Viewing: Museums

Architectural rendering of the expansion project done by Saunders + Crouse Architects

Wednesday December 20, 2023 | by Jana Elsayed

The Barry Art Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, will double in size thanks to longtime friendship between art-collecting families

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums

Richard and Carolyn Barry, the founders of the Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, are planning a major expansion, with the institution that bears their name doubling in size with the planned addition of the Waitzer Wing, named after their late art-collector mentors, philanthropists Richard and Leah Waitzer, who died in 2019 and 2021 respectively. The two couples not only shared a love of art, but the older pair were instrumental in inspiringthe Barrys to begin their collecting many years earlier. That the Weitzer collection would end up finding a home within the museum built to house much of the Barry collection is just the latest development in the intertwined histories of two art-collecting couples.

Portrait photo of Marta Klonowska taken by Stephan Wieland

Thursday December 14, 2023 | by Jana Elsayed

CONVERSATION: Marta Klonowska, on childhood memories, discarded beauty, and her major exhibition at the Finnish Glass Museum

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, Museums

Once upon a time, a little girl in Poland picked up a piece of glass, placed it up against the sky, and marveled at how it altered the light hitting her eye. As children do, Marta Klonowska then dug a small hole in the ground and filled it with leaves and pieces of a drawing she had torn up. Covering her creation with the piece of glass, she knelt down and looked down at her artwork transformed by the shadows and unusual cast of light. This childhood game wasn't forgotten many years later, when Klonowska was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland, and came across shards of broken glass in her studio. Though she was studying ceramics and sculpture, something about the glass rekindled her interest, and she began creating sculptural assemblages of glass shards to create figurative objects imbued with the beauty and symbolic power of a shattered material.Klonowska's aesthetic approach of finding beauty in discarded items rescued and remade may hearken back to her childhood years, but there's something very grown-up about the way she takes what others may overlook, or dismiss as garbage, to not only use but to create beautiful things. At the Finnish Glass Museum, where Klonowska's latest exhibition "Movements" is currently on view, creatures are brought from the obscure corners of paintings and take center stage in three dimensions, bristling with the alluring sparkling edges of the shards from which they were constructed.

Dan Dailey, Dubious from the series Individuals, 2011. Blown, sandblasted, and acid-polished glass; metal. photo: bill truslow. © dan dailey

Thursday February 20, 2020 | by Farah Rose Smith

OPENING: Dan Dailey's portraiture explored in "Character Sketch" exhibition at Chrysler Museum

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Artist Interviews, Events, Exhibition, Museums

"Dan Dailey: Character Sketch," an exhibition focusing on figurative work of prolific glass artist Dan Dailey, opens this Friday. The work will be on view at The Chrysler Museum from February 21 to May 31, 2020. The Chrysler-curated show will feature 33 artworks and span the artist’s 40-year career. The museum's Carolyn and Richard Barry Curator of Glass Carolyn Swan Needell has written a catalog to accompany the exhibition. Subjective and narrative in nature, Dailey’s work is “inspired by the human character and based upon his direct observation of the world,” reads the exhibition announcement. The artist "articulates his perceptions and thoughts about humanity through the medium of glass, pushing the material to new frontiers in order to tell stories about human nature," the announcement continues. Dailey is known as one of the most unique voices within the field of contemporary glass, and the exhibition will include blown and hot-worked glass vases and sculpture, glass cane murals, wall reliefs made from Vitrolite, industrial colored glass, as well as his original drawings.

Thursday January 11, 2018 | by Andrew Page

HELP WANTED: The Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass seeks full-time assistant curator

FILED UNDER: Help Wanted, Museums

The Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah, Wisconsin, is seeking a graduate-degreed candidate with museum experience to fill the open position of assistant curator. With a wide range of responsibilities -- from maintaining exhibit records to assisting in their organization, from overseeing exhibit installation to managing the museum's collections database, from maintaining donor records to engaging visitors through tours and written materials -- this full-time position that reports to the museum's executive director, Jan Smith, requires a masters degree in art, art history, museum studies, or related experience, as well as demonstrated ability in the Past Perfect museum collection management software.

Albert Paley in collaboration with William Carlson, Arc, 2010. Formed and fabricated steel and stainless steel, cast glass. H 22 1/2, W 31, D 22 in. courtesy: the artist. photo: chuck lysen

Thursday August 31, 2017 | by Lindsay Hargrave

OPENING: Museum exhibit explores Albert Paley’s two-decade wrestling match between steel and glass

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, Museums, News, Opening

At the intersection of architecture, steel forging and glass casting lies the work of Albert Paley. This convergence is explored in an exhibition entitled "Complementary Contrasts: The Glass and Steel Sculptures of Albert Paley" opening at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, on September 9th, 2017. Running through September 2018, the year-long exhibit aims to view glass and its applications through the eyes of artists who may not work in the medium exclusively.

