Cultural foundation in Venice expanding to include exhibition and research center on glass art and d

Aerial view of “Rooms for Glass” in Venice, Italy courtesy: selldorf architects

The Cini Foundation, long established as a privately-funded nonprofit research center in Venice for scholarship in art, history, and music, is expanding its purview to include Venetian glassmaking. The organization embarked on a cultural project in collaboration with Swiss-based foundation Pentagram Stiftung to promote 20th-century Venetian glass. The foundation recruited New York-based firm Selldorf Architects to refurbish the wing of a former boarding school on the CF’s San Giorgio Maggiore island headquarters, which will be home to the foundation’s new glass-only exhibition space, Le Stanze del Vetro (In English: “Rooms for Glass”). This new wing will house year-long exhibits with a focus on quality pieces that highlight significant moments in the history of Venetian glass art, and will be opening its first-ever exhibit “Carlo Scarpa. Venini 1932 – 1947“ at the end of August.

In issue #97 of GLASS The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly, the late Anna Venini wrote that Scarpa “refined and transformed decorative elements so that applications such as gold and silver foil, which had been applied as surface elaboration, became embedded in the sculptural properties of the piece.” Her article also describes the cultural backdrop against which Scarpa collaborated with her father Paolo (i.e. in a rapidly de-fascicizing Italy) in rich detail. These kinds of accounts are at risk of being lost to history, given the destabilization that the age-old industry is currently facing.

In an interview with the Hot Sheet, David Landau, one of the foundation’s trustees who helped spearhead “Rooms for Glass,” characterized the project as an ongoing effort to help Venetian glass “find its soul again,” and to instill the idea of quality over quantity in other glass producers, for the practice of Venetian glassmaking is as much an exercise in craft as it is in appreciation of raw aesthetic pleasure.

Architectural rendering of Rooms for Glass interior. courtesy: selldorf architects

Beside making a space available for museum-goers to appreciate Venetian glass art at no cost (unusual for an Italian museum, according to Landau) it is the goal of the foundation to turn Venetian glass into an object of study and discussion. The foundation has established a Study Centre on the island where they hope to host conferences, seminars, and workshops and where they’ve been collecting books, photographs, prototypes, and design drawings for their archives.

Donations to the foundation’s library on glass are “most welcome,” said Landau, “in any language. I hope it will slowly become a major library on glass that we’ve started.” Monetary donations can be made through the Cini Foundation website; any other contributions to their archives can be arranged by contacting them via email (centrostudivetro@cini.it) or by telephone.

—Isabella Webbe