Color meets glass, a match with limitless possibilities, becoming (for starters) intense, opaque, transparent, translucent, reflective, infrared, or ultraviolet.
The exhibit opening Thursday in the new $3 million gallery at the Toledo Museum of Art makes that crystal clear.
There's Radio Light, a glowing rainbow spiraling into itself (made of blown glass, mercury, and argon gas), and Colorbox II, eight tall, narrow panels suggesting CD racks filled with slices of brilliant color; each 30-pound panel carefully baked for days in a kiln.
Color Ignited: Glass 1962-2012, shows off objects that please, tease, and tell the amazing evolution of studio glass from its humble beginnings in a Toledo garage to the glorious ways the world's best artists manipulate it. It's a material that glass pioneer Fritz Dreisbach loves for being "runny, drippy, gooey" and that inventor/artist Dominick Labino said "has absolutely no limits" in terms of color.
It's a big week for shinystuff in the Glass City; for art aficionados it's comparable to the LPGA tournament for golfers. Some 1,200 artists and connoisseurs will gather Wednesday through Saturday at the SeaGate Convention Centre and the museum for talks, demonstrations, the eyeballing of each other's creativity, and fun at the Glass Art Society's 42nd conference. This is the third time the group has held its annual meeting in Toledo; this year with a nod to two historic 1962 workshops held at the museum at which a handful of clay artists, eager to figure out how to melt glass in a small furnace like the kilns they used, met with auspicious breakthroughs.
Despite the fragility of its subject matter, Color Ignited will be fun for kids and adults. Most of these nearly 100 pieces have been borrowed from private collectors, but many are owned by the museum, which began buying studio glass in the 1960s.
It's astonishing how different glass can be made to look by varying the raw materials used to make it, the intensity and duration of heat, substances added to it, and methods for shaping. And it's a heckuva good sport, happily partnering with an array of other materials.
Enter the gallery's oversized doors and you'll face the wow! of Jun Kaneko's Colorbox II (2007). Head right for a visual history of American studio glass, and don't miss the humble beginnings: An island of pedestals hold several simple little greenish pieces made at the 1962 workshop from melting glass marbles invented by Dominick Labino when he worked for Johns Manville.
Hung on a near wall is Dan Dailey's life-sized sculpture: a thickly bespectacled man sits legs crossed, feet slippered, reading a book titled The Principles of Decor, opened to a page about rugs; a curvaceous gal leans in with a cuppa joe. Mr. Dailey didn't make this glass; he carved it from pieces of Vitrolite, a color-saturated, often opaque glass made in the United States by Libbey-Owens-Ford from 1935-1947 but no longer manufactured.
A don't-miss work is among the most recent in the show, and its creator is probably the youngest. Twilight Powered by Electricity Makes for a Brilliant New Horizon is an elephant/robot with knobby eyes and knees and hints of Seussicality. Andrew Erdos, who blew it and its little round buddy, added sterling silver for a mirrored effect, and placed the pair on a translucent white base under which four rows of LED lights softly cycle through primary colors.
Commissioned by the museum, it was blown in hollow segments and fused together, said the museum's glass curator, Jutta-Annette Page.
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