Two weekends ago a few of our class mates and I decided to check out the glass exhibit at the Dayton Art Institute titled Dayton Celebrates Glass: Chihuly, Lttleton, Labino and Beyond. Personally I wanted to go because last year I curated a glass exhibit at the Art Gallery at Berea College (Berea College Art Galleries Blog) . So I wanted to compare how I did my exhibit with how the Dayton Art Institute did theirs in terms of content, exhibition style, and the number of items on display. The glass I exhibited was much older and was not locally made, completely opposite from this exhibit. While walking though the galleries at the Art Institute I was paying attention to the way the glass was exhibited, such as how the lighting was placed. Lighting can be tricky in general, but with glass it is even trickier to deal with because you do not want the light reflecting off of the glass and blinding the viewers. Many of the pieces were encased but some were not, probably due to their large size. There were quite a few larger pieces and I was impressed that the Art Institute was able to exhibit them. I definitely would not have wanted to be part of the moving crew when it came to the larger pieces being exhibited! I moved a lot of glass when I did my exhibit; for example I lifted glass objects off of very tall shelves and had to carry them across brick floors, talk about nervous!
I was wondering if one of us was going to do a blog post about our trip to the DAI. I enjoyed reading your entry, particularly with the added insight of your experiences putting together a glass exhibit. I agree with you in that I couldn't imagine being in charge of moving all of those fragile glass pieces. There was a good amount of description in the exhibit about how the pieces were made, but there were a few that I would have liked some more information about. In particular, there were a few with a lovely cityscape silhouette in them. I would have loved to have known how the artist got that effect but there was nothing about that. But, small quibbles like that aside, this was a terrific exhibit that I'm glad I got the chance to see while it was in Dayton.
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