Friday March 28, 2025 | by Sophie Faber

EXHIBITION: Tracing the evolution of glass color chemistry across the centuries

When Corning Museum of Glass curator Amy McHugh first walked through the Museum’s ongoing exhibition "35 Centuries of Glass," she expected to see changes in what colors could be achieved in glass as technology and knowledge exapnded. As the years progressed, aesthetics and designs varied, as did coloring, but a pronounced shift in color around the late 19th century was enough to give her pause. Why were the colors suddenly so vivid? Why did they look so different from what had preceded them? A deep dive into Corning’s collections resulted in the upcoming exhibition, "Brilliant Color," an attempt to showcase the creative techniques of the golden age of glassmaking. Four curatorial groupings, ranging from “Spectrum of Color” to “Color Today,” invite visitors to view wall displays and interact with a variety of color techniques as they gain a new appreciation for the historical experimentation that brought us the vibrant hues we come to expect today.

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Thursday March 20, 2025 | by Sophie Faber

Taking a page from The Museum of Glass, Vermont art center celebrates chidren's imaginations in colorful glass designs

Some 15 years ago, Danny Lichtenfeld, the director at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, was browsing the bookstore at the Seattle Art Museum when a small green creature with blue wings and googly eyes caught his eye. The charming creature adorned the cover of Kids Design Glass (University of Washington Press, 2009), which told the story of a unique program at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, with photographs of fantastical glass creatures and essays by Ben Cobb, the hot shop director, as well as Dale Chihuly and a Harvard child psychologist who consulted on the program. Lichtenfeld was so intrigued he not only brought the book back with him to Brattleboro, but borrowed heavily from it to set up a similar program at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, where it debuted in 2010 under the name "Kids Design Glass Vermont" (though it was later changed to "Glasstastic," as it is known today).

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Friday March 14, 2025 | by Sophie Faber

Australian artist Gabriella Bisetto wins 2024 Tom Malone Glass Art Prize for meditations on skin

Gabriella Bisetto has been awarded the 2024 Tom Malone Glass Art Prize, which for 22 years has recognized the most important work in glass by Australian or New Zealand artists. As part of the prize, Bisetto's work is on exhibit through March 30, 2025, at Linton & Kay Galleries location in Cottesloe, Australia, along with the 17 short-listed artists. The Australian art prize provides $20,000 (roughly $12,560 in USD) as well as displaying the winning artwork first at Linton & Kay before moving into its final home at a state art institution. The artwork in question, This Skin I'm In #2, is a kiln-formed and carefully textured glass sheet doing its own striking impression of skin, undulating and catching the display room's light and shadow.

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Thursday March 6, 2025 | by Sophie Faber

EXHIBITION: Saint Louis Art Museum features oversized glass vessels, multi-media work by Crystal Z Campbell

Glass figures prominently into "Currents 124," a multimedia exhibition by artist Crystal Z (sic) Campbell currently on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Blown-glass sculptures, referencing apothecary bottles that once had distinct shapes so that illiterate people could identify them by sight, as well as wall-hung works combining paper and fiber examine both the Black and Filipino histories, including how each have experienced colonization in different ways. The exhibition, which opened on October 25, 2025, runs through Sunday, March 9th, 2025.

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Friday February 28, 2025 | by Sophie Faber

Multiple glass artists recognized as 2025 U.S. Artists Fellows and Louis Comfort Tiffany Award winners

Four artists who work primarily in glass have won prestigious art awards. In January, the United States Artist Fellowship named the winners of their $50,000, no-strings-attached award. The two glass artists included this year, Anjali Srinivasan and Jocelyne Prince, provide beautifully different approaches to glass that set an exciting tone for 2025.

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Thursday February 20, 2025 | by Sophie Faber

A look ahead to the May 2025 GAS conference in Texas, and the artist association's increasingly international vision for the future

Last year's Glass Art Society conference, held in Berlin, Germany, was the first to be held outside the U.S. since the 2018 Murano conference. The shift to Europe for last year's event was part of the organization's 2019 commitment to hold its annual gathering of artists at international locations more frequently, which GAS Executive Director Brandi Clark has presented as part of her vision of the artist organization. In fact, Clark told the Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet her goal is to hold the event outside of the U.S. every three to four years. For the 2024 Berlin Conference, she reports an attendance of just under 1,000. While the upcoming conference in May 2025 will take place in Texas, GAS plans to continue to focus on planning to hold events internationally, including the 2026 International Festival of Glass in the United Kingdom, which it will take over and run (See "Handover: The British Glass Biennale and International Festival of Glass in Stourbridge prepare to be taken over by the Glass Art Society, which will run the 2026 editions of both events" by Emma Park, in the Winter 2024-25 edition of Glass, #177). The venue for the 2026 GAS conference is yet to be announced.

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Tuesday December 17, 2024 | by Sophie Faber

Einar and Jamex de la Torre's Glass Meteorite Crash Lands at Corning

We tend to think of a natural disaster as something that happens in one bright instant of overwhelming, unstoppable power. It’s discordant to think of something so devastating as actually fragile at times, and with power that waxes and wanes through various stages of life. Einar and Jamex de la Torre’s latest glass art installation presents the fragility of force, decked out in a host of ancient and modern signals of change. Meteorite dall’Influenza Veneziana appears to us in the form of a large meteorite, studded with glass configurations and trailed by a blaze of color. Here, Murano glass techniques are uniquely presented alongside Mexican and American cultural elements, displaying cultural diffusion and the collaborative nature of glass art.

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Wednesday November 20, 2024 | by Sophie Faber

Carnegie Museum assistant curator Alyssa Velazquez pushes boundaries with Pittsburgh Glass Center project

Most of us are familiar, maybe even personally, with the term "glass ceiling." However, the concept of an invisible barrier in the workplace that prevents women and minorities from advancing professionally need not be simply accepted, however grudgingly. In fact, the metaphor can be recast, transformed from something that is scorned but widely accepted into something that becomes the change. The Pittsburgh Glass Center's new exhibition, Smash the ceiling, floor and walls; take the broken shards and blow it back, does exactly this, metaphorically speaking.

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Thursday November 7, 2024 | by Sophie Faber

After the hurricane, Asheville glass artists look to an uncertain future, seek to make up for lost sales

The late-September arrival of the remnants of Hurricane Helene, a slow-moving deluge of rain and destructive winds, killed 42 citizens of Buncombe County, which surrounds Asheville, North Carolina. This Western North Carolina city of less than 100,000 is a glassblowing center, where the steady flow of tourists on weekends, especially in the months from October to December, have supported multiple glass artists in their careers. The natural beauty of this mountainous region regularly drew weekend shoppers watching the leaves turn and stocking up on holiday gifts at the burgeoning galleries, artist studios, and craft marketplaces such as the Marquee, which opened in Asheville's River Arts District in 2021. But the trillions of gallons of rain that fell across the Southeast U.S. on September 27th as the hurricane made its way north caused catastrophic flooding across Buncombe County, and especially in downtown Asheville, where the French Broad River crested 24-feet above normal the waters, climbing to the soaring ceiling of the Marquee.

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Saturday November 2, 2024 | by Sophie Faber

New Zealand artist Te Rōngō Kirkwood awarded 2024 Rakow Commission

The 2024 Rakow Commission from The Corning Museum of Glass has been awarded for the first time to an artist from New Zealand. Te Rōngō Kirkwood, a mixed-media glass artist, is also the first indigenous Māori artist to be selected for this prestigious commission to make a work for the Corning permanent collection. Her pieces, made with both blown and fused glass in addition to other materials, bring the vibrancy and power of Māori culture to New York State this fall.

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