The famous glass makers of a hundred years ago, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Emile Gallé, and René Lalique, for example, all headed factories devoted to the production of glass which they either designed personally or had made under their personal supervision. Studio glass is created by single individuals who, sometimes with a small team of glassblowers, […]

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Casting: The process of pouring hot glass into molds of various materials, the simplest being sand. Casting can also be done from the kiln, where the glass starts in a cold state then melted into plaster/silica molds.
Flat Grinding Wheel: Machine consisting of a large flat spinning wheel that is used to flatten […]

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Neo-Baroque: term used to describe artistic creations which display important aspects of Baroque style, but are not from the Baroque period proper, around the 17th-18th centuries. It is most frequently used to refer to music or architecture, but can also concern painting or the decorative arts.
•Baroque: The seventeenth-century period in Europe characterized in the visual […]

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A glass bottom boat is a boat with sections of glass below the waterline allowing passengers to observe the underwater environment from within the boat. Over the years the design was converted around the paddle boat. Between 1945 and 1994, eight glass bottom boats were built, experiencing few alterations other than replacing the canvas top, […]

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Answer: Dichroic Glass is a multi layer coating placed on glass by using a highly technical vacuum deposition process. Quartz Crystal and Metal Oxides are Vaporized with an electron beam gun in an airless vacuum chamber and the vapor then floats upward and attaches then condenses on the surface of the glass in […]

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Leopold and son, Rudolf, came from a long line of glassblowers going back to the 15th century. Originally from Venice, the family had moved to Northern Bohemia (now Czech Republic) by Leopold’s birth in 1822. He apprenticed as a goldsmith and gemcutter before joining his father in making glass ornaments and glass eyes for taxidermists. […]

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The Corning Museum of Glass, founded in 1950, is located in the heart of the picturesque Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Conceived as an educational institution by the Corning Glass Works (now Corning Incorporated), the Museum exists as a non-profit institution that preserves and expands the world’s understanding of glass. It is a unique […]

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Cathedral Glass: Transparent glass that is monochromatic with smooth or textured surfaces.

Stained Glass: Term used to describe any colored flat glass or any object made of such glass joined by metal strips. Originally, colored or clear flat glass cut to fit an artist’s design on which details were painted in pigment with a brush. The […]

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Update on Museum Café
The Museum sent Requests for Proposals (RFP’s) to selected food service providers and those who chose to submit proposals have done so. The next step is the review of those proposals, which is underway.
Search for a Curator
We continue to accept resumes and interview qualified candidates.
Water Forest
The City of Tacoma […]

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As David Chatt looks back at how he arrived at his current place in life, he sees a rather direct line, but admits to many years of feeling like he didn’t know where it was all headed. The fifth of six children born to teachers, his jewelry-maker father was the head of the art department […]

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The Museum has had some challenging shows since it opened, some of which have been outright confusing for visitors. As docents, we have been entrusted with the task of helping people understand what they are looking at. Of course it helps that we get information from the artist, publications, and each other. That information exchange […]

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When did the technique known as lampworking begin? Perhaps as long ago as ancient man and the accidental combination of fire and sand. Early craftsmen created a small earthen- ware furnace fueled by wood that was shaped like a bee hive. The heat and gas that escaped through the opening in the top was hot […]

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Marquiscarpa (a title suggested to the artist by Lino Tagliapietra) flaunt Marquis’s expert knowledge and handling of the Murrine technique. The name Marquiscarpa alludes to the influential Venetian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa who was hired by Paolo Venini (founder of Venini Fabbrica) as a designer in 1932 and subsequently promoted to artistic director in […]

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Cathedral Glass: Glass sheets for manufacturing leaded glass windows and mosaics. Louis Comfort Tiffany maintained at least one cathedral glass shop in his glass-works, in which a dazzling variety of colors, textures and degrees of translucency was developed. In 1897 Cecilia Waern reported in The Studio that Tiffany maintained an available stock of 200 to […]

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What is Postmodern Art? The answer can be misleadingly simple: Postmodernism, sometimes called Po-mo, is art after, or in contradiction to some aspect of Modernism.So all Postmodernism means is that it was made later than the Modern phase? Actually no, most scholars agree that for some time during the 1970’s Modernism and Postmodernism existed simultaneously. […]

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Color Bars: Bars of concentrated colored glass about 1” in diameter and a foot long. The glassblower cuts these in smaller chunks to melt, crush or overlay the softened bar over a bubble. MoG purchases color bars from Kuegler (Germany) and Gaffer (New Zealand). The glass is colored with different metal oxides, which are […]

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In the exhibition, Contrasts, A Glass Primer, the Museum of Glass will be trying to show visitors the diversity and scope of studio glass by using comparison and contrast. In that tradition, I would like to start a series of articles explaining general art terms that can be […]

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In Western culture the hierarchy of status among the arts was established during the Renaissance. Functional or decorative arts had a minor ranking behind painting and sculpture. Craft objects, no matter how beautifully designed and made, were associated with mundane, everyday life.
The term “crafts as art” refers to the elevation of craft material to art. […]

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Mildred Howard (American, born 1945)
Blackbird in a Red Sky (a.k.a. Fall of the Blood House), 2002
Glass, wood, and cabling
Museum of Glass, gift of Paule Anglim
Here are my thoughts about Blackbird in a Red Sky . . .
The house was based on the typical African-American shotgun houses of the American South, but I was also pushing […]

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Jean Shin’s work illustrates optimism gained from giving new life to discarded materials. Stripped of any consumer value, she transforms leftovers of life into displays of form, texture and color.
Shin has created installations out of vast collections of items such as: prescription pill bottles, lottery tickets, military uniforms, discarded leather shoes (deconstructed and […]

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