Viewing: Museums

Tuesday August 25, 2015 | by Lindsay von Hagn

Doug and Mike Starn create site-specific glass public artwork for Princeton University

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, New Work, News, Public Art

A large-scale sculpture by identical twins Doug and Mike Starn, the duo's second-ever work in glass, will be installed in mid-September on the lawn of the Princeton University Art Museum. The site-specific sculpture, titled (Any) Body Oddly Propped (2015), features steel, cast bronze trees and six 18-foot tall colored glass panels. According to the official announcement, the sculpture “continues the artists' exploration of organic energy systems through root and branch forms that here also respond to the arboretum-like character of the Princeton campus.” An attempt to evoke the complex experience of light filtering through trees, the sculpture will play off the contrast between the permanence of the structure and the ephemerality by interaction between natural light conditions and the colored glass.

Wednesday August 12, 2015 | by Emily Ma-Luongo

EXHIBITION: “Chihuly’s Venetians” on view at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma

FILED UNDER: Museums, News

On view through January 4, 2016, the "Chihuly's Venetians" exhibition at The Museum of Glass focuses on a recreation of Venetian Art Deco glass, an elaborate reimagining of the era's peculiar aesthetics and forms. To realize this series which ran from 1989 to 1997, Chihuly collaborated with Pino Signoretto and Lino Tagliapietra. Chihuly was inspired by an affecting encounter with original 1920s-30s pieces in Venice in 1999, and the artist worked with the two masters to yield intensely colorful and subversive glass pieces, classical Italian forms with a vibrant twist.

Thursday August 6, 2015 | by Susanne Frantz

In Memoriam: Yoriko Mizuta (1956 – 2015)

FILED UNDER: In Memoriam, Museums, News

The glass world lost an exceptional scholar and advocate with the passing of Yoriko Mizuta who succumbed to cancer on August 3, 2015. She was 59 years old. As a long-time curator at the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in Sapporo, Mrs. Mizuta was a key organizer of the triennial series of exhibitions “World Glass Now” which ran from 1982 to 1994. Those international overviews helped garner early attention to the contemporary glass art of Japan. Instead of indefinitely continuing those broad surveys, in 1997 she partnered with the Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf and The Corning Museum of Glass to present 20 artists from nine countries in an exhibition entitled “The Glass Skin.” The premise was to focus on glass as a literal and metaphorical surface, barrier, and crossing point. In addition to exploring the skin theme the show’s three co-curators hoped to encourage more exhibitions united first and foremost by an idea rather than simply a common material.

Exterior of the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery.

Tuesday July 21, 2015 | by Alexander Charnov

Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery Announces Guest Curator

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, News

The Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery has announced that Patricia Deadman will serve as guest curator for the next year, while the gallery’s current curator Sheila McMath is on maternity leave. In her time as curator, Deadman will realize two exhibitions curated by McMath, and will also curate an exhibition of her own.

Tom Patti will be the Specialty Glass Artist-in-Residence at The Corning Museum of Glass for 2015 through 2016.

Wednesday July 8, 2015 | by Emily Ma-Luongo

Tom Patti awarded specialty glass residency at The Corning Museum

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Artist Interviews, Museums, News

The Corning Museum of Glass has chosen Tom Patti for the 2015/16 Speciality Glass Artist-in-Residence, an award granted for a unique opporutnity to work with cutting-edge formulations of glass. The residency will allow the artist freedom to work in an industrial laboratory with the assistance of the museum's glassmakers, research scientists, and curators. Patti is the second selected artist in the invite-only program after Albert Paley. Beginning this month, the residency will take place in the research and design facility known as Sullivan Park, where Patti will have the opportunity to experiment with patented glass formulations from the Corning Archives, giving him the chance to further explore the medium. Known for his innovative techniques that push the physicality of glass, Patti will use the residency to further explore how temperature affects the material. Since his primary concern is to conduct research, he told the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet that he is going into the process without a specific creative agenda, but to simply further his knowledge of what glass is capable of doing.

