Winter 2014
MAGAZINE
KELLY A. CONWAY ’99 Storytelling through glass
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Glass Through History by Larry G. Anderson
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As recently as two centuries ago, glass sometimes rivaled gold and silver in value. But what once was exclusive to royalty is now ubiquitous, reflecting sweeping cultural, industrial and societal changes. The beauty and power of glass is still celebrated, however, at places like the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y., home to some of the world’s premier authorities on glass. As curator of American glass there, Kelly A. Conway ’99 has a leading role in telling the story of how this country created a revolution in the look, manufacture and uses of glass. Strolling past rows of gleaming display cases, Conway enthusiastically notes that each object has an important story to tell.
REFLECTING EARLY AMERICA “Glass was America’s first industrial experiment,” Conway says. “The English colonists who landed in Jamestown, Va., attempted to establish a glass house in 1608. That attempt failed, as did the colony. They tried again between 1621
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and 1624, and again, they were not successful. The first sustainable glass factories in America did not take hold until midway through the 18th century.” The early colonists actually weren’t supposed to develop a domestic industry because Britain saw its American colonies as a market for British goods. But in spite of that, market demand in the colonies spurred the need for basic utilitarian glass, especially bottles, windows and some tableware. However, English and European glass styles strongly influenced American glass into the 19th century. As early as the 1740s, glass was instrumental in sparking Benjamin Franklin’s interest in electricity, according to Ian Simmonds, a full-time scholar-dealer who sells to museums and private collectors. “Franklin used glass tubes, charged with static electricity from being rubbed with buckskin, to explore and demonstrate the latest
discoveries of natural philosophers,” he says. “Although Franklin’s first tubes were imported from London, by 1755 he was using tubes made at the glassworks of Caspar and Richard Wistar in southern New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia.” One of the most important American pieces in the Corning Museum’s collection, Conway points out, is a rather ordinary-looking green glass bottle bearing a seal with the initials RW. “The RW stands for Richard Wistar, son of Caspar, who established a brass
button-making trade in Philadelphia and ventured into glassmaking in 1739 when he established the Wistarburgh Glassworks,” she says. “The successful company lasted until the beginning of the American Revolution, and it manufactured primarily bottles and windows. Bottles were a very important product in America, used for storage, transportation and serving of any kind of beverage, mostly alcoholic beverages.” The Industrial Revolution and America’s development of pressed glass molds in the 19th century marked a turning point in the affordability and availability of glass to the general public as well as in the variety of uses. The number of glass manufacturers skyrocketed, and so did their products.
FORM AND FUNCTION “The dominant theme in American glass of the 19th century was the Industrial Revolution and rise of mass production and consumption. American manufacturers were leaders in both cost reduction and production in quantity, with innovations in glass pressing and mechanized cutting,” Simmonds says. “A side effect of improved mass production was a stylistic race between the makers of luxury, cut and engraved glass and those seeking to manufacture close approximations of fashionable glass using molds at a fraction of the cost.” The American mechanized press could produce the shape, size and design of glass all in one process. American pressed glass became so popular that glassmakers in Britain and continental Europe quickly adopted the technology. Initially, pressed and molded glass was valued as being higher style than the earlier handblown glass, but less so than the finest cut glass. The American style of glass
was now being emulated abroad. “The growth of the middle class in America created a market for massproduced glass, but it also led to shifts in consumer taste and habits,” Conway says. “One of the fun things about my job is researching the development of the transportation, lighting, food and beverage industries in America. There are fascinating objects in the museum’s collection that are interconnected with those histories.” For example, a widely held misconception is that colored glass was more valued than colorless glass. “In the museum, you see the glass out of context,” she explains. “You have to imagine the contents of the glass tableware. A clear glass bowl enabled people to show off the contents within. If they could afford expensive, highquality food and beverages, they wanted to show their economic and social
position to family and guests.” The prevalence of glass in America struck Simmonds when he moved to this country from England. “In England, home to an enormous pottery business, we rarely used glass as tableware. It seems to me that glass is much more visible in America.”
