More Objects in the Contemporary Art + Design Galleries

Yesterday, we talked about some highlights from the Promenade and two of the new galleries. Let’s take a look at exciting pieces in the other galleries, and the Porch.

* Works on view for the first time.

The History and Material Gallery presents works that reflect the manipulation of traditional forms in glass and focus on its material properties.

Material Culture (2008) by Beth Lipman references and recontextualizes functional vessels so that we understand them in new ways. The abundance of objects explores the idea of amassing large collections of objects, and the cultures of excess.

*Carroña (Carrion) (2011) by Javier Pérez exploits the beauty and drama of Venetian chandeliers, creating a statement very different from that of functional lighting fixtures. The installation is meant to evoke opportunistic birds gobbling carrion by the side of the road, a metaphor for the gradual disappearance of the traditional glass industry in Murano, Italy.

Tire (2005) by Robert Rauschenberg is meant to be ambiguous and highly ironic, while urging viewers to consider everyday objects in new ways. It explores the idea that a rubber tire—humble, dirty, industrial, and ecologically adverse—is recreated in colorless glass and presented as a thing of exquisite beauty.

The Design Gallery will be devoted to international design from the past 25 years and feature a range of functional glass vessels, furniture, lighting, and design art.

Etruscan Chair (1992) by Danny Lane is constructed of colorless glass that has been chipped, ground, polished, drilled and assembled with fabricated metal.

Folpo Nero (2003) by Maria Grazia Rosin is both a chandelier and a sculpture. The octopus—with its waving arms, murky color, and staring eyes—evokes the mysterious depths of the ocean. The eyes are illuminated with fiber-optic lighting, and the deep black glass is enlivened with iridescent purple, blue, green, and gold sparkles.

Eye Prototype (2011) by Sigga Heimis was made at The Corning Museum of Glass as part of GlassLab, a pioneering collaboration between international designers and master glassmakers from the Museum.

The Special Temporary Projects Gallery will be a changing space in which large-scale installations can be displayed.

*Constellation (1996) by Kiki Smith is a room-sized installation that will be on view until March 2016. It is a meditation on the infinity of space and the human desire to understand it, bringing the heavens to earth. Twenty-six hot-sculpted glass animals of different sizes represent different animal-themed star patterns. Smith designed the piece after a 19th-century celestial atlas, and worked with Venetian maestro Pino Signoretta to produce it.

The Porch is the display area around the themed galleries which overlooks the Museum’s new one-acre green.

The White Necklace (2007) by Jean-Michel Othoniel is a floor-to-ceiling necklace composed of 51 irregularly-shaped blown glass beads, made to demonstrate how glass beads may participate in the larger context of contemporary art.

*Continuous Mile (2006-2008) by Liza Lou consists of black glass beads sewn onto a continuous mile-long cotton rope that is coiled into a circle. Lou spent several years working with a team of beadworkers from several townships in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, to create the piece.

*Untitled (“The peacock likes to sit on gates or fenceposts and allow his tail to hang down. A peacock on a fencepost is a superb sight. Six or seven peacocks on a gate is beyond description, but it is not very good for the gate. Our fenceposts tend to lean and all our gates open diagonally”). (2013) This large, abstract sculpture by Roni Horn is made of lime-green glass, and cast in one block. The work was removed from the mold and left in its natural, flawed state. When exposed to light, the sculpture captures and reflects moments of instability and change, which will be readily apparent in the skylit gallery.