Thursday September 1, 2016 | by Esteban Salazar

Art Institute of Chicago to sell 400 paperweights from its permanent collection

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Auction, Museums, News

On Saturday, September 17th, 2016, Chicago’s L.H. Selman Gallery is auctioning close to 400 glass paperweights that had been part of the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent collection. The artwork on the block had been donated to the Institute by Arthur Rubloff, Potter and Pauline Palmer, Ella Grace Burwick and Lucy K. Kretchmer. According to Benjamin Clark, CEO and owner of L.H. Selman, the non-profit organization helping to create awareness of glass paperweights as an art form known as The Glass Paperweight Foundation "will receive 100-percent of the net proceeds of the buyer’s premium.” (The buyer’s premium is an additional cost a buyer pays when they win a lot. In this case it will be between 20-25% of the hammer price.) According to Christopher Monkhouse, the Eloise W. Martin Chair and Curator, Department of European Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago: “The net proceeds of the sale of will be used towards to purchase of artwork for the Art Institute of Chicago.” Monkhouse also explains that “deaccessioning artwork is a very sensitive matter for museums, but in rare occasions they are forced to do it, particularly when the collection is too large or a substantial number of close duplicates are kept in storage.” Case in point, Arthur Rubloff regularly acquired entire series of paperweights for one specific item, this eccentric practice naturally added sizeable numbers of duplicates to his collection. In 2012 after the Museum expanded the Arthur Rubloff Paperweight Gallery many of these paperweights were sent to storage because great examples were already on display. The museum is putting the duplicates back the in the hands of the public.

Continue Reading

Thursday August 25, 2016 | by Esteban Salazar

To attend a European artist residency, Aric Snee takes novel approach of crowdfunding via Instagram

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, News

As part of the The European Glass Context 2016 exhibition, a biennial showcase of European glass and ceramics, The Royal Danish Academy, School of Design Bornholm has selected American artist Aric Snee for a six-week artist residency at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts program in glass at KADK Bornholm. As social media opens a window of opportunity for artists and designers to crowd-source funding, Snee is taking a novel approach, eschewing sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, instead reaching out to his followers on Instagram to auction a selection of his latest work “Orbit Vases.” Snee, who has extensive glass-factory experience dating from his tenure at Simon Pearce and Steuben Glass Works, transitioned into academia with an MFA from Alfred University in 2012, putting an emphasis on sculpture/dimensional studies. During his upcoming residency in Denmark, Snee plans to plot new designs to produce himself. At the same time, he wants to develop designs to be manufactured by a third party. Ultimately, he wants to continue investigating how a prototype is essentially the "embodiment of idea," dependent of the context where the work is seen. In other words, if context changes, the meaning of the work changes. Snee, currently a gaffer for The Corning Museum of Glass and a product designer for the Danish glassware brand Holmegaard, recently answered questions from the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet about his fundraising effort via an email exchange.

Continue Reading