STYLE AND PRESTIGE Cut and engraved glass varies considerably in the quality, quantity and difficulty of its decoration. A true connoisseur would have as readily noticed an extraordinary wine glass as the extraordinary wine that it contained, according to Simmonds. Americans seeking extra distinction could have their glass monogrammed, and in the 1850s, some even had family crests engraved on their tableware. “Like other decorative arts, glass has long stood at the center of our everyday,
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EMERALD PRESSED CELERY VASE
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domestic life and has naturally lent itself to artful design and display. Its history sheds light on how it was made, how it was used, and who could afford it and when – as well as the evolution of taste, both public and private,” says Jefferson Harrison, chief curator at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va. Conway served as curator of glass at the Chrysler Museum prior to joining the Corning Museum of Glass in September. “Most people know nothing of how glass is made. Through our Perry Glass Studio, Kelly brought the magic of glassmaking to thousands of visitors,” Harrison adds. “Kelly researched and interpreted virtually every national school of glass artists during her tenure at the Chrysler Museum. A large part of the Chrysler’s permanent collection is devoted to American glass, from the colonial period to the present, and she brought a new order and coherence to our interpretations of that material.” To present the story of glass effectively to visitors at the Corning Museum, Conway is further studying the style and technique of glass, and especially its place in history. That comes easily to Conway, who was a history major at DePauw. She finds some of the most compelling stories not in the most ornate pieces – and the museum has many of them – but rather in the more everyday pieces. “There are certain American glass objects that I like to talk about because they reveal how much has changed in our daily lives. One of my favorite forms to talk about is the celery vase, of which the museum has many examples,” Conway says. “The celery vase was prominent in the mid-19th century. It’s a very tall, trumpet-shaped vase on a stem. You can imagine it being
very stately on the table.” Celery vases, which held water and leafy celery stalks, came in many styles and could be decorated with cutting or engraving. Today celery is inexpensive and available year-round in grocery stores, but in the mid-19th century it was a luxury item and labor-intensive to grow. People who could afford to serve it wanted to show it off. An attractive clear glass vase, usually placed prominently at the center of the table, allowed them to do so. “By the late 19th century, celery becomes easier to grow, widely available and affordable,” Conway says. “The shape of the vessel changes accordingly. It becomes a flat, broad, shallow dish and is placed at the corner of the table rather than the center. Celery is no longer the statuesque centerpiece, and it has declined as a luxury good and status symbol.” Conway ends this story on a personal note. She remembers Thanksgiving dinners at her grandmother’s house where the relish dish, including celery, was placed on the table. It never came out any other time of the year. Many families have similar histories and can connect them to various glass objects on display in the museum.
REFLECTING SOCIETAL CHANGE Glass objects often were gifts to commemorate a major life event, such as a wedding or birthday. As a result, they became part of a family history, were well cared for and passed from one generation to the next. When the pieces make their way to the museum, they provide an extraordinary way to illustrate a story. “We get to talk about the broader socio-political issues going on in colonial America,” Conway says. “We point out the fashionable styles of the time, how consumers purchased items and how they
used glass. There are a lot of objects in the museum that were basic household items, yet reveal how much our daily habits have changed over time.” One such object that Conway cites is the butter dish. The Corning Museum last year acquired a very rare, round, pressed-glass butter dish and lid made around 1830 when butter was churned by hand on the farm – usually by women. The butter was then shaped into balls rather than today’s eight-tablespoon sticks, so a round butter dish made sense. Butter factories, also called creameries, didn’t come along until the 1850s. “As glass historians, we have to assemble a number of facts to date objects and approach research from a variety of angles. When the dairy industry started creating sticks of butter, rectangular glass dishes followed. It was a reaction to another American industry, and it illustrates that nothing was developed in isolation from the consumer,” Conway says. By the end of the 19th century, many people were better off financially, and more glass goods were available. The market for luxury glass blossomed, particularly for the purpose of home decoration. The creation of department stores with widely circulated publications fueled consumer demand and accessibility to material goods. At the end of the century, the leading tastemaker was Louis Comfort Tiffany. Creating an artistic empire to outfit private homes with innovative and beautiful works of leaded-glass windows, lamps and glass vessels, Tiffany’s vision marked a turning point to the modern era of glass. The Corning Museum’s collection includes some of the highly prized lamps and leaded-glass windows designed by Tiffany.
