EVENT: Toledo Museum of Art residency honoring the 1962 glass workshop concludes with artist present

The mouth of the rebuilt 1962-era furnace that was constructed at the Toledo Museum of Art to commemorate the 50 year anniversary of Harvey Littleton’s workshop.

A residency at the Toledo Museum of Art commemorating the 50th anniversary of Harvey Littleton’s 1962 workshops that helped launch the Studio Glass movement will conclude at 6:30 this evening with resident artist presentations. Kim Harty, Amber Cowan, and Matthew Szosz will offer demonstrations and lecture presentations on the projects they realized during the eight-day project entitled “The Toledo Workshop Revisited.” Last Friday they cut and stacked bricks to create a hand-built furnace based on the original design used for the workshop a half century ago, and they used it to melt Johns Manville #475 marbles, which Dominick Labino had suggested Littleton use when the original batch failed. The residents have been using these marbles, designed to create industrial fiberglass, for their various experimental projects.

Toledo Workshop Revisited artist resident Matthew Szosz preps for his tube draw, heating up the metal apparatus that will be pressed into the molten glass and drawn up by pulley to create a tall glass cylinder.

Referencing the intersection of art and industry that the first workshops represented, Matthew Szosz has done a series of tube draws, an old-fashioned method of blowing tall glass cylinders that were cut and opened to make window glass in the decades before float glass was perfected. “The idea of turning industrial process into something that more suitable for the art world is central to my work,” Szosz told the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet. “I’m interested in taking something that has a functional purpose and subverting that function so that it becomes something that is only an aesthetic object rather than a useable one.” The Johns Manville factory marbles used in the residency have been ideal for stretching and pulling tubes over 8-feet tall, which have a life-span of less than a minute before they shatter, raining down in dramatic showers of glass.

Collecting the glass shards from the various projects underway, resident artist Kim Harty has created a video-installation that beams a shaft of projected light across a pile of broken glass in a rhythm not unlike the movement of a blow pipe across the rails of a glassblower’s bench. When hit by light, the gathered shards of glass cast spectral patterns across a curved wall in a darkened room.

Gathering up broken glass from the residents’ projects, Kim Harty has created an installation that beams a bar of light over the glass, casting complex refractions against a wall in a darkened space.

The work is just one of her projects realized at this residency. She has also created a three dimensional construction built up over repeated layers of dripped hot glass. “The drip piece is performative but the most interesting part of it for me, I was only peripherally aware that the marbles were made for fiberglass. Intuititively working through it, it did exactly what it was supposed to do.” Harty, who has been expanding her practice as an MFA student in the art and technology program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, found the residency a chance to reconnect with glass. “I think that the really amazing thing about the residency and what the furnace we built was really a symbol of for me, was making the hotshop into the space of a studio, where no rules are imposed,” she says. “That was the real gift of the residency.”

In contrast to the furnace-based approach of her fellow residents, Amber Cowan focused on flameworking the Johns Manville #475 glass marbles, but found them unstable and prone to cracking. Her best results came from heating them up in the flameworking kiln and bringing them to the bench and, after attaching them to blown vessels, using the glory hole to heat them. “Sometimes they would still crack, they would slip away and bounce all over the place.” Still, she realized a wide range of vessels incorporating the marble forms, which she sees as a “zygote” that gave birth to the use of glass as a purely sculptural material.

After a tour of the Libbey Plant on Monday, Cowan decided to also work on reconstructing shards of Libbey machine-made glass she bought at the factory outlet. The thinness of the glass made them difficult to keep from cracking. “I would have never thought of working with the Johns Manville marbles if not for this residency,” she says. “The project was a lot of fun and I am really happy with how the series came out. It was important for me to have some kind of objects come out of this. I knew it was supposed to be more of an experimental project, but sometimes it is important to have an object representative of time spent.”

Toledo Museum of Art glass studio manager Jeff Mack felt the residency was a success in the way it engaged the public and raised awareness of the historical significance of the museum’s role in the history of Studio Glass. “What made this different, there were three artists at once, and they were actually working together, which created a different dynamic in the studio than our typical artist residency,” Mack told the Hot Sheet. “The public was very interested in and curious about seeing this different type of furnace appear so quickly in the studio. It generated a new awareness of the significance of the Toledo Museum in Studio Glass that even some of the local people didn’t have. “

Toledo Museum of Art director Brian Kennedy said that what united the work being done by the artist residents was the interplay of chaos and order in their diverse projects, which not only connected the residency to the original Toledo workshops, but to the very origins of glass. “I saw in some of the themes being explored in the residents’ work not only echoes of Harvey Littleton’s search for a sculptural voice in 1962, but issues that related in some ways to the very origins of glassmaking in ancient times.”

All three artists will deliver presentations at the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion beginning at 6:30 PM.

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