CORNING, NY.- The Corning Museum of Glass will bring its GlassLab program back to the Vitra Design Museum during Art Basel 2011, pairing international designers with Corning Museum glassmakers for a series of collaborative design performances. GlassLab design sessions will take place on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, from June 13 to June 19, 2011. Participating designers will be Active People (Alex Hochstrasser and René Küng), Shin Azumi, Tomoko Azumi, Stephen Burks, Paul Cocksedge, Sigga Heimis, James Irvine, Beat Karrer, and Arik Levy.

The designers will bring their sketchbooks and concepts and work side-by-side with glassmakers in a unique mobile hotshop developed by The Corning Museum of Glass. The teams will prototype their design ideas in live sessions, allowing audiences to watch the evolution of the designs as they are created. This year’s designer proposals include an experiment to blow glass through paper tubes by Tomoko Azumi and the creation of an organic, multifaceted shape in blown glass by toy designers Active People.

“The Corning Museum is a center for glass design, and GlassLab is an opportunity to share our passion and expertise with the international design community,” said Robert Cassetti, creative director of The Corning Museum of Glass. “GlassLab provides leading designers with rare access to hot glassmaking processes and enables them to experience first hand the full potential of glass as a material for design—pushing the creative boundaries of both designers and glassmakers.

An exhibition at The Corning Museum of Glass on view May 19, 2012 ‒ January 6, 2013, will highlight new explorations in glass by contemporary designers. The survey will feature objects by a select group of international designers and studio artists working in glass, and will also showcase works from GlassLab. The exhibition will explore how glass is being used by artists and designers in newly expressive ways as a result of special access to the material through programs such as GlassLab, where designers are able to explore concepts and learn about the properties of glass in ways that have not been previously possible.

The Corning Museum’s GlassLab has been featured at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, and at Design Miami/Art Basel. The hot glass design performance program was inspired by glass design workshops presented by the Corning Museum at Domaine de Boisbuchet, a design retreat center that is a cooperative effort of the Vitra Design Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou, in the Charente region of Southwest France.