Outgrowth: Highlights from the Museum’s Collections

February 9 – April 21, 2013

Organized by Museum of Glass

Outgrowth displays the variety of conceptually-oriented sculptural glass in the Museum’s collections. With the long-standing effort to include artists from outside the Studio Glass movement combined with nearly 50 years of academic fine arts glass programs, this period of rapid growth encouraged many offshoots to grow out from an initial rhizome (root system).

“Although technique remains vital, Outgrowth demonstrates a concerted effort to create work that is rich in content, appealing to an audience beyond the tradition of Studio Glass,” comments curator David Francis. “This exhibition allows us to showcase applications of glass as a medium that our visitors may find surprising—something that is key to the Museum’s mission.”

Instead of blowing vases, goblets, lamps, baskets, and chandeliers, many of these artists blow, cast, and fuse such mundane objects as Styrofoam cups, fashion shoes, and Q-tips, showing a renewed interest in design from a Pop-Art perspective.  Others engrave glass to evoke collective memory and nostalgia, or hot-sculpt the material to reference the reliance on data, technology, and scientific information or the haunting presence of nature on the brink.  Instead of relying on the inherent beauty of glass, these artists explored its fertile ground for metaphor, imagination, and meaning.

The exhibition includes 35 works, some created in the Museum Hot Shop during Visiting Artist residencies and others gifted to the Museum from artists or collectors.