NEW BRITAIN, CONN.- The New Britain Museum of American Art announces Glass Today: 21st-Century Innovations has opened in the McKernan Gallery for changing exhibitions. Organized by Assistant Curator Anna Rogulina, this group exhibition celebrates glass as medium and subject matter for contemporary art—sculpture, installation, video and even painting. The second chapter of the Museum’s 2008 exhibition dedicated to the Studio Glass Movement in the U.S. and in Europe, this exhibition brings together over 85 works made in the last fourteen year by 66 international artists, from seasoned masters like Dale Chihuly and Lino Tagliapietra to the newest talent in the field.
Because of our familiarity with glass as a highly useful, everyday material, its utilitarian functions inform our expectations of what glass typically looks like and the purposes it serves. The goal of this exhibition is to demonstrate the seemingly boundless ways in which artists are continuing to shatter all such expectations by manipulating the properties and potentialities of the medium. Three themes—Nature & Landscape; Form & Color; and Narrative & Symbol—serve as loose connective tissue between the sheer diversity of techniques, aesthetics and conceptual goals achieved by each of the exhibiting artists. A significant number of works, such as light sculptures by Sydney Cash and Stephen Knapp, are expansive in scale and move beyond the pedestal. Others, such as Daniel Clayman’s Three Volumes and Norwood Viviano’s Mining Industries series, demonstrate how artists are embracing rapid prototyping and other advances in technology to realize their vision.
To punctuate the exhibition’s emphasis on artists who have pushed the material in new directions, the Museum has commissioned a major, site-specific installation by Beth Lipman inspired by Thomas Hart Benton mural series The Arts of Life in America (2013, cast and mouth blown glass, 115 x 80 x 60 in.). Borrowing objects depicted in the murals, Lipman creates a monumental three-dimensional still-life sculpture from clear glass as a meditation on the good fortunes of wealth and prosperity as well as the misfortunes that ensue from their abuse.
Participating Artists
Giles Bettison, Mary Beth Bliss and Peter Vanderlaan, Martin Blank, Peter Bremers, Latchezar Boyadjiev, Nancy Callan, Sydney Cash, José Chardiet, Nicole Chesney, Dale Chihuly, Daniel Clayman, Amber Cowan, Dan Dailey, Steffen Dam, Andrew Erdos, Josepha Gasch-Muche, Peter Greenwood, Mundy Hepburn, Eric Hilton, Richard Hornby, David Huchthausen, Sidney Hutter, Anja Isphording, Luke Jerram, Richard Jolley, John Kiley, Vladimira Klumpar, Stephen Knapp, Jon Kuhn, Thérèse Lahaie, Karen LaMonte, Shayna Leib, K. William LeQuier, Beth Lipman, Marvin Lipofsky, Carmen Lozar, Linda MacNeil, Dante Marioni, Richard Marquis, Benjamin Moore, Debora Moore, Sibylle Peretti, Stephen Rolfe Powell, James Randolph, Mark Reigelman II, Jill Reynolds, Christopher Ries, Martin Rosol, Richard Royal, Brian Russell, Toland Sand, Judith Schaechter, Thomas Scoon, Josh Simpson, Raven Skyriver, Carmen Spera, Dan Spitzer, Ivana Šrámková, Ethan Stern, Preston Singletary, Lino Tagliapietra, Bertil Vallien, Norwood Viviano, David Walters, Steven Weinberg, and Toots Zynsky.
