Toots Zynsky’s distinctive glass thread vessels enjoy a widespread popularity and deserved acclaim for their often extraordinary and always unique explorations in color. Defying categorization, her pieces inhabit a region all their own, interweaving the traditions of painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts. For nearly 30 years, Zynsky has worked with the technique of fusing glass threads that she developed and that many others have tried to imitate. The Museum owns one of the first objects that she made in this technique, which is Clipped Grass (1982) from her first solo show at Theo Portnoy Gallery in New York. Her palette is defined by her mood, and by the music that she listens to for inspiration. “When I hear music,” Zynsky says, “it translates into color.” To make her vessels, Zynsky first layers thousands of multicolored glass threads onto a round, heat-resistant fiberboard plate. For her, this part of the process is like drawing or painting. This mass of glass threads is then fused inside a kiln. While hot, the fused thread disk is allowed to slowly slump into a series of consecutively deeper and rounder preheated bowl-shaped metal forms. To make a taller vessel, the piece is turned upside down and slumped over a cone-shaped mold. Finally, Zynsky reaches into the kiln, wearing special heat-resistant gloves, and she squeezes the glass into a unique, undulating form. Signed “Z” in glass thread on underside of base. For more information, see Dagmar Bendstrup and Arthur C. Danto, Toots Zynsky, Ebeltoft, Denmark: The Glasmuseet, 2001; and Tina Oldknow, Voices of Contemporary Glass: The Heineman Collection, Corning: The Corning Museum of Glass, 2009, pp. 344–347.