Wonders of Glass: From the Collection of Susan S. and David R. Goode

For more than four thousand years, glass has been a medium for human creativity. Its long arc of innovation has largely evolved in industrial settings where working with molten glass was entrusted to highly trained factory artisans. Only in the last century have artists won access to the facilities and expertise that allows working with hot glass. After the Second World War, a pioneering generation of artists in the United States and Europe demonstrated successfully that glass could be harnessed for artistic expression in a singular studio setting. Academically trained, enthusiastically collaborative, and fearlessly creative, these pioneers propelled the fledgling Studio Glass Movement into the international and diverse community that it is today.

Collectors Susan and David Goode embraced this new form of artistic expression decades ago.  Their viewpoint, as always, is distinctive. They acquired works by pioneering American artists who developed technologies that are uniquely their own, such as Toots Zynsky’s filet de verre forms—sculptural vessels made of fused colorful glass threads. Other acquisitions reveal tie-ins with their continued interests in anthropological subjects, as reflected in Tlingit artist Preston Singletary’s Raven Transformation Mask. The selections presented in this exhibition reveal the bedrock of the Goode collection: thoughtful, creative, and culturally diverse expressions in glass that capture the magic of the medium.