August 12 Corning Museum of Glass

 We left Cooperstown on Aug 11 and stayed over night at Norwich, NY.  On the way there I stopped to buy something and the sales clerk asked where I was  going. After a while, he said that I was making a mistake going to Norwich on the way to Corning and that I should have stayed over night in Binghamton, NY. As I went through the byways to Norwich, I realized he was probably right.

One of the things I wanted to see in Corning was the new contemporary glass exhibit added to the Museum of Glass (first image - from the internet).

 It is a minimalist structure which is designed to show off the glass sculptures and downplay the structure itself. All the walls and roof of that wing are made of translucent or transparent glass.  


The second image is a close up of a sculpture in this new area.

The sculpture is by Javier Pérez (Spanish, b. 1968). It is called Carroña (Carrion in English) and was done in Murano, Italy in 2011. 


The next (third) image (I got this from the internet as flash photos were not permitted and I couldn't get this w/o a strong flash) is from the older part of the museum (translucent or white walls but opaque ceiling). It is a chessboard where Hasidim are battling Franciscan priests and the Pope.



The artist of this is Gianni Toso who was born in Murano, Italy. He converted from Catholicism to Judaism and lives across the street from my brother Irwin in Baltimore near Greenspring Valley (Irwin asked if I saw Toso's work and then told me that the artist was his neighbor). The museum has several other of Toso's work.

The next (fourth) image is Ann and me in front of a sculpture by Harvey Littleton, then of the University of Wisconsin when it was done in 1987.

It is called Gold and Green Implied Movement. Littleton has quite a few sculptures in the museum as he was one of the founders of the contemporary glass movement when he became an art professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison campus in the early 1960s. 

 


The fifth image shows the Littleton sculpture by itself with other Littleton creations in the background (the lighting was better here and in the previous image and I could take a picture without a flash).



 


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The next (sixth) image is Ann and Martin in front of a Dale Chihuly sculpture in the lobby near the admissions area. This sculpture is called "Fern Green Tower". It was made in 1999  to a height of about 11 feet. In 2013, Chihuly dissembled it, replaced the steel frame with a stronger frame and added 4 and a half feet to the sculpture.






Mr. Chihuly has similar large sculptures elsewhere including in Grand Rapids at the Frederick and Lena Meijer Sculpture Garden (next, seventh image, which was created in 2003 and called "Lena's Garden" ) which we visited in the summer of 2014.


One of the nice things about our visit to the Corning Museum of Glass was that the regular parking lot (which has shuttle service) was full and we thus got to park (for free) at the VIP parking lot adjacent to the museum.





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