Wadsworth Atheneum is ‘Fired Up’ about new contemporary glass exhibit
It’s clear that glass art has stretched in new directions over the last few decades, taking on new shapes and meanings. A new exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, “Fired Up: Glass Today,” provides a cutting-edge look at this precious, fragile medium. With 150 separate items crafted by more than 50 artists, “Fired Up” is not just comprehensive but the very definition of contemporary — a third of the works on display were either crafted in the last year or two or are being shown for the first time.
The exhibit opened Friday and runs through Feb. 5.
The Wadsworth is firing up “Fired Up” even bigger by holding live demonstrations of glass working techniques in a mobile glass studio set in the museum’s courtyard. The studio is called “The Hot Spot,” and there are nine separate demonstrations scheduled during the first few weeks that the exhibit is up, involving artists whose work is on view there.
The exhibit’s curator Brandy Culp (whose full title at the Wadsworth is Richard Koopman curator of American decorative arts) says “Fired Up” is “the Wadsworth’s contribution to the International Year of Glass,” a designation made by the United Nations to “celebrate the essential role glass has in society” and explore how the production and use of glass “can aid the development of more just and sustainable societies, the most recent scientific and technical breakthroughs, its influence on art and in history and finally the role of museums.”
Culp says the Wadsworth wants to show the glass artmaking process “beyond the furnace and the flame, the techniques of glass work today.”
“We’re just delighted to have the show,” says Matthew Hargraves, who was named the Wadsworth’s new museum director in July after serving for two years as interim director. “The museum has a great collection of glass, but not contemporary glass. This is a departure for us. It has been in the works for a couple of years.” Hargraves is among those at the Wadsworth who encouraged expanding “Fired Up” from a smaller exhibit into the 57-artist exhibit it became.
Where there’s fire, there’s smoke
Glass art is often associated with bottles and other receptacles, but cultural needs, and the substances we use to express those needs can change. Some glass artists have turned their attention to functional art that holds smoke rather than liquid.
The painter Rene Magritte once famously wrote “ceci n’est pas un pipe” across a painting of a pipe. But several of the artworks on display in “Fired Up” are actual working glass pipes meant to smoke cannabis with. The pipes are gorgeous and also seem impractical. One looks like a regular-sized open umbrella. Another is expertly shaped like a clear glass walking stick.
David Colton, who has an abstract, intricate and very colorful cannabis pipe in the exhibit, holds the distinction of having created the first glass cannabis pipe that became part of an American museum collection as a commission for the Corning Museum of Glass three years ago. His new pipe on display in “Fired Up” was made expressly for the exhibit.
“I came to glass after seeing Grateful Dead shows and seeing the glass pipes there” in the mid-1990s, Colton says. “I set up a shed and taught myself how to do it.” He describes his style as “flowy, improvised, reminiscent of the music.”
Culp suggests, and Colton affirms, that the making of cannabis pipes has led to an artistic revolution in the glass art field. “When I started out,” Colton says, “there were only five colors” available to most artists. “Now there are 10 color companies.”
Statement pieces
Flowers remain popular subject for recreating in glass. So does food (Megan Stelljes’ “Abundance” looks remarkably like a real plate of discarded banana peels) and small household items, from spray cans (expertly fashioned by Joseph Ivacic of Chicago) to plastic soda bottles. Seattle artist Dante Marioni has scattered dozens of beautifully crafted, all-white replicas of soda cans, wine bottles and an ashtray full of cigarette butts around a small table and titled the arrangement “29 hours of television.”
There’s an innate humor in using fragile glass to duplicate easily crushed items like paper coffee cups and tree leaves. There’s also a deeper meaning in contrasting disposable trash with the classiness of glass. Some of the works on display make direct cultural or political statements, like Hannah Gibson’s environmentally “Recycling Narratives,” which use glass made from old television screens, COVID-19 vaccine vials, car windshields and textiles to fashion small figures that resemble toy robots. The figures draw attention to the materials from which they were forged. Gibson has a background in geophysics and says that through her artwork she is asking “What is the origin of the glass we use, and what happens to it afterwards? My work is all about recycling and sustainability. I am trying to open a dialogue in a more approachable way.”
Dan Friday, who lives in Seattle and is a member of the Lummi Nation, created the wall display “Schaenexw (Salmon) Run” for this exhibit. It shows over a dozen large luminous fish-like sculptures all facing the same direction as if they are swimming in formation.
“My family has been fishermen for millennia,” Friday says. “They are stewards of the land. Fishing is a revered thing. I try to bring that into a more contemporary format.”
He intends the work to have a climate change theme.
The artists in “Fired Up” use glass to fashion everything from a bald head to a sewing machine. Glass proves to be as malleable and expressive a medium as just about anything else used in modern sculpture. Glass is breaking through, and the Wadsworth shows how.
“Fired Up: Glass Today” is on view through Feb. 5 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St., Hartford. Admission is $15, $12 for seniors, $5 for students and free for youth under 17 and all Hartford residents. thewadsworth.org.
Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.
