Does a city-wide promotion help the glass community or does it increase the top of that pyramid, gradually increasing the number of non-artists who benefit from the tourists, inverting it and unbalancing it?
2007 Wendy Solomon:
"Pittsburgh used to be synonymous with steel. But few people outside Western Pennsylvania know that before this former industrial city was called Steel City, it was the country's leading glass manufacturer, earning it the nickname America's Glass City.
Those industries and tag lines died out long ago, but this dynamic city is capitalizing on its historical and contemporary ties to glassmaking in a year-long celebration called Pittsburgh Celebrates Glass!
This multi-faceted event kicks into high gear this Thursday with a major exhibit of renowned Seattle-based glass artist Dale Chihuly's work at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. A Victorian glasshouse, garden and tropical forest conservatory, the Phipps will provide a dramatic backdrop for Chihuly's fanciful glass sculptures.
Since Chihuly installations in other major cities have set attendance records, the Phipps will issue tickets with specific times and dates to regulate the crowd flow.
Over the next eight months, the city will host hundreds of first-rate exhibits, performances, lectures and demonstrations with glass, with Pittsburgh's connection to it, front and center.
"The history of glass is so embedded in this region, so it was a platform by which to go out to all these cultural organizations and get them all on board," explains Marguerite Jarrett Marks, director of Pittsburgh Celebrates Glass!
The city is rolling out the welcome mat for the 400,000 people it expects the event will draw and the $20 million it could pump into the local economy.
The year-long celebration gives visitors an opportunity to view glasswork by leading artists seldom seen en masse, at one time and in one city. It includes a number of must-see exhibits, including "Allure of Japanese Glass," which features the work of 17 leading Japanese glass artists rarely seen in the United States.
Pittsburgh has emerged in recent years as a hotbed of glassmaking, due in large part to the Pittsburgh Glass Center, one of the country's leading glass facilities. Established in 2001, the center has been at the forefront of Pittsburgh's emerging glass art scene and revitalization of the Friendship section of the city.
The connection between Venetian and American glass will be explored at a new exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art called "Viva Vetro! Glass Alive! Venice and America" that opens Saturday.
Organizers have taken and run with the concept of all things "glass," playfully including an opera by Philip Glass at the Andy Warhol Museum and offering special "Glass, Glorious Glass" hotel packages that include VIP tickets to some of the exhibits.
In June, downtown Pittsburgh will be transformed nightly into a spectacular artistic display of color and light designed by French artist Lucette de Rugy and her team from Artlumiere, and one of the largest installations of its kind in the country.
The excitement continues next month when more than 1,500 glass artists from around the world descend on the city June 5-7 for the Glass Arts Society's 37th annual international conference at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
Therman Statom, one of the most famous contemporary glass artists, will teach glassmaking to local underprivileged youth and work with them on a piece in public view throughout May in a storefront window on Fifth Avenue Place.
For people seeking a better understanding of Pittsburgh's historical ties to glassmaking, which date to 1797, the Sen. John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center offers a permanent exhibit, "Glass: Shattering Notions," that chronicles glass's role in local history.
Clearly, Pittsburgh wants you to get to know the place. Its homage to its glassmaking tradition comes on the heels of Pittsburgh Roars, a celebration of the city's rich cultural, philanthropic and civic institutions, and dovetails into Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary celebration in 2008."
Here's an article from 2007 about Lino Tagliapietra's Dinosaurs. It's sort of an apology for the glass world in general and places Tagliapietra's work in the larger context of art history. He also uses the phrase "sybaritic indulgence" and I had to look up in the dictionary... it means loving luxury and sensuous pleasure... a lot.
2007 Alan Artner:"Glass sculpture seldom gets more seductive than the work of Lino Tagliapietra, the 73-year-old master from Murano who has a large exhibition of pieces completed mainly since 2000 at the Marx-Saunders Gallery.
Vessels, abstract screens and representational pieces both free-standing and hanging -- all are here, making up a prodigious display of craft by which the artist measures himself against a centuries-old Venetian glassblowing tradition.
