Glass is having a moment. This is the 50th anniversary of the Studio Glass movement, and Color Ignited: Glass 1962–2012, “an enticing ‘coming of age’ look at the medium” that is international in scope, starts next week at the Toledo Museum of Art, which is where it all began. (A piece by Paul Seide is below right.)
In August, the new permanent Rooms for Glass, an exhibition space designed by Selldorf Architects of New York, will be inaugurated in Venice. The opening show is Carlo Scarpa, Venini 1932-1947, more than 300 works by Scarpa. The center will showcase the Venetian art of glassmaking in the 20th and 21st centuries and, eventually, establish a “General Archive of Venetian Glass” that will be accessible to scholars and to used to revive the art of glassmaking there.
And today came word that the Corning Museum of Glass has chosen a preliminary design for its proposed new North Wing, “featuring light-filled galleries for its collection of contemporary works in glass, as well as one of the world’s largest facilities for glassblowing demonstrations and live glass design sessions.” The architect, Thomas Phifer and Partners, has created a 100,000-square-foot expansion that, Corning says, “will dramatically enhance the visitor experience for the Museum’s growing domestic and international audiences.” The cost? $64 million, funded entirely “before groundbreaking” by Corning Inc. The building is scheduled to open in 2014. You can find more details here.
Karol Wight, executive director of the museum (formerly antiquities curator at the Getty) was quoted in the press release saying: “Over the past decade, we’ve experienced tremendous growth: in our collections; in our increasingly diverse audiences; and in the breadth and ambition of our public programs, especially those that allow visitors to experience the energy of artists and designers at work. This is a transformative design that responds to those demands and further enables us to bring glass to life for the 400,000 people who visit our campus each year.â€
Until I learned the number of visitors, I was surprised by the scope of the expansion. Attendance of 400,000 puts the Corning Glass Museum, which after all is located a four-and-a-half hour drive from New York, the nearest major city, among the nation’s top 25 art museums by that measure. It puts the glass museum ahead of, say, the Whitney, the Frick, the Morgan and the Newark museums — all of which draw on the huge NYC metro area and more easily on the Northeast corridor — not to mention tourists from near and far.
I was less impressed, though, after I did some digging. That 400,000 is a precipitous drop. According to clips in The New York Times, the Corning museum “expected” 1 million visitors in 1962. In 1980, it had 800,000 visitors. I have no comparative figures for other museums at those times, but the drop probably says more about what interested Americans in those days, versus now, than it does about the museum.
If then glass is having a moment, and people are getting more interested in the medium, Corning is on the right track. I really hope this isn’t another case of overexpansion.
Photo Credits: Courtesy Toledo Museum of Art (top); Corning Museum of Glass (bottom)
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