The Owensboro Museum of Fine Art (OMFA) will showcase Glorious Glass – a panorama of art created in the medium of glass – on Saturday, July 29, with a preview gala. Sponsored by Owensboro Health, the exhibition is made possible through a partnership with guest curator and Owensboro native Brook Forrest, White, Jr.
White is a well-known Kentucky glass maker and owns Flame Run Gallery in Louisville. There, he oversees the production of a wide array of individual glass vessels and large installations. White’s works include private, public, and museum collections across the country, including the OMFA, Owensboro Health, and the Owensboro Convention Center locally.
White was a student and protégé of the internationally recognized glass maker, the late Stephen Rolfe Powell. He recently completed a large installation on the campus of Centre College in Powell’s honor.
“Complementing this exhibition of some of the most accomplished glass makers in the Midwest will be excerpts from the museum’s collection of more than 300 works of art in a wide variety of glass-making techniques, including blown, cast, etched, slumped, and carved objects dating from the mid-19th c. to the present by major American and European artists,” OMFA said in a release.
The medium of glass has been around for centuries. Historians claim that around 1500 BC, Egyptians were crafting decorative beads and glass vessels by “building up” threads of hot glass around a center mass of sand. Fast forward 100 years, and artisans developed a method of using long tubes to blow hollow forms from gatherings of molten glass.
Glass manufacturing in the United States became relevant in the early 18th century, primarily consisting of practical, aesthetically pleasing objects. The 19th-century era of innovation and expansion of glass production, along with the public’s appetite for unique glass forms, catalyzed the creative revolution that followed in the 20th century.
OMFA boasts an extensive permanent collection of American glass-making called “whimsies” from the early 19th century, thanks to an in-kind donation from Dr. and Mrs. R. Wathen Medley, Jr.
The exhibition will remain open through October 22. The museum operates Tuesday through Friday from Noon to 5 p.m. and on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on the corner of Ninth and Frederica Streets.
For more information, visit omfa.us or call 270-685-3181.
