Toledo is now known as the birthplace of the studio glass movement, but participants at a glass workshop 50 years ago had trouble even forming a bubble.

“Nobody knew anything. Literally no one knew how to make a bubble. There was no one there to ask,” recalled 89-year-old Toledo artist Edith Franklin, one of the fewer than 10 people who attended the first of two 1962 glass workshops at Toledo Museum of Art.

“The turning point for me, for all of us, was close to the last day of the class, this old man came dressed in a suit and tie and someone started to talk to him. He had worked as a glassblower for Libbey. They said, ‘Would you like to try?’ He took off his coat and his vest, sat down, put his thumb over the hole at the top and there came the bubble. Magic! Here we had been huffing and puffing for a week and then there it was. Simple. With the touch of a thumb.”

The man was Harvey Leafgreen, a glassblower who had worked for the Libbey Glass division at Owens-Illinois for years. Afterward, he worked one-on-one with the workshop participants.

‘Color Ignited’

“Color Ignited: Glass 1962–2012,”  a new exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA), will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the historic workshops led by Harvey Littleton. The free show, which focuses on the evolution of the use of color in glass, will debut June 14 during the Glass Art Society Conference and run through Sept. 9.

On display will be more than 80 objects from private collections, galleries and other museums as well as TMA’s collection, including work by Littleton, Dominick Labino, Marvin Lipofsky, Dale Chihuly, Dan Dailey, Laura de Santillana, Heinz Mack, Klaus Moje, Yoichi Ohira, Ginny Ruffner and Judith Schaechter.

The exhibit will be the first in the new $3 million Frederic and Mary Wolfe Gallery of Contemporary Art. The space was home to 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 an international 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 will be on display.

“I had them at home for years and nobody looked at them and now they’ve become famous,” Franklin said.

Such early pieces are rare, Page said.

“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.”

Right place, right time

Franklin, a lifelong Toledo resident, was taking a ceramics class at TMA when she heard about the 1962 glass workshop. She was told it was open to university ceramics professors only, but a week before the workshop, she was invited to attend.

“They couldn’t fill the class. There were not enough people signed up from across the country to fill the class,” Franklin said. “I’m a firm believer in luck. Right place, right time and you’re lucky you were the one that happened to be there.”

Franklin never worked with glass again, but has fond memories of that first workshop.

“It wasn’t for me. I did it because I was curious, but I’m too little to lift that heavy pipe with the gather on the end. My God, I couldn’t lift the damn thing. But 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 and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. The museum is closed Mondays and major holidays.

For more information, visit www.toledomuseum.org.

Tags: color ignited, Dale Chihuly, Edith Franklin, glass, glass art society, Glass Art Society Conference, Harvey Littleton, libbey glass, Sarah Ottney, TMA, Toledo Museum of Art

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2012 at 9:12 am and is filed under Arts and Life, Featured, Star, Toledo Museum of Art.
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Dale Chihuly turns it up — way up — in the studio. Whether he’s drawing or directing a team of glassblowers, the artist takes it to 11.

“In the morning, it might be classical music; and in the middle of the day, it might be more hip music; in the afternoon, it could be more jazz. We play a big variety of music — Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen — anything that I like,” Chihuly said and laughed.

“If I’m not there, they can play whatever they want,” he said of his crew and laughed again.

The international art superstar cranks up the volume, color, creativity — and visibility of studio glass.

Of course, it’s hard to miss some of his ginormous multipiece works.

There was “Chihuly Over Venice,” which featured 14 dazzling chandeliers suspended over the city’s canals and piazzas in 1996. Three years later, his magic appeared to be a mirage: Huge blocks of ice from Alaska made a 60-foot wall outside of the Tower of David Museum of the History of Jerusalem. Throngs celebrated the millennium by viewing “Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem 2000,” a project that cost more than $1 million and included a crystal mountain.

“Ideas come to me sometimes, they just feel sort of like they come right out from the gut. Nothing that I’ve thought about necessarily for a long time — somehow it just appears,” he said during a phone interview from his Ballard studio in Seattle.

Chihuly’s gritty obsession began in 1965 when he melted stained glass and picked up a metal pipe.

“It was just the process of blowing human breath down a blowpipe and it came out at the other end like a bubble. It’s a pretty amazing technique,” he said.

In 1968, the glassblower traveled to Murano, Italy, to learn more about the ancient art. He was the first American to work at the Venini glass factory.

