Pictured above: Installation view of “Look What Harvey Did: Harvey K. Littleton’s Legacy in the Simona and Jerome Chazen Collection of Studio Glass.” Courtesy of Chazen Museum of Art.
More than 60 years ago, Harvey K. Littleton introduced the United States’ first university-based studio program in glass art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison). The Chazen Museum of Art at UW–Madison explores this transformative moment and the artistic advances that followed in the recently opened exhibition Look What Harvey Did: Harvey K. Littleton’s Legacy in the Simona and Jerome Chazen Collection of Studio Glass. The exhibition, which is now open runs until 16 August 2024.
The Chazen unpacks the ingenuity that Littleton inspired in artists around the world with approximately 40 works from the acclaimed Simona and Jerome Chazen glass art collection. Works by Littleton, as well as other pioneersincluding Michael Aschenbrenner, Dale Chihuly, Daniel Clayman, Dan Dailey, Ulrica Hydman-Vallien, Clifford Rainey andGinny Ruffner, tell the story of studio glass and its progress in the past six decades.
The exhibition illuminates how Littleton’s advocacy of glass as a vehicle for contemporary expression evolved into a recognized movement that continues to impact 21st-century art. Littleton’s legacy started with a curiosity.Could an artist blow glass in the studio to take a medium mostly confined to factory production and transform it for artistic expression? The innovator, artist and educator found his answer in 1962 when he discovered a way for artists to manipulate glass for art.
“Littleton started in ceramics and industrial design, but he was really bewitched by glass. He believed in it as a medium for artists to push the boundaries of both materiality and ideas,” said Davira Taragin, decorative arts expert and guest curator of Look What Harvey Did.
“It will be fascinating for audiences to observe, in one place, the results of decades of his work in glass advocacy and experimentation and how different artists took up the charge to innovate in the years since he founded the Studio Glass Movement.”
Littleton’s fascination with the material began when he saw glass being produced in his hometown at Corning Glass Works in Corning, New York. He was just six years old and influenced by his father, a physicist and member of Corning Glass Works’ first research team.
In 1951, Littleton joined UW–Madison as the head of the ceramics department. After exploring glassmaking establishments in Europe during a leave of absence from UW–Madison, he was inspired to see what he could do. One result was the seminal 1962 Toledo Museum of Art workshops that broke barriers between designers and fabricators and enabled artist-craftsmen in ceramics to explore glass.
Shortly after the 1962 workshops, Littleton established America’s first university-level hot glass program at UW–Madison, nurturing a generation of glass artists, including Chihuly. The exhibition explores how Littleton impacted glass artists at UW–Madison and beyond in the subsequent decades and how glass artists took on the charge to innovate for themselves.
At the 1972 National Sculpture Conference, Littleton declared that “technique is cheap,” shining the spotlight on an issue plaguing contemporary glass: Should the focus of its artists be refining technique or expressing conceptual ideas?
Since then, as seen in the exhibition, glass artists have increasingly focused on creating content-driven art. They expanded on the concept in the 1980s by incorporating different materials with glass to achieve larger and more ambitious forms. The exhibition at the Chazen also explores other developments in glass, such as how artists honored and honed the need for collaboration inherent to the medium.
That teamwork is apparent in works by Chihuly, Lino Tagliepietra as well as Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová. The show also delves into how the demographics of glassmaking have changed over the years with works by Mary Shaffer, Toots Zynsky and Therman Statom, who helped pave the way for women and people of color in the contemporary glass field.
About the Chazen Museum of Art
The Chazen Museum of Art makes its home between two lakes on the beautiful campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Within walking distance of the state capitol, it sits squarely in the heart of a vibrant college town.The Chazen’s expansive two-building site holds the second-largest collection of art in Wisconsin, and at 166,000 square feet, is the largest collecting museum in the Big 10. The collection of approximately 24,000 works of art covers diverse historical periods, cultures and geographic locations, from ancient Greece, Western Europe and the Soviet Empire to Moghul India, 18th-century Japan and modern Africa.
For more information: chazen.wisc.edu
All images are courtesy Simona Chazen, Chazen Museum of Art.