FROM GLASS CITY TO CRYSTAL CITY American glass comprises much of the museum’s collection, given that Corning, N.Y., is inextricably tied to glassmaking as home to Corning Incorporated, a leading glass manufacturer and innovator. The community is known as the Crystal City. Conway grew up in Toledo, Ohio, which is known as the Glass City. Toledo, too, has a long history of glassmaking in its local manufacturer, Libbey Company, and the Toledo Museum of Art has a significant collection of historical glass. Her father worked for Owens Corning Fiberglass. However, it was her first visit to the Corning Museum as a graduate student that solidified her passion for glass. “As a place, Corning, N.Y., is not unlike Toledo, Ohio. It is a factory town whose major museum was established by the local glass industry leader,” scholardealer Simmonds says. “In both cases, the local glass factory was relocated from the East Coast. Libbey Glass of Toledo had earlier been the New England Glass Company of Cambridge, Mass. The Corning Glass Works was formerly located in Brooklyn.” The Corning Museum of Glass benefits from its strategic location on the tourist route between New York City and Niagara Falls, Simmonds notes. “To entertain large groups, including many foreign
groups, the museum presents the Hot Glass Show. Few crafts have the same level of spectacle as glass blowing. At the same time, the museum remains a great center for collecting, research and scholarship.” Steuben Glass Works, co-founded in 1903 by English chemist and designer Frederick C. Carder, was also located in Corning until it closed in 2011. A large collection of Carder’s artistic glass is now housed at the Corning Museum. When Conway joined the museum, she replaced a curator who had cared for the American glass for more than 40 years. That is a daunting challenge by itself, but as Conway works toward her own interpretation of the collection, she faces two particular challenges: the sheer amount of glass pieces and how to tell all their stories. PRESSED BUTTER DISH
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What Happens when Glass Breaks? When a museum has nearly 50,000 glass objects, many of them quite old and all of them fragile, they require a great deal of care. At the Corning Museum of Glass, the responsibility for proper cleaning, storage and sometimes repair is in the steady hands of another DePauw alumnus, chief conservator Stephen P. Koob ’71. Glass is one of the most difficult materials to restore, according to Koob. “If glass breaks, one of its idiosyncrasies is that it breaks into sometimes the tiniest chips and fragments,” he says. “Every one of those little chips and tiny pieces has a home somewhere in the reassembled object. If you’re skilled enough to put it back together the right way, you should be able to find where virtually all, or very close to all, of those pieces go.” The museum received a gift of a rare Tiffany lamp that had broken into about 40 large pieces and hundreds of tiny bits
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of glass. Koob spent months puzzling the pieces together under a microscope and reassembling them with an acrylic adhesive developed at the museum. From a heap of shards in a box, the exquisite lamp is now on display in the museum. Koob also works on archaeological pieces, such as two medieval beakers from the time of the Crusades, the late 12th or early 13th centuries. The dark blue glasses – gilded, enameled and scratch engraved – lay in a jumbled pile in museum storage for 40 years until Koob and a former colleague were able to isolate the fragments into two distinct pieces. It took nearly a year of work for them to restore the first beaker; the second took only about three weeks. Both pieces went on display in an international show. Largely due to the efforts of Koob, who joined the Corning Museum in 1993 after working in ceramics and glass conservation
at the Smithsonian Institution and as conservator for the Agora Excavations in Greece, the Corning Museum is an international leader in glass conservation. Corning’s program attracts students from around the world, and especially Europe, who want to work full time with glass. “We’ve developed new techniques and new materials for working with glass, including adhesives, restoration materials and even packing and storage. We have the largest collection, the broadest collection, and the most expertise and experience in working with glass,” Koob says. “We’ve been able to teach what we’ve learned not only to the public but also to professional conservators.” Koob also has taught a one-week course in Europe and other locations for nearly 15 years. He continues to do archaeological conservation at Samothrace in northern Greece.