The work represents in color, form and surface some of the most extravagant decorative art created today, which draws from many cultures and epochs. It has echoes of J.M.Whistler's "Peacock Room," the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, gold paintings by Gustav Klimt and shields of Masai warriors. What's more, everything coexists comfortably, as if in Charles Baudelaire's 19th Century dream of luxury, calm and voluptuousness.
Many might say that because such opulence does not express our period, Tagliapietra's art is only backward-looking. It certainly is a sybaritic indulgence from which hard-core modernists would recoil. But we are in the most artistically conservative era of the last half century, and if painters can look back while indulging the delusion that their "concepts" will make the past fresh, so can creators of glass sculpture.
The works Tagliapietra calls "dinosaurs" are among the most personal in form and lyrical in expression. Their sole purpose is to win us over, and that they instantly do. Today's viewers are supposed to hate the ease of that process, preferring to be affronted by art that demands they sacrifice optical gratification. Hence, work like this that makes an appeal to pleasure is tacitly dismissed by thinkers who see it to be of interest only to the rich and brainless.
You know who you are."
Artner, A. "Pretty glass sculpture may confuse some." Chicago Tribune, August 31, 2007. Accessed through the Tacoma Public Library at Accessmylibrary.com November 5, 2009. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-32766428_ITM
2007 Rosemary Ponnekanti:
"Hot glass. Dammed rivers. The two may not seem to be linked, but they are -- and the connecting thread is Maya Lin. The internationally known architect, sculptor and artist has made her career by creating unique works of landscape art -- sculptures and installations that, both indoors and out, echo and enhance natural environments. This weekend, she's coming to Tacoma for an artist residency at the Museum of Glass hot shop, before heading down to Celilo Falls, Ore., for a blessing ceremony as part of her Columbia River Confluence Project. The common factor? Water. "We're going to be creating clear glass drops, for an installation to look like scattered water on a surface," says Lin from her New York studio. The installation will be part of MoG's fifth anniversary exhibition, "Mining Glass," which opens June 16.
[...]
The final installation will be around 20 square feet, depending on the space available in the museum. Lin will be working on design and directing the museum's resident team of gaffers: Benjamin Cobb, Alex Stisser and Gabe Seenan. Will she blow any glass herself?
"No!" says Lin with a laugh. "It's incredibly hard, and last time I did it I nearly burned my eyebrow off." From the intricacies of glass droplets, Lin will then move literally to art on the scale of an entire river: the Columbia. Her ongoing Confluence Project, commissioned in 2000 by American Indian tribes and civic groups from Washington and Oregon, is part of the bicentennial commemoration of the Corps of Discovery journey in 1804-06 of Lewis and Clark. From dialogues with tribes, land users and locals, Lin is designing art installations along the Columbia's length that blur the lines between nature, science, art and history. The only stage so far completed is at the river's mouth at Cape Disappointment: a text-inscribed boardwalk and trail, a contemplative cedar grove, a wetland viewing platform and a polished basalt fish-cleaning table create an environment imbued with an awareness of both native and non-native history. Further upriver, Celilo Falls (near The Dalles, Ore.) is another of Lin's Confluence Project sites. It's one of several slated to be completed this year, and on the day after her MoG residency Lin will be heading there to take part in a public blessing ceremony of the land. The traditional ceremony marks the 50th anniversary of the drowning of the falls by the rising waters of The Dalles hydroelectric dam and, like Lin's installation, is intended to honor the American Indian history of the site. Lin is presently planning the artwork for the site.
[...]"
Excerpted From:
Ponnekanti, R. "Sculpting water: Famed artist Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, visits the Museum of Glass as artist in residence." News Tribune (Tacoma, WA). March 13, 2007. Retrieved November 05, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-160474476/sculpting-water-famed-artist.html
2007 Caroline Tell:
"NEW YORK - Jewelry and art clashed last weekend here at the Sculpture Objects and Functional Art New York show that featured 59 international fine art galleries, 12 of which housed contemporary jewelry displaying ceramic, glass and decorative textile objects.
The crowd was an eclectic mix of artists, shoppers and purveyors.
