Viewing: Museums

Imagine Museum benefactor Trish Duggan, and museum executive director Nate Jessup, at hard-hat tour. courtesy: imagine museum.

Tuesday February 14, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

A brand-new glass museum set for grand opening in St. Petersburg, Florida, by end of 2017

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, Museums, News, Opening

St. Petersburg, Florida, may seem an unlikely hub for glass art, but the city that holds the world's record for the most consecutive days of sunshine is also soon to be home to a new museum devoted entirely to the material as a medium of sculpture. The brand-new Imagine Museum is currently being installed in a repurposed building just nine blocks away from the Morean Arts Center, which boasts a now-permanent collection of Dale Chihuly’s work. The Imagine Museum expects to have a grand opening before the end of 2017, but it is already hosting events even as it undergoes a major renovation of its building, which has in previous incarnations been a bank, nightclub, and, most recently, a charter school. The museum is in the process of installing signage and building out its museum store. The first floor is on schedule to be complete by the end of February, where it will host occasional activities and events before the museum officially opens.

Carol Prusa, Spooky Action. Glass. courtesy: boca raton museum

Wednesday February 1, 2017 | by Awura Barnie-Duah

OPENING: Berengo’s Glasstress project comes to Boca Raton, Florida

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

Adriano Berengo is back with another Glasstress exhibition, this time in partnership with an art museum in Boca Raton, Florida. Known for bringing artists who don't usually utilize glass as a medium together with his team of glass maestros in Murano, Berengo has built Glasstress into an art-world brand since it debuted as a collateral exhibition at the 2009 Venice Bienalle. In addition to his Glasstress exhibits at the international exhibition, Berengo has also been developing "Glasstress World" in which Berengo Project artists display their work in partnership with major museums around the globe.

Dafna Kaffeman. Wolf 01, 2010. Glass, aluminum, and silicon. courtesy: the artist and lorch + seidel contemporary, berlin.

Tuesday January 24, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

MassArt gallery unveils first glass exhibit in 30-year history as major Boston arts venue

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

On Monday evening, when the Bakalar & Paine Galleries at Massachusetts College of Art and Design unveiled its new exhibition, "VITREOUS BODIES: Assembled Visions in Glass," it marked the first time glass art was displayed at this prime visual arts venue in the Fenway-Kenmore area of Boston, a cultural destination. Bringing together works by 13 multidisciplinary artists including Dan Clayman, who had spent the Fall semester at MassArt as a visiting professor, the show also includes work by an international group made up of Kanik Chung, Petah Coyne, Mona Hatoum, Timothy Horn, Michael Joo, Dafna Kaffeman, Jacob Kassay, Maya Lin, Lucy and Jorge Orta, Arlene Shechet, Thaddeus Wolfe, and Rob Wynne. Also debuting on Monday, but at a different location on the MassArt campus was a second work by Clayman, his largest installation to date. (Disclosure: Clayman serves as an advisor for the Robert M. Minkoff Academic Symposium at UrbanGlass, which is organized by GLASS magazine.)

Jutta-Annette Page

Tuesday January 17, 2017 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Curator Jutta-Annette Page on leaving Toledo to lead new museum in Virginia

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, News

Jutta-Annette Page, the senior curator of glass and decorative arts at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio since 2003, will be leaving her position of 13 years for a new job as director of the Barry Art Museum, a brand-new institution to be built at Old Dominion University in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Page will be moving to Virginia in March 2017 to begin the hard work of getting a new art museum off the ground. The building itself is yet-to-be-completed but there is no shortage of tasks, including hiring a full- and part-time staff, developing the museum's systems and protocols, and planning its inaugural exhibition of its namesake's collection. Last summer, Richard and Carolyn Barry announced a $35-million gift to Old Dominion, where they both have professional and personal connections (his father was a professor and he himself served as rector, while she taught there for a time as an adjunct). When it opens in 2018, the Barry Art Museum permanent collection will include more than 200 works of art, with over 100 works from the Studio Glass era. In an extended telephone interview, the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet discussed Page's tenure in Toledo, what interested her about the new opportunity, and some of her early plans.

The opaque steel walls of the flameworking studio at the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion include a wide picture window that allows the public to view its activities through the exterior walls. photo: © floto + warner studio

Friday December 23, 2016 | by Andrew Page

BOOK REPORT: Toledo Museum of Art celebrates 10-year mark for iconic Glass Pavilion with new tome

FILED UNDER: Book Report, Museums

With an unusual curved corner that echoes the rounded-glass-wall architecture of its subject, a new hardcover book entitled simply The Glass Pavilion ($44.95) is a 144-page love letter to the The Toledo Museum of Art's eye-catching annex designed by the Prizker Prize-winning Japanese architecture firm SANAA. Featured on the cover of GLASS magazine when it opened in 2006, the Glass Pavilion added 76,000 square feet of ethereal exhibition space and a state-of-the-art working glass studio to the 100-year-old museum. The museum wanted to make sure the new building devoted to art would be architecturally significant as would befit a facility dedicated to the same material on which museum founder Edward Drummond Libbey built his industrial empire. It was also at the Toledo Museum that Harvey Littleton held his famous 1962 workshop that many consider the birth of Studio Glass.