Several participating artists, alongside Deborah Harding, selecting their artifacts from the collection. Courtesy of Nathan J. Shaulis.

Tuesday June 16, 2015 | by Alexander Charnov

OPENING: New Pittsburgh exhibition mines ancient glass for inspiration and inquiry

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

New movements in art can be understood as conversations with contemporaries, as peers engage in aesthetic dialogues that can reshape the art world. A new project at the Pittsburgh Glass Center facilitated a related but contrasting conversation between contemporary glass artists and their long-departed precursors — the anonymous makers of ancient glass who created extraordinary glass objects two millennia ago, which are in the permanent collection of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. An innovative partnership between two Pittsburgh organizations, the project resulted in an exhibition opening Friday, June 19th, entitled “Out of the Archives and Into the Gallery.”

The museum building that will house ZIBA - Prague Glass Experience.

Tuesday June 2, 2015 | by Justyna Turek

A major new glass museum prepares to open in Prague in 2016

FILED UNDER: Education, Museums, News

Europe will gain a major new museum devoted to glass when ZIBA - The Prague Glass Experience Museum opens in 2016 in the center of the historic city of Prague in the Czech Republic. Designed to be an inspiring experience of visual art, design and innovative technology in contemporary glass will present the material with an emphasis on its prominence in Czech history. The museum will connect glass art with its role in design, crafts, technology, architecture, and other creative disciplines across the industry, including education and entertainment. Though the official opening is still more than a year away, the venue is already hosting interesting exhibitions and events in preparation.

Tina Oldknow in the Heineman Gallery. photo: allison lavine

Tuesday May 26, 2015 | by Andrew Page

A conversation with Corning’s Tina Oldknow on the announcement of her retirement

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, News

This morning, The Corning Museum of Glass will announce that Tina Oldknow plans to retire from the position of senior curator of modern and contemporary glass in September 2015. Oldknow has been in this high-profile position since 2000. Her 15-year-tenure has been marked by numerous exhibitions, publications, and frequent appearances as a lecturer, critic, and panelist (including those I've moderated). Her visibility, as well as prodigious output as an author and curator, have made her perhaps the most-visible and best-known figure in the world of contemporary art made from glass, and one of its most-enthusiastic proponents. Oldknow's retirement will come just months after the March 2015 opening of The Corning Museum's new Contemporary Art + Design Wing, which she curated, and for which she made several major acquisitions while being intimately involved in its planning and design. Oldknow also wrote the exhibition catalog for the new wing, entitled Collecting Contemporary Glass: Art and Design After 1990 from the Corning Museum of Glass (2014).

Tuesday May 12, 2015 | by Emily Ma-Luongo

EXHIBITION: Finalists in Belgian and Dutch art competition on view in Holland

FILED UNDER: Award, Exhibition, Museums, News

Since 1992, Bernardine de Neeve Exhibition has been celebrating new developments in contemporary glass among Belgian and Dutch artists. Taking place once every three years, the seventh iteration of this competition has been narrowed down to three 2015 finalisits who are exhibiting their nominated works at DordtYart, an industrial shipyard turned contemporary art center. The finalist will be annnounced on June 28th.

Tuesday May 12, 2015 | by Emily Ma-Luongo

Toledo Museum of Art invites visitors to experience “Play Time” with glass and other media

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Events, Exhibition, Museums, New Work

“Play Time,” an interactive exhibit opening on May 22, 2015, at the Toledo Museum of Art, promises to be a participatory art playground for museum-goers. The event is based on the idea that a sense of "play" is an important element of everyday life and helps maintain good health (the event is sponsored by a health organization). Depending on the material, the projects will vary in the amount of viewer participation, and will include everything from a climbable net to a giant rubber ball. For glass artist Kim Harty's Glass Mountain project, which involves layering hot strands of molten glass over itself to create a complex single structure, it will be less of an opportunity for hands-on involvement by the general public, but more of a spectacle or performance. For the project, which will begin on Friday, May 22, and continue over the Memorial Day weekend, Harty intends to interact with the audience in a different wayto create her own unique corner of “play.”

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.