Toledo is now known as the birthplace of the studio glass movement, but participants at the original workshop 50 years ago had trouble even forming a bubble.
“Nobody knew anything. Literally no one knew how to make a bubble. Th ere was no one there to ask,” recalled 89-year-old Toledo artist Edith Franklin, one of the fewer than 10 people who attended the fi rst of two 1962 glass workshops at Toledo Museum of Art (TMA).
“Color Ignited: Glass 1962–2012,” a new exhibition at TMA, will commemorate the 50th anniversary of those historic workshops.
Th e free show, which will focus on the evolution of the use of color in glass, debuted June 14 during the GlassArt Society Conference and will run
through Sept. 9, 2012.
On display are more than 80 objects from private collections, galleries and other museums as well as TMA’s collection, including work by Harvey Littleton, Dominick Labino, Marvin Lipofsky, Dale Chihuly, Dan Dailey, Laura de Santillana, Heinz Mack, Klaus Moje, Yoichi Ohira, Ginny Ruffner and Judith Schaechter.
The exhibition is the first in the new $3 million Frederic and Mary Wolfe Gallery of Contemporary Art.
The space was the home of TMA’s glass collection before the Glass Pavilion opened in 2006.
Jutta-Annette Page, TMA’s curator of glass and decorative arts and vice president of the Glass Art Society, called the exhibition “visually enthralling” and said she hopes visitors leave with a better appreciation of Toledo’s role in the evolution of studio glass.
“I very much hope this exhibition will make it clear this very important movement started here in Toledo and also help people realize this is aninternational movement that is here to stay,” Page said.
Visitors can also view the exhibit from the gallery’s mezzanine level.
“It allows people to look at the works on the ground floor from a different vantage point, which some of the artists are intending on in their works,” Page said.
Several of Franklin’s pieces from the original studio glass workshop are on display.
“I had them at home for years and nobody looked at them and now they’vebecome famous,” Franklin said.
Such early pieces are rare.
“It’s a very, very small group of surviving objects and the reason for that is they had not really figured out the technological issues that came with this experimentation,” Page said.
“Most of the pieces broke.”
The first workshop used glass from melted-down fiberglass marbles made at the Johns Manville plant in Waterville.
Learning to add color was part of the experimentation process.
“If you look at these very earliest pieces they were all greenish, transparent glass because the color was entirely determined by the glass batch,” Page said. “Very early on the palette was limited to the prefabricated glass the artists were using, but they very quickly experimented with color.”
Franklin never worked with glass again, but has fond memories of that first workshop.
“It was a wonderful experience,” Franklin said. “It’s been exciting these past couple of years. It’s nice it’s getting the recognition it should. Too bad some of the people aren’t alive who would have been enjoying this.”
Admission to the museum, located at 2445 Monroe St., is free. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday andnoon to 6 p.m. Sunday. Th e museum is closed Mondays and major holidays.
For more information, visit www.toledomuseum.org. ✯