Jen Blazina, Separation, 2016. Cast glass and bronze. H 15 W 15 D 1 in. courtesy: artist website

Wednesday August 9, 2017 | by Lindsay Hargrave

Philadelphia glass-art museum to spotlight philanthropists, artist Jen Blazina at annual gala

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Auction, Events, Museums, News

The National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia will feature Separation, a sculpture by Jen Blazina as part of its 18th annual glass auction and gala coming up on October 7, 2017. The museum fundraiser not only supports this unique institution that sees a linkage between the material of glass and the concept of freedom, but also calls attention to the work of community role models, as well as spotlights the philanthropic efforts of an individual artist. This year’s honorees are Sandy and Steve Sheller, who funded the Stephen and Sandra Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple University Beasley School of Law, The Stephen and Sandra Sheller 11th Street Family Health Services Center of Drexel University, and The Stephen and Sandra Sheller Commons of the South Philadelphia Free Library. This year’s "artist hero" is Pearl Dick, who co-founded Project Fire, an initiative to use glassblowing as a healing and mentoring, and job-creating tool for trauma victims and young victims of gun violence.

Daphne Farago. courtesy: kate elliott

Friday August 4, 2017 | by Lindsay Hargrave

IN MEMORIAM: Daphne Farago (1924 - 2017)

FILED UNDER: Announcements, In Memoriam, Museums, News

When Daphne Farago, a lifelong benefactor and supporter of Studio Craft, died on July 23rd, 2017, she left her collection of over 100 pieces to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. During her lifetime, Farago donated almost 1,000 objects to the museum, mostly made up of jewelry and textile pieces, though she also donated a substantial amount of ceramics, glass, wood, metal, and folk art. In 2012, she gave the museum their largest donation ever, totaling 161 craft objects. “Mrs. Farago really collected across the spectrum of craft,” Emily Zilber, curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, told the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet. “Her gifts have transformed what we do, and have really made craft much more visible at the museum because we have them.”

Micah Evans' curtain of black threads burning at the beginning of his Third Thursday performance at the Chrysler Museum of Art Glass Studio. courtesy: chrysler museum of art.

Monday July 31, 2017 | by Sarah Thaw

CONVERSATION: Flameworker Micah Evans puts on show at Chrysler Museum

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Glass Quarterly, Museums

Washington State-native flameworker Micah Evans does not consider himself a performance artist, but he undoubtedly put on a show for the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, recently while working as a visiting artist from July 20th to 23rd. Evans grew up in Seattle, Washington in the 1990s, surrounded by a culture heavily saturated with marijuana and glass pipe-making. This environment presented Evans with a less-than-traditional gateway into glass art, as he got his start by making smoke pipes at a local flameworking studio. Evans’ work has since expanded to include traditional craft forms and personal sculptural work, which lead him to be recognized as the first flameworker to receive a residency at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, which he completed from 2012 until 2015.

Carried on Both Sides, research image, 2016. courtesy: the artist

Tuesday July 25, 2017 | by Sarah Thaw

Artist Talk: Past, present, and imagined future of @ symbol explored in collaborative inquiry

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Curiosities, Events, Exhibition, Museums, New Work

New York-based artist Caroline Woolard set out to satisfy her curiosity about the links between an ancient container to transport liquids and a ubiquitous symbol of our contemporary digital moment. For good measure, she extends this inquiry into speculation on how this typographical element might further evolve. This journey into the past, present, and imagined future of the symbol for digital communication "@" is the subject of her project Carried on Both Sides, which she will be discussing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this Friday evening, July 28, 2017 with her collaborators present. To realize the project, Woolard partnered with glass artists Helen Lee and Alexander Rosenberg as well as textile artist Lika Volkova during residencies at the Pilchuck Glass School and UrbanGlass. She explained her intent for Carried on Both Sides in her proposal for the residency at Pilchuck as a project “that traces the transmutation of an ancient vessel into a common computer symbol -- the @ [at sign]. Our work links 6th-century terra cotta and glass amphorae to the handwritten @ of 16th century mercantile scripts to the ubiquitous contemporary vector graphic we use in email and in social media.”

Verena Schatz, Bundle, 2015. borosilicate tubes, slumped. H 53 1/2, W 14, D 14 in. courtesy: Hans-Martin Lorch

Thursday July 20, 2017 | by Sarah Thaw

OPENING: Berlin gallery devotes summer to exhibition of high-level student work in glass

FILED UNDER: Education, Events, Exhibition, Museums, New Work, News, Opening

Jens Gussek, an accomplished artist in his own right and a winner of the 2015 International Glass Prize in Lommel, Belgium, has also worked steadily as a university professor throughout his career. He currently holds the title of Head of the Institute of Ceramic and Glass Art (IKKG) at the University of Applied Science in Koblenz, Germany. A unique exhibition of work by 11 of his former students is opening at a commercial gallery in Berlin this summer, a testament to the caliber of work Gussek has helped his students achieve. Entitled “subtext glas(s),” the exhibition opens July 22 and will run through September 2, 2017, at the lorch+seidel contemporary gallery in Berlin, Germany.

Glass: The UrbanGlass Quarterly, a glossy art magazine published four times a year by UrbanGlass has provided a critical context to the most important artwork being done in the medium of glass for more than 40 years.