“What I learned that was the most important was how to work in a team, because all the Italians work in a team. And when I came back, I worked with a team of my own students,” Chihuly said. “The bigger the team, the more it allows you to work larger.”

He and his grand concepts are globally renowned for explosive, electrifying color.

“When I first started using glass, my first use of it was really with stained glass and stained glass comes in hundreds of colors,” the 68-year-old said. “So, right from the beginning, I had the option of using whatever color I wanted, and I ended up using most all of them.”

First look

The Glass City got its first look at Chihuly’s vibrant work in 1970 when he was one of 11 artists invited to submit work for “Toledo Glass National Exhibition III” at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA). He and college friend and collaborator Jamie Carpenter created “Monotropa Uniflora,” a stunning vision of neon, argon and blown glass.

In 1972, the Toledo Museum of Art and the American Craft Museum in New York teamed up for an exhibit, “American Glass Now.” Chihuly and Carpenter convinced TMA’s director, then Otto Wittmann, to support their work in the glass studio to create large-scale pieces for the event.

“I remember setting up the door that we showed. We showed another piece with bent plate glass with dry ice in it. I remember setting up those two pieces,” Chihuly said. “We were very thankful to be invited.”

Chihuly was grateful to be alive following a 1976 car accident in England that took the sight in his left eye and permanently injured his right ankle and foot. He started working with an assistant glassblower and gave up the gaffer, glassblower, position after dislocating his shoulder while bodysurfing in 1979.

“No, it wasn’t difficult,” he said of the transition. “I prefer to direct the team instead of be the gaffer on the team because we do a lot of big work and that means having a lot of people around; we have as many as 16 people on the pad at one time all working on the same piece. If I’m not the gaffer, I can kind of, you know, walk around and watch all aspects of it, whereas if you’re the gaffer, you have to concentrate just on that.”

He began to focus more on drawing to convey his designs to his team. Some of those ideas involved placing glass floats, flowers, ferns and tumbleweeds outdoors. His 23 red glass reeds, some as high as 8 feet tall, can be seen at the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library in the Wintergarden. They were installed there in 2001.

“It just seems to look just right,” Chihuly said of the environmental installations. “I’ve been doing that for probably 40 years, but I’ve been doing them more in the last 10 years. I’ve done about 10 shows in botanical gardens, usually in a greenhouse along with showing them outside as well.”

He has been drawn to water his whole life.

“I love working with water,” he gushed. “I think it’s just the fact that glass is so much like water; it’s a liquid, you know, to start with, and it moves and flows like water.”

Chihuly’s fluid works seem to defy gravity, capture movement and mesmerize the masses.

“Everybody takes away whatever they want to and it’s something different for everybody,” he said

‘Chihuly Toledo!’ extended at TMA

Swirling shapes, eye-popping colors and pulsating music greet visitors who enter the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion Gallery Four to see “Chihuly Toledo!”

“Everything [Chihuly] we own, literally, is on view. There’s about 36 objects ranging in date from 1975 to 2006,” said Jutta Page, glass curator at the museum. “[The exhibit] provides a very good overview, I think, of the whole entire span of Dale Chihuly’s career.”

On display are some of the artist’s Blanket Cylinders from the mid-1970s; Seaforms, Macchia and Persians from the 1980s; and Venetians and Niijima Floats from the 1990s. Sketches and drawings that inspired the work also are included.

“He has been very influential on the entire field of studio glass,” Page said. “And I have to say that Chihuly has always been very true to his affinity to Venetian glassmaking. He largely relies on Venetian glassmaking techniques that have been in use hundreds of years.”

The curator said she is a fan of the diversity of Chihuly’s work.

“I like the variety of it and there are certain parts, certain series, that I particularly like,” she said. “I’ve always thought the Niijima Floats that he’s created — which are the largest pieces his team has been able to blow — are just mesmerizing.”

Check out “Green and Gold Sparkle Float.” The magnificent orb shimmers with gold leaf and crushed glass from every angle.

And be sure to use the pavilion’s Monroe Street entrance, where “Campiello del Remer #2” hangs. The chandelier was one of 14 featured in “Chihuly Over Venice.” The original piece was split in half; the artist’s team rearranged 243 pieces when installing the 9-foot light in Toledo.

By popular demand, the free exhibit has been extended and will be on display through Feb. 7. For more information, visit www.toledomuseum.org.

Tags: Dale Chihuly

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Arts and Life, Exhibits, Featured.
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