ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION

Contemporary Glass

Although Rockford Art Museum collected its first glass piece in 1968, a humble vessel blown by Marvin Liposfsky in 1964, Glass Art is one of the youngest focuses of collection at the museum. Two generous donations have provided the core of our glass collection. June and Francis Spiezer began donating Contemporary Glass to the museum in 1994. Carol and Don Wiiken doubled the size of the collection and expanded its international significance with their donation in 2004.

Glass has been used for centuries as a decorative medium from the ancient civilization of Egypt up through art glass of Emile Galle and Louis Comfort Tiffany. The development of glass as fine art has been more recent. The American movement began with Harvey Littleton, a ceramicist who had traveled to Europe to explore the artistic potential of glass, and the Toledo workshops of March 1962. Armed with little more than a technical manual and small portable kiln, Littleton and several students began blowing misshapen bubbles. "Technique is cheap," a mantra Littleton often repeated, emphasizing the importance of glass as a conceptual and expressionistic sculptural medium while denying its traditional association with craft and functionality. The first 10 years of the American movement were focused on making glass blowing a studio art that could be practiced by the artist in isolation, resulting in many free-formed expressionistic blobs.

The 1970s saw the growth of technical know-how through contact with traditional European glass shops. While the United States artists have been excluded from commercial glass factories, in Europe, the situation has been quite different. Europeans have a strong connection between the artist and the factory, most notably with the Swedish glass factories Kosta Boda and Orrefors (which merged into Orrefors Kosta Boda AB in 2002), the Italian glass factory on the island of Murano, near Venice, and the many small glass shops in Italy, as well as the state-owned factories of Communist Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). These European factories have had the tradition of allowing glass blowers to produce their own work during off-hours with factory equipment; as well, Europeans have strong decorative and technical tradition.

During this time glass artists in the United States began banding together to share technical knowledge and the high cost of glass making. Most notably, Dale Chihuly co-founded the Pilchuck Glass Center (now Pilchuck Glass School) near Seattle in 1971. This rural open-air glass studio proved to be one of the most innovative and experimental forces in contemporary glass. The American fervor for glass as fine art has been exported and taken up throughout Europe, Australia and, most recently, Asia. Although no longer confined by functionality, glass has been slow to slough off its characterization as craft and has, only in recent years, started to find wider acceptance as a fine art.

Contemporary Glass Artists

Harvey Littleton
Harvey Littleton is perhaps the single most important figure in the American Studio Glass movement, in which glass is used as a sculptural, rather than a utilitarian, material. Because his father was director of research for Corning Glass Works, from an early age Littleton had access to glass making activities. From 1949 to 1951, Littleton was a ceramics instructor at the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art School of Design, where he met Dominick Labino, who was destined to supply much of the technical knowledge for early studio glass makers. At Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, Littleton earned his master's degree in ceramics and then began teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. more...

Ruth Brockmannn
Ruth Brockmannn's work revolves around mythologies, specifically those of the Pacific Northwest and in general, those found around the world. She draws on animal forms creating totemic masks and figures that reveal the interrelatedness and spirituality of all living things. more...

Janusz Walentynowicz
Janusz Walentynowicz’s glass sculptures defy the normal expectations of the transparency and brilliant color glass is supposed to possess. Rather his glass work is often pitted, the colors dark and dingy and in most situations the clarity of the glass is cloudy to opaque. Walentywicz is one of the few artists that has been able to transcend his medium. more...

Joel Philip Myers
Joel Philip Myers' introduction into glass art was both a common and unusual for his time. Common in that like many other glass artists of the 60's he had come through ceramics to discover glass. Unusual because he is the only American glass artist of that time not to have been taught by Harvey Littleton, regarded as the founder of the Studio Glass Movement. more...

Bertil Vallien
Bertil's glass possesses the quality of ice. Anyone who has ever found fascination at the thought of a prehistoric man frozen inside a glacier, his features obscured by the frosted surface will know what it is like to look into Vallien's works. There is an interest in the texture of the glass and the quality of light that penetrates its surface. “Glass eats light,” Vallien said. more...

Ulrica Hydman-Vallien
Although her preferred medium may be glass, Ulrica Hydman-Vallien is a painter. Looking at her glass, this can be as easily discerned as in any of her acrylic on canvas works or in any of her inkwashes. Where many glass artist work thoroughly with its transparent and optical properties, Hydman-Vallien's work lives very much on the surface with the transparent glass beneath it revealing an secret inner dimension. more...