Mark Lymon, who started SOFA New York in 1998 as an offshoot of the bigger Chicago show he founded in 1994, wanted to support young artists working with original materials in innovative ways.
"People think of jewelry as one thing," said Lymon. "But there are so many viewpoints. These artists are making jewelry that isn't after a certain style, but their own ideas. It's not necessarily based on gems or metals, but it's about the thought and vision they are presenting."
Highlights of the show included Melanie Bilenker's ebony and resin pendants of a woman's silhouette that she threaded with her own hair. They were priced from $2,500 to $3,200 and were represented by the Sienna Gallery in Lenox, Mass. Gallery owner Sienna Patti noted the difference between jewelers and the craftspeople, like Bilenker. "We represent artists working with ideas that are prevalent in jewelry," she said.
[...]"Excerpted From:
Tell, Caroline. "ART AND ACCESSORIES COLLIDE AT SOFA.(Sculpture Objects and Functional Art)." WWD. 2007. Retrieved November 05, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-31333300_ITM
2007 Rosemary Ponnekanti:
"Q: What do Tiffany, Chihuly and Blaschka have in common, other than that they all work(ed) in glass? A: Nothing. This seems precisely the point of "Contrasts," a three-year exhibition that's been up since November at the Museum of Glass. Guest-curated by Vicki Halper, "Contrasts" offers itself as a "glass primer," arranging a potted history of glassmaking from antiquity to the Studio Movement primarily in pairs: contrasting, say, the voluptuous vulgarity of a Chihuly with the austerity of Libensky/BrychtovEaAi. Yes, it's education. It's also, aesthetically, completely boring. The exhibit reduces the multidimensionality of art to two polar opposites: Heavy or Light? Thick or Thin? This reductive, you-need-to-be-educated approach may help beginners develop an appreciative vocabulary, but as a long-term gallery show it's a serious waste of space. And it's a compelling visual argument for the necessity of a full-time curator, something the museum hasn't had in three years, and now -- thank goodness -- says it is prepared to find.
[...]
Halper begins the slippery slope of exhibiting an artwork by one single, basic term. It's like showing someone a Rembrandt and saying, this is an oil painting. Well, yes, but that's not exactly all. Seeing Richard Marquis' "Marquiscarpa #99-16" as the opaque piece of glass, for example, it's easy to forget about its other parameters. What about form -- those whimsical mosaic dots that twist around the stem but statically grid the bowl of the vessel? What about content -- why those curving, childlike animal friezes? Or Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka's intricately fashioned, gray-green "Invertebrates" -- contrasting them (fact) with Salviati's ornate, lettuce-edged dragon (fiction) may reduce them to accuracy, but what about their own ornateness, their depth of color? Beyond this blinkering, there's another, deeper problem. Siting one artwork next to another creates an immediate dynamic. It's a statement that this piece has something to say in that position. This is one of the challenges of curating, and one of the most important artistic contributions of a curator. In pursuing the either/or dichotomy, Halper has taken a certain magic away from these gorgeous works.
[...]
But there are better ways to do it, and three years is a long time to have a gallery filled with a show that's as appealing as a reference book. Halper has fulfilled her mandate to create a teaching show for history and technique, yet just think of the possibilities this would offer were the items part of a permanent collection and masterminded by a long-term curator. "Contrasts" is an interesting precursor to how the Museum of Glass can utilize a collection: educational, informative," says director Tim Close, who with board and staff is mapping out a blueprint for a full-time permanent curator and a permanent collection. If it is a precursor, it speaks volumes about the need for an intelligent, committed, creative vision to marry both the education and aesthetic expansion of the museum's visitors. "Contrasts" certainly makes a good primer. But don't stick too closely to the text. After all, there are thousands of other adjectives."
Excerpted From:"Review Textbook solution 'Transparently Built' adds interest to foyer: The Museum of Glass' educational show ?Contrasts' is orderly but boring and more limiting than inspiring." News Tribune (Tacoma, WA). 2007. Retrieved November 06, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-158066124/review-textbook-solution-transparently.html
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