Hearing that there was a “glass exhibit” at the Wadsworth Atheneum, I ignored its existence for awhile. What would it be — vases and drinking glasses? Boring. Domestic art, or whatever one calls the genre of plates-silverware-furniture does not do it for me. Maybe it rocks your world. We’re allowed to have different interests.

But, then I saw back in September that the museum was hosting glass-making demonstrations. That sparked my interest.

Life happens, and I never made it to any of those sessions. Then, I saw someone’s social media showing a few of the pieces in this exhibit and I realized how this was not a bunch of paperweights or snow globes. So, I took my Wadsworth Welcome key tag and went for a visit, once, twice. . . a bunch of times.

What grabbed me was “Singer,” a glass sewing machine created by Micah Evans. Without reading anything about it, the piece is stunning. It’s not glass made to look like metal, but its own thing entirely. And then you look at the object label and learn that the artist is a “cannabis pipe maker” (such official language) who has constructed three of these sewing machines, two of which are functional pipes. Singer bongs. While I do not partake in any of that, this fills me with so much damn glee, imagining 1950s era housewives being really into their sewing.

What if nothing in this exhibit is as it appears?

This is what made me look much more closely.

This is one of those exhibits where the wall text is worth reading.

The artist who made “Flowering Plant with Golden Orb” is quoted as saying, “What Walt Whitman did with words, I seek to do in glass,” and it does matter that you are familiar with Whitman’s style to understand what Paul Stankard meant by this. You can decide if he meets his goal.

There are over 50 contemporary glassmakers represented in this exhibit, many presenting interpretations of the natural world.

A number of works are connected to themes of extinction and climate change — something everyone should expect more of as people get clarity on how this is the central issue of the day. Survival. Shifts in environmental norms. Habitat destruction.

Kelly O’Dell’s “Long Before Us” (the ammonite pictured above) and Dan Friday’s “Schaenexw (Salmon) Run” (pictured below) are two such pieces.

Caroline Landau’s work, “Archiving Ice,” is true to its name. She’s made glass replicas of Arctic icebergs — containing glacial water — as an intentional, direct way of discussing climate change. I enjoy when artists are willing to be straightforward, rather than tiptoe around hard-to-face realities through use of abstractions. There’s guts in this, being able to point at a thing and say look at what we are losing, look at what we have lost.

Raven Skyriver’s “Return to the Arctic” (pictured below) captures grace and movement in a way that is often missing from our increasingly two-dimenstional, flattened, always-online lives.

But maybe you don’t need that deep of an experience, and if so, that’s fine. You can walk through and marvel at how pretty everything is, how alive the glass insects appear, how delicious Shayna Leib’s wall of glass desserts,”Pâtisserie,” look. So delicious that you may need to remove yourself from the exhibit, visit the cafe on the first floor, and then return.

How entertaining, the caution labels on the side of Joseph Ivacic’s “Spray Paint Cans”  (pictured below).

How delicate Robert Micklesen’s “Networked Parasol” is, casting a patterned shadow. What’s that? A second parasol handle? That one is another smoking device.


Through February 5, 2023, you can view Fired Up: Glass Today at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Top image shows Alex Bernstein’s “New Spring Blue Group.”