“My job is to understand all aspects of the American glass collection, whether it is a history of how and why a glassworker’s descendants cared for an object over a century, whose marriage or retirement a glass commemorated, how an object illustrated technological innovation, and why these individual glass objects illustrate important changes in our society,” Conway says. “My overall interpretive goal for the collection is just to tell these stories about our American history, help visitors connect with these objects as something meaningful and hope they find the objects relevant to their own lives.” That helps explain why Karol Wight, Corning’s executive director and curator of ancient and Islamic glass, was interested in Conway for the position. “Kelly does very strong scholarship, and she brings the kind of expertise we need to the position of curator of American glass,” Wight says. Conway’s experience prepared her for the new challenge. Looking after the Chrysler Museum’s entire glass collection provided her with broad knowledge of glass, not just the American kind. That fits well with the Corning Museum’s goal to enhance and expand its programs. “We want to be the world’s authority on glass,” Wight says. Wight explains the museum’s unique role in tracing the history of glass: “We have the most comprehensive collection of glass objects from the time glass was first created as a material and formed into objects by man – from ancient Mesopotamia in the second and third millennia B.C. up to the present day. It’s our goal to have a deep collection of the history of glassmaking that goes beyond the usual vessels to include architectural glass and scientific glass. So we have an entire innovation center here that
TIFFANY LEADED WINDOW
focuses on the role of glass in significant technical innovations that have occurred through time.” And glass innovations are many. Wight notes, for example, that the field of optics wouldn’t exist without glass, because early lenses were made out of natural materials such as rock crystal, which is rare, hard to cut and difficult to manipulate into optical, curved surfaces for magnification, for example. The development of glass lenses for microscopes and telescopes allowed for huge advances in molecular, biological and astronomical studies. In the 1800s, Corning Glass Works developed a new lens for railroad signal lanterns that led to a standardized signal system and decreased accidents. The company
also provided glass bulbs for Thomas Edison’s filament light bulbs. When electric lighting took off in the 1880s, the company made so many light bulbs and railroad lenses that it scaled back on making glass vessels. Today, glass makes fiber-optic communications possible. One of Corning’s newest innovations is the scratch- and impact-resistant Gorilla Glass used in iPhones carried by millions of people around the globe every day.
TELLING STORIES THROUGH GLASS Just as glass continues to change, so does the landscape in which museums must connect with and remain relevant
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to people. “The leading edge of glassmaking today has much to do with public performance, prompting some to debate whether it is the studio process itself – watched by a rapt audience and perhaps accompanied by rock music – or the discrete, finished object that is the principal work of art,” Chrysler Museum curator Harrison says. “I love watching people watching glass being made,” he adds. The Chrysler and Corning museums both feature glass-blowing demonstrations for visitors, and both offer people an opportunity to create their own glass objects – blown, fused, cast or lampworked. The Corning Museum is building a new gallery for contemporary art in glass because the way artists are using glass now is increasingly larger in scale. “Museums are really attracted to contemporary glass,” Wight says. “They’re seeing it more in connection to other contemporary art, such as paintings and sculptures.” Wight and Conway, like other museum curators, are working to develop new tools and take advantage of new technologies to interpret their collections. They need to understand what visitors really want to learn and how to tell the stories that answer their questions. In the case of glass, the stories vary from purely scientific to purely artistic. “I think the good news for us is that glass is very much a part of our everyday lives. We are surrounded by glass all the time at home and at work,” Wight says. “Coming up with relevant stories to connect our visitors and our collections to their daily lives is actually a very easy task for us. All we have to do is draw direct parallels between a 17th century goblet and the wine glass you buy in a department store.”