Jacob Fishman, It Is What It Is. Neon. courtesy: bergstrom mahler museum of glass.

Wednesday December 7, 2016 | by Malcolm Morano

The Bergstrom-Mahler’s neon exhibition taps into the special allure of sculpture that glows

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, Museums

There's something magnetic about neon. An object emitting light attracts the eye, no doubt the main reason neon has been so popular for so long as a medium for commercial signs. Executive director of Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass Jan Smith thinks this provides a special opportunity for neon art. "A sense of familiarity with its history in signage gives people an entry point," she told the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, "and the journey into the sculptural realm takes them into a surprisingly new dimension." The museum hopes to guide visitors on that journey with "Bending Brilliance," a neon and plasma group exhibition currently on display through February 19th, 2017.

The Bousilles, or Whimseys in English, were a collection of factory worker experiments made in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Tuesday November 29, 2016 | by Andrew Page

MusVerre, a new glass museum in Northern France

FILED UNDER: Architecture, Museums, News, Opening

While the conversion of a former glass factory into a museum is not in itself unusual, the recently expanded MusVerre celebrates a peculiarly touching history. Beginning as a 1967 exhibition of curiosity pieces made by factory glassblowers in the 19th and early-20th centuries, the project of MusVerre reached new heights with its grand reopening in a new building designed by Raphaël Voinchet and W-Architectures earlier this month in Sars-Poteries, France. The inauguration is being celebrated with an exhibition by Ann Veronica Janssens, a Belgian artist whose “relevance, power and poetry... recurrent use of glass as a material and the very particular fit of the “wide-angle” space [of the new museum] to her work made this invitation an obvious choice,” for the museum’s curators.

Newly hired chief advancement officer James Gerhardt signals a new fundraising push by the museum to finance ambitious new initiatives.

Thursday November 17, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Looking to diversify its funding sources, The Corning Museum hires high-level development officer

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, News

Since its founding in 1951, The Corning Museum of Glass has been funded primarily by its major benefactor, Corning Inc. Now, the Corning, New York, institution has announced a high-level appointment on the development side that reveals its bid to diversify its sources of unearned income. With a number of as-yet-unnamed expansion plans set to follow the March 2015 opening of its $64-million North Wing, the museum that lays claim to "the world's best collection of art and historical glass" is revving up its fundraising engines. James Gerhardt, who will hold the title of chief advancement officer at the museum, brings extensive non-profit fundraising experience to the post, including a recent stint in Philadelphia as the chief advancement officer at the National Museum of American Jewish History, which opened in 2012. What makes Gerhardt's newly created position at Corning significant is that unlike previous development positions at Corning, he will play a role on the institution's leadership team when he starts on November 30, 2016.

West Branch of the Susquehanna, 2006. Hot worked, slumped, and etched glass on steel. H 48, W 30, D 3 in. collection: connie and jamie egan

Tuesday October 18, 2016 | by Malcolm Morano

OPENING: Meditations on nature in Kathleen Mulcahy’s rich museum retrospective in Pennsylvania

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, New Work, Opening

While artist Kathleen Mulcahy was canoeing on the west branch of the Susquehanna River over a decade ago, a sudden storm came out of nowhere, leaving her no way to escape from the furious pelting rain. The river was too wide, and the waters too rapid. “We were moving into it, and there was nothing I could do but submit," she told the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet in a telephone interview. "And in that moment of submission, of letting go, I put my hand in the water. And after that moment, once I let go, we went right through the storm; and on the other side of it was clear skies and fresh air and beauty like I had never really experienced, from everything — my skin, the way things smelled, the air, everything was beautiful. I remember putting my hand in the water and saying, ‘what will my new work look like because of this?’” The answer arrived in a dream a few months later. "[Upon waking], I quickly grabbed a pencil and sketched this little tiny sketch of the image that I saw.” Mulcahy's first drop piece came soon after, titled West Branch of the Susquehanna (2006), which will be featured in her upcoming exhibition “Opposites Attract: Kathleen Mulcahy and Sylvester Damianos,” at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art opening on November 5, 2016, and running through February 2017.

Laura Donefer's Blood Basket, is one of the works referencing the legacy of Canadian painter Tom Thomson, in this case, his environmental awareness.

Tuesday September 13, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Conversation with curator of glass exhibition in response to top Canadian painter

FILED UNDER: Exhibition, Museums, New Work

Curator Christian Bernard Singer, formerly of the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, has held the position of senior curator at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in West Owen Sound, Ontario, since October 2015. He recently spoke with the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet about his current exhibition entitled "With a Destiny," which features work by Canadian glass artists Laura Donefer, Susan Edgerley, and Karina Guevin. Painter Tom Thomson (1877 – 1917) is arguably Canada's most renown artist, and he ushered in a new, raw style of landscape painting at the turn of the 20th century that continues to resonate through Canadian contemporary art today. The art gallery that bears his name houses one of the largest collections of Thomson's paintings, but its mission also includes connecting the artist's trail-blazing work to the latest contemporary art in a variety of media. The glass exhibition on view through September 18, 2016, finds a connection to Thomson's work in a frank exploration of the natural landscape, as well as meditations on the idea of destiny, according to the show's curator Singer.

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.