When curator Tami Landis began developing a show on women of the 1960s American Studio Glass Movement, she found countless early glass experiments by men. Many weren’t even that good—“ugly and floppy,” she recently recalled. But it was male artists who’d dominated the “hot shops” who became central to the mythology of the movement. Traces of the women who experimented with the medium were far harder to find. “It annoyed me that there’s not enough collected evidence of that in institutions,” she said.
Yet Landis persisted and has assembled a formidable trove of glassworks by women in “Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio,” on view at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York through January 10, 2027. The show offers a new history that foregrounds the pioneering female figures who worked in glass, despite incredible adversity. Much more than a historical revision, the arresting presentation features luminous and technically daring works that feel incredibly contemporary.
Landis spoke to many women artists who shared stories about being actively discouraged from working with glass. Some had professors and peers who intentionally broke their work, removed pieces from kilns early so they would crack, left notes on desks telling them to quit, or physically barred them from studios altogether. Women were routinely told they were not strong enough. They were simply unwelcome. Many ended up working alone, often at a smaller scale and outside of the studios that helped define the American Studio Glass Movement. Yet they made groundbreaking innovations in kiln-forming, stained glass, pâte de verre, and other techniques that broadened the possibilities of the medium for generations of future practitioners.
The exhibition includes rarely seen works by both well-known and lesser-known artists. Many capture moments of great invention, like the artists’ earliest encounters with glass. There are several works on view that Landis has catalogued, photographed, or properly mounted for the first time. The exhibition’s position within the museum is also significant; it occupies the museum’s prominent Heineman Gallery, which previously showcased works from the family who endowed the museum’s studio glass collection and offered a traditional, collector-driven narrative. For Landis, this project demanded a structural shift as much as a curatorial one. “We’re museums, we’re institutions,” she said. “We need to tell a different story than just what a collector says.”
Here are five artists in the exhibition to know:
Edith Franklin
B. 1922. D. 2012.
Vessels from the First Toledo Studio Glass Workshop (1962)
When Edith Franklin first tried to join the invitation-only Toledo Museum of Art Glass Workshop, she was told she couldn’t attend because she wasn’t a university professor. She asked again and was once again denied. She learned there was still space and finally paid a fee to participate. Franklin recalled: “I wasn’t invited. I invited myself.” The experimental glassblowing workshops, held in two sessions in 1962, are widely considered the birthplace of the American Studio Glass Movement, but very little work survived.
One of Franklin’s vessels greets visitors at the show’s entry. It’s one of the few works from the 1962 workshops that has endured. The three bulbous, translucent vessels, which are on loan from the Toledo Museum of Art, are small and humble but full of personality. Franklin went on to teach ceramics at the 577 Foundation in Ohio, where she served as director until 1997. She also co-founded the Toledo Potters’ Guild in 1951 and became a trustee of the Toledo Area Glass Guild in 1981.
Ruth Tamura
B. 1943.
Marbles from The Great Marble Tournament on Bay Fill (1969)
The exhibition title comes from artist Ruth Tamura, who once described the glassmaking process as “rather tough stuff.” Tamura was a pioneering figure in the American Studio Glass Movement and continues to create sculptural glass works that emphasize organic forms. She studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC, now the California College of the Arts) in San Francisco and earned a BFA in 1966. In 1969, she received the first-ever MFA in glass from CCAC while simultaneously completing an MFA in ceramics at Mills College in Oakland, California. While still a student, Tamura helped develop the glass studios at both institutions.
The artist graduated and became acting head of the CCAC glass program, and was one of the first women to lead a university glass program in the United States. She worked closely with Dale Chihuly to write the grant that, in 1971, helped establish Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington; it’s now one of the most important glassmaking institutions in the world.
The show features three black marbles from Tamura’s 1969 thesis performance at CCAC, The Great Marble Tournament on Bay Fill, in which the artist covered the gallery floor with sand and dozens of large-scale marbles and invited visitors to interact with the work.
Only three marbles survived, she later recalled, because visitors walked away with the rest. Tamura was deeply inspired by the performance art movement in 1960s California, and she believed that glassmaking itself was participatory and performative.
Mary Shaffer
B. 1947.
Nail Pillow (1972)
Mary Shaffer is best-known for using fused and slumped glass to expand the language of studio glass towards Minimalism and Conceptual art. She began working with the medium in 1970, both at the Rhode Island School of Design and at home with a small kiln. Shaffer quickly developed a technique that she called “mid-air slumping,” in which she used gravity to soften plate glass. She often integrated metal objects into the material. They created a sense of tension and left permanent marks, which the artist associated with the lasting imprint of trauma and memory.
For Shaffer, glassmaking carried symbolic meaning: Glass would warp and bend under heat, then settle back into flatness, which mirrored patterns of pressure and recovery. In her work, sheets of plate glass slump over wire grids into delicate, subtly distorted forms that are both fragile and rugged.
From 1979 to 1983, Shaffer chaired the Craft Department at New York University, where she also developed a public street workshop for glassblowing. Across her practice, including later works in metal, stone, and cast glass, Shaffer has remained engaged with environmental concerns and the use of recycled materials. Her first major solo exhibition devoted to glass, in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1974, featured installation-based works suspended by chains and meat hooks.
Cappy Thompson
B. 1952.
The Kingdom Within (2001)
Cappy Thompson populates her vessels with mythological and intensely personal symbols that reference memory, transformation, and spiritual reflection. The artist began her career in stained glass and is largely self-taught, with a strong commitment to experimentation.
Thompson began working with glass while studying painting and drawing at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. During the summer of 1975, she found a new creative home at Mansion Glass, a small studio where she decided to complete her degree. She taught herself glass painting and developed early technical fluency. She learned the grisaille technique in glass, which she used for commissioned portrait panels. Her work at the time also included multi-paneled screens inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and ideas of harmony and pattern.
By the end of the 1970s, Thompson was renting a live-work studio equipped with a ceramic kiln and working part-time as a carpenter’s assistant. After moving to Seattle in 1984, she met the sculptor Flora Mace, who encouraged her to paint on vessels rather than flat surfaces. Since then, she has worked consistently with curved surfaces, which activate her painterly language. Thompson’s process begins with a blown glass vessel that she allows to cool completely. She then paints it and fires it again, often using enamel pigments that permanently fuse to the surface.
Toots Zynsky
B. 1951.
Clipped Grass (1982)
Toots Zynsky’s work is deeply connected to movement, rhythm, and sound. While the artist is often celebrated for her later works, she has received far less attention for her role in the experimental culture of the late 1960s. Zynsky initially trained as a dancer and was strongly influenced by music; she was drawn to the hot shop by both its sounds and the material itself. During her “spinning experiments,” fragments of colored glass would fall to the floor, which she imagined could become their own sculptural forms.
Among Zynsky’s earliest experiments were sound studies in which she dropped pieces of glass onto sheets of plate glass and recorded the resulting tones and vibrations. Although the works no longer survive, Zynsky documented these investigations, which treated glass as an instrument that could produce rhythm and resonance. They led her to pursue the filet de verre technique for which she became internationally recognized, in which fine threads of colored glass are layered and fused in the kiln, then shaped into undulating vessels.
Clipped Grass (1982), the first work Zynsky made entirely with hand-pulled threads of glass, reflects a memory central to her practice; after spending time at the renowned Pilchuck Glass School in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, which she helped build during its formative years, Zynsky returned to New York and longed for the sensation of walking barefoot outdoors.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/C3opqrs
No comments:
Post a Comment