HANOVER, NH.- Kirk J. Nelson, Executive Director of the New Bedford Museum of Glass, will present an illustrated lecture, “Treasures of American Glass through Four Centuries,” in the Loew Auditorium of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College on Saturday, November 3, at 2:00 p.m. Following his lecture, Mr. Nelson will be available to identify (but not appraise) pieces of American glass brought by audience members (limit one object per person). This program is held in conjunction with the exhibition American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art, which is the Hood’s largest presentation to date of its American collections and remains on view through December 9, 2007.

Kirk Nelson is one of the leading authorities on American glass. He received an M.A. from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, The University of Delaware, where he wrote his thesis on the mechanization of the American flint glass industry, 1820–1840. Before assuming his present directorship at the New Bedford Museum of Glass, he served as curator of art and decorative arts at the Bennington Museum, Bennington, VT; curator of glass at the Sandwich Glass Museum in Sandwich, MA; and director of the Glass Art Center, Bradford, MA. In addition to his scholarly background, he gained firsthand experience making glass through his position as a part-time glass cutter for Pairpoint Crystal, Inc., in Sagamore, MA.

Mr. Nelson has published extensively on American glass, including books and articles on various aspects of glassmaking from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. His exhibitions have also covered a range of topics, including fakes and reproductions in early American glass, the glass engraving of Lous Vaupel (1828–1903) and his contemporaries, Steuben glass, and the work of twentieth-century glassmakers Michael and Frances Higgins. Kirk Nelson also served as a glass consultant to the Hood’s current exhibition American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art.