All About Glass

All About Glass

This is your resource for exploring various topics in glass: delve deeper with this collection of articles, multimedia, and virtual books all about glass. Content is frequently added to the area, so check back for new items. If you have a topic you'd like to see covered, send us your suggestion. If you have a specific question, Ask a Glass Question at our Rakow Research Library.

Toots Zynsky
Article

When I hear music, it translates into color.—Toots Zynsky Toots Zynsky’s distinctive heat-formed  filet de verre  (glass thread) vessels enjoy a widespread popularity and deserved acclaim for their often extraordinary and always unique explorations in color. Defying categorization, her pieces

Beth Lipman: Still Life in Glass
Article

Like Dutch still-life painters of the 16th and 17th centuries, American artist Beth Lipman sees images of food as a metaphor for desire, consumption, decadence and consequence. But unlike the European painters— who were primarily male, she points out—Lipman works with colorless glass, creating

Masters of Studio Glass: Jiří Harcuba
Article

Heritage means to select the most valuable thing from history and hand it over to the next generation... Prehistorical rock engravings are closer to our contemporary artistic views than classical art. Other manifestations of the primary art of Australia, Africa, and Oceania as well as folk art

Thérèse Lahaie: Rhythms in Glass
Article

Rarely does a visitor catch sight of Thérèse Lahaie’s Silver Gray Nocturne Triptych (2005.4.204) in the Museum’s Ben W. Heineman Sr. Family Contemporary Glass Gallery and not walk over or lean in to get a closer look. Something in, or behind, the panels of glass is rising and falling—soundlessly,

Master of Studio Glass: František Vízner
Article

In 1979, the Museum’s landmark exhibition, New Glass: A Worldwide Survey, introduced to the American public the work of a Czechoslovak glassmaker, František Vízner. Nearly 30 years later, the Museum presented Vizner once again at Corning as a studio glass master. Masters of Studio Glass: František

Jaroslava Brychtová and Stanislav Libenský
Article

In 1950, Jaroslava Brychtová joined the design studio of the glassworks at Železný Brod, directing the architectural glass department. Working with her father, the sculptor Jaroslav Brychta, she began to experiment with casting, molding, and melting glass during the 1940s. In 1954, Stanislav

Local Artists Panel | Behind the Glass Lecture
Video

Pursuing one’s dream to be a working artist can be a challenge. It takes determination, imagination, and pure grit. Many people have built their lives around their craft, but have you ever wondered what it takes to become a full-time, self-sufficient glass artist? From identifying a saleable

Lino Tagliapietra
Article

The glass seemed so light, it appeared to fly It was a spring day in Venice shortly before the end of World War II. The air was filled with a sense of imminent freedom and new possibilities. A young Lino Tagliapietra was playing with a paper ball on the island of Murano, Venice’s glassmaking center

Meet the Artist: April Surgent
Article

April Surgent rethinks engraving and cameo techniques, reaching back to antiquity to create works that look painterly, photographic, and contemporary. Her images come to light through precise cutting and the grinding away of fused glass layers, usually milky white on the top with darker strata

Master of Studio Glass: Richard Craig Meitner
Article

The ever-evolving work of American artist Richard Craig Meitner, distinguished by its wit and poetry, reflects a variety of influences and ideas, ranging from Japanese textiles, Italian painting, and German Expressionist graphics, to science and the natural world. A new survey of his work, Masters

René Roubícek
Article

René Roubícek is another Czech artist who disguised his obvious interest in abstract art in glass design. Like Jirí Harcuba, Roubícek used glass as expressively as possible. While Harcuba focused on engraved decoration, Roubícek experimented with the actual form of the glass, creating shapes that

Jan Kotík
Article

This vase, which illustrates the abstract style of engraving characteristic of Jan Kotík’s work, was shown for the first time in the United States as part of the special exhibition, Glass 1959. A similar vase was exhibited at the 1959 Moscow Exhibition, where it drew unfavorable attention. The

Joel Philip Myers and Steven I. Weinberg
Article

In 2007, The Corning Museum of Glass launched an exhibition series called Masters of %%Studio Glass%% with an exhibition of work by Joel Philip Myers and Steven I. Weinberg, two highly regarded studio glass innovators. Myers: Colorful Blown Work Joel Philip Myers’ work explores vibrant color, as

Robert Willson
Article

Robert Willson (1912–2000) was a sculptor, “half Texan and half Choctaw Indian,” as he liked to describe himself. A maverick in art and in life, he worked outside the mainstream. His work explores themes inspired by ancient mythologies, pre-Columbian and other native American art, and the American

Tom Patti: Investigations into a Complicated Universe
Article

Artist Tom Patti was drawn to glass in the 1960s, while designing houses of inflatable plastic for the developing world. “I wanted to work with materials that I could open up and look at,” he says. Sheet glass, readily available and affordable, attracted him as a means to expand his vocabulary of