Kids Design Glass

October 31, 2009 – February, 2011
Organized by Museum of Glass

Kids Design Glass is an exhibition that pays tribute to the imagination of children. It showcases 52 glass sculptures designed by children who participated in the Kids Design Glass program. All of the “creatures” were crafted by professional artists in the Museum of Glass Hot Shop, making it a uniquely MOG exhibition.

Kids Design Glass began as a temporary education program in conjunction with Murano: Glass from the Olnick Spanu Collection, a traveling exhibition that came to MOG in 2004. The exhibition highlighted the symbiotic relationship between designers and glassblowers who make works of art in glass. Similarly, the underlying concept of the Kids Design Glass program illustrates the interrelationship of these roles. A child draws a design—generally a fantastical creature—names it, and writes a brief explanation or story about his or her creation. The Museum’s Hot Shop Team selects one design every month based on its aesthetic merits and transforms the two-dimensional drawing into a three-dimensional sculpture. As the designer, the child directs the artists as they make two sculptures—one for the child to take home and the other for MOG’s Permanent Collection.

The Hot Shop Team has become highly proficient in making the unconventional sculptures, which are more difficult to create than they might appear. “Following a child’s drawing takes an entirely different kind of precision,” states Museum of Glass Hot Shop Manager Benjamin Cobb. “Each Kids Design Glass session is an adventure. The process is always a challenge and immensely rewarding. It’s one of our favorite things to do—and one of the most intense.”

All 52 sculptures were created between 2005 and 2009 by the Hot Shop Team and a handful of Visiting Artists, including Lino Tagliapietra, Preston Singletary, Joseph Rossano, John Miller, Dante Marioni, Nancy Callan, Martin Blank and Bee Kingdom. The artist sketch, artist statement and photographs from the Hot Shop will be displayed with each piece.

A full-color catalog accompanies the exhibition and includes essays by Susan Linn, a psychologist at Harvard’s Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, and Museum of Glass Hot Shop Manager Benjamin Cobb. Linn discusses the importance of unbridled imagination for children and Cobb describes the creative and technical challenge of the process from the perspective of a glassblower. Pip! The Baby Monster and How He Was Made, a children’s comic-style book written by noted children’s author George Shannon and illustrated by Ericka Moen, and a DVD documenting the creation of Recycle Robot are included with the catalog.

This exhibition is available to tour beginning in 2011. For more information, contact Susan Warner.