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KELLY A. CONWAY ’99 Position: Curator of American glass, Corning Museum of Glass Studies at DePauw: Major in American history, minor in classical studies DePauw activities: Women’s golf team, Delta Zeta sorority, Panhellenic president Further education: Master of Arts degree in history of decorative arts from Parsons School of Design + Smithsonian Associates Previous jobs: • Curator of glass, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va. • Manager, Random Harvest Antiques and Home Furnishings, Washington, D.C. • Winter Term internship coordinator, DePauw University Outside interests: Travel, yoga, baking, civic volunteer and performing arts advocacy Favorite DePauw professors: John T. Schlotterbeck, professor of history, was my adviser from day one at DePauw. He encouraged me to study abroad in Rome, taught me to critically evaluate statistics and helped me locate the right graduate school program. I recently came across a poignant thank-you letter written by Barbara J. Steinson, professor of history, to our 20th century U.S. History class as a reflection of and thanks for the semester. It was exceptionally memorable. Favorite DePauw memories: I loved Winter Terms at DePauw, particularly the first one. I believe my freshman Winter Term was the first in which students were able to select their own curriculum. I chose Shakespearean Verse through Acting. I remember practicing a lot of breathing exercises and emphatic hurling of Shakespearean insults.
GLASS FACTS • Glassmaking began in Mesopotamia (now Iraq and northern Syria) just before 2000 B.C. The Corning Museum’s earliest pieces date from about 1450 B.C. • Glassblowers work with molten glass at temperatures near 2100º F (1150º C). • Glass can be formed in nature when sand or rocks are heated to high temperatures and then cooled rapidly. Volcanic glass is called obsidian. Glass formed when a meteorite strikes sand is called a tektite. Glass formed from a lightning strike is called a fulgurite. • There are many recipes for making glass, but the three main ingredients are a former, flux and stabilizer. Silica (silicon dioxide) in the form of sand is a common former. Soda (sodium carbonate) and potash (potassium carbonate), both alkalis, are common fluxes, which lower the melting point. Lime (calcium carbonate) is a common stabilizer needed to make the glass strong and water resistant. • Glassblowing began in the Roman Empire around 50 B.C. • Glass musical instruments include the armonica developed by Ben Franklin.
GROWTH OF THE CORNING MUSEUM Since opening in 1951, the Corning Museum of Glass has had one mission: to tell the world about glass. Conceived as an educational institution and founded by Corning Glass Works (now Corning Incorporated), the museum has never showcased the company or its products; rather it is a nonprofit institution that preserves and expands the world’s understanding of glass. More than 60 years later, the museum’s scholarship and outreach as a collecting, exhibiting, teaching and research facility are felt around the world. It is home to the world’s largest collection of glass,
• Glassmaking was America’s first industry.
containing nearly 50,000 objects representing 3,500 years of glass
• When gold chloride is added to a batch, the mixture of raw materials used to make glass, the result is a deep red glass known as gold ruby.
materials, curate special exhibitions and conduct extensive research.
• In 1954 Corning scientist Donald Stookey left a piece of glass in a furnace, and it overheated. Crystals formed in the glass, causing it to be opaque and very strong – a glass-ceramic. Today, glass-ceramics are commonly used as bakeware. • Glass used in space capsules is chemically tempered. Glass is placed in a bath of potassium salts where potassium ions replace the smaller sodium ions. This exchange makes the surface crowded, and the glass is compressed, making it very strong.
history. The museum and its renowned Rakow Library actively acquire The museum has grown over the years to include several glass galleries, a hands-on Innovation Center, demonstrations of hot glassblowing, opportunities for visitors to make glass, one of the largest museum shops in the country and more. It attracts almost 400,000 visitors from around the globe annually. Read more about the Corning Museum of Glass at www.cmog.org.
– Courtesy of Corning Museum of Glass
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