Artisans show museum goers a touch of glass
It's the hottest show in town - literally.
Working with a molten mixture of sand, soda and lime passed down from ancient Egyptians, artisans from New York's Corning Museum of Glass are giving spectators a front-row seat to the art of glassblowing at "The Glass Experience," running now through Sept. 1 at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.
Each day, the artists choose one design drawn by a guest and bring it to life, molding and shaping it from a fiery glob into a work of art that the guest gets to keep.
On a recent visit, the Corning Museum's Ray Friday took the crowd through the glassblowing process step-by-step as sculptor Annette Sheppard transformed a young girl's giraffe drawing into a delicate bowl shaped, well, like a giraffe.
Wielding a long, metal blowpipe, Sheppard had spectators' full attention as she dipped the pipe into a pool of molten glass inside a 900-degree furnace on stage. The crowd tensed as she puffed air into the pipe to form the bubble from which all glass pieces begin. A second furnace, used to reheat the glass as it is being shaped, raged nearby, glowing at nearly 2,500 degrees.
Through it all, the T-shirt and sandal-clad Sheppard, working just inches from the lavalike mixture, wore specialized glasses to protect her eyes. The hollow, stainless steel blowpipe, Friday explained, only gets hot at the very end. Experienced glass blowers know just how far down the pipe they can put their hands, she said, so oven-type mitts are not only unnecessary, but would make it virtually impossible for the artists to hone their piece.
"It would be like trying to tie your shoes with oven mitts on," Friday said.
Though Sheppard made the process look effortless, it takes nearly a decade of training for glass blowers to learn their craft. You can always tell a novice glassblower, she said, by the pipe burns on their arms.
"It's a long road - a lot of hours in a hot shop," Friday said. "It takes three years just to learn how to make a juice glass."
The live glassblowing demonstration is the exclamation point on an exhibit exploring the many decorative and functional forms of glass through the ages.
A colorful glass display showcases the creations of glass masters past and present, including a collection of ornate lamps and windows from Dale Comfort Tiffany and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as works by contemporary artists Lino Tagliapietra and Jon Kuhn.
Renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly holds a special place in the gallery - an arrangement of more than 20 large, handblown colored glass sculptures he made especially for the exhibit called the Macchia (meaning "spotted" in Italian) Forest. Each organically shaped sculpture is placed on a pedestal of a varying height, filling the space with speckled, brilliantly colored works of art, giving the illusion of a glass forest.
The Macchia Forest is accompanied by a short film that shows Chihuly at work, explaining the scientific process behind coloring and forming the sculptures. It takes more than an hour for a team of 10 glassmakers to make just one Macchia.
The Botti Studio of Architectural Arts in Evanston is also on hand, offering a glimpse into the world of stained-glass windows. Guests can watch and talk with the Botti artisans as they work to restore the Chicago Cultural Center's Tiffany Dome, among other projects. A recent visit found workers restoring stained-glass windows from a church in South Dakota, a process that required each piece of glass to be removed separately from the window and cleaned by hand with brass brushes and a solvent similar to soap and water.
Colorful display pods show glass fibers at work in everyday items such as furnace filters, insulation and window screens. The role of glass in communications, lighting, and space exploration also is on display. Guests can further test breakthrough technologies, including bulletproof glass, tempered glass and the glass used in NASA satellites.
The exhibit also touches on the new directions of glass, from fiber-optic clothing and the "smart glass" windows of the Boeing 787 to the Skywalk glass bridge over the Grand Canyon.