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The Studio announces 2019 Residencies

Today, The Studio announced the 2019 Artists-in-Residence recipients: twelve artists from around the world who will each spend one month at The Studio, researching and experimenting with new techniques to further their work. Additionally, two artists and two scholars have been selected for the David Whitehouse Research Residency for Artists and the David Whitehouse Research Residency for Scholars, respectively. These recipients will spend up to three weeks in the Rakow Library, utilizing the vast holdings to inform their practice or area of research. Each resident will provide a public Lunchtime Lecture during their time at the Museum, describing their inspirations and work at The Studio and the Rakow Library.

2019 Artists-In-Residence at The Studio

Shinobu Kurosawa & Jim Butler
February 24-March 24; Public lecture on March 14

Translated literally, the Japanese word tonbodama means dragonfly ball. Since 2000, flameworker Shinobu Kurosawa has been making tonbodama beads that depict traditional Japanese landscape and nature scenes in glass.

In her March 2019 residency, Kurosawa will use The Studio’s resources to continue her research on tonbodama and expand her flameworking skills as she explores new possibilities in Japanese beadmaking.

Donor Profile: Dwight and Lorri Lanmon

“It was a boyhood disease,” Dwight Lanmon said of his early love of glass. “I was haunting antiques shops by the time I was in high school.” You might then say it was destiny that brought Dwight and his wife Lorri to Corning, where Dwight spent 19 years working at The Corning Museum of Glass, culminating in his time as director from 1981 to 1992.

Dwight and Lorri Lanmon

Although Dwight’s career started in an entirely different field—he first worked as a research engineer in the aerospace industry in Southern California—he was always drawn to glass. Dwight began to form a collection. He recalls buying his first piece of Carder-Steuben glass: a gold Aurene-lined calcite compote. He later added Tiffany glass and the occasional piece of Carnival glass.

In Los Angeles, he began to focus on 18th-century English drinking glasses. To feed his interest in antiques, he took night classes at the University of California at Los Angeles where he met a Curator of Decorative Arts at the Los Angeles County Museum who would later become his mentor. Gradually, he realized that he could find far greater satisfaction working as a museum curator than in his aerospace work. Read more →

How glass heals

If you think about how glass relates to medicine, you might first conjure images of fingers cut on a broken bottle. But glass has a long history as a curer of wounds and an enabler of healing, not just hurting: from jars for ointments and medicines, the mortar and pestle for preparing prescriptions, glass eyes, test tubes and syringes for blood analysis, and even ultra-sharp surgical blades made from obsidian.

But a novel way for doctors to use glass inside the body dates to the late 1960s, when a scientist named Dr. Larry Hench turned what seemed to be a problem—a glass that dissolved in water—into an answer: glass that could be put into the body to promote healing, even as it dissolved away in the body’s fluids.

You may know that soda-lime glass is the most common family of glass. It is made by melting together silicon dioxide (also called “silica”or “quartz”) from sand, sodium from washing soda, and calcium from limestone. Within the soda-lime family, by changing the amount of these ingredients plus many others, manufacturers can make glass that works for everything from beer bottles to stained glass windows. It’s like how a baker can start with flour,sugar, and water, to make anything from a pancake to a birthday cake!

GlassBarge: By the numbers

In May 2018, The Corning Museum of Glass launched a statewide tour to commemorate the 150th anniversary of glassmaking moving to Corning from Brooklyn.

Barge with stadium seating docked on the Hudson River with visitors watching glassblowing.

GlassBarge docked in Troy, N.Y., on June 21, 2018.

In 1868, Brooklyn Flint Glass Company loaded its equipment onto canal boats bound for Corning, N.Y., thus setting in motion 150 years of glassmaking innovation in Corning that has shaped the modern world. GlassBarge retraced and expanded upon the 1868 journey by traveling from Brooklyn to Buffalo before making its way home to the Finger Lakes, offering free glassmaking demonstrations to the public along the way. The tour also coincided with the Erie Canal Bicentennial (2017-2025)—for which GlassBarge was a 2018 signature event—as well as the centennial of the New York State Barge Canal. Read more →

The Studio announces 2019 Residencies

2019 Artists-In-Residence at The Studio

Shinobu Kurosawa & Jim Butler
February 24-March 24; Public lecture on March 14

The Corning Museum of Glass Surveys Global Contemporary Glass in Special Exhibition Opening in May 2019

Today The Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG) announced that 100 artists—representing 32 nationalities and working in 25 countries—have been selected to exhibit in New Glass Now, a global survey of contemporary glass and the first exhibition of its kind organized by the Museum in 40 years. The show, which will be on view from May 12, 2019, through January 5, 2020, will include works ranging from large-scale installations and delicate miniatures to video and experiments in glass chemistry, all of which demonstrate the vitality and versatility of this dynamic material.

Sarah Briland
United States, b. 1980
Problematica (Foam Rock)
United States, Richmond, Virginia, 2016
Foam, Aqua Resin, glass microspheres, steel, concrete stand
With stand: 96.5 x 52 x 45.7 cm
Photo: Terry Brown

In spring 2018, CMoG welcomed submissions of new works, made between 2015 and 2018 in which glass plays a fundamental role, for consideration by a panel comprising Susie J. Silbert, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Glass at CMoG, and three guest curators, including: Aric Chen, curator-at-large, M+ museum, Hong Kong; Susanne Jøker Johnsen, artist and head of exhibitions at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Denmark; and American artist Beth Lipman. More than 1,400 artists, designers and architects working in 52 countries—from Argentina, Australia, Indonesia and Japan to the United States, United Kingdom, and beyond—submitted works, which draw upon flameworking, glassblowing, casting, neon, carving, and kilnworking techniques, among others. Read more →

Photographing glass, part 3: Lighting techniques for transparent glass objects

This is the third in a series of blog posts addressing photographic lighting techniques for transparent glasses. It builds on the techniques discussed in the first two posts, Photographing glass, part 1 and Photographing glass, part 2.

In the first two posts, I used colorless engraved glasses to demonstrate how we can reveal detail by exploiting the ways glass interacts optically with its surroundings in a carefully controlled lighting environment.

In this third post, I use two different objects without engraving to demonstrate how the same lighting principles can be used to capture more subtle elements like tooling marks and optic ribbing. I also present a few techniques used to define edges and introduce controlled reflections. My goal is to capture details that provide insight into the process of making the objects as well as the properties of the glass itself.

As with the first two posts in this series, all objects are photographed on a translucent white acrylic surface (PlexiGlas 2447 with a P95 matte finish). Read more →

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