Context. That’s what the two newly opened shows at the Vero Beach Museum of Art are all about, says the museum’s curator, Jay Williams.
He organized both of the exhibitions from the museum’s permanent collection.
In the Schumann Gallery, “Masters of Studio Glass” shows off the museum’s growing collection of American glass art. “From Exhibition to Collection” in the Titelman Gallery is “kind of a 30th anniversary show,” says Williams. His selections reflect the variety of artworks the museum has collected over its 30-year history. Specifically, it includes objects that came into the collection via temporary exhibitions at the museum.
In a recent informal tour of the two shows, Williams spoke to the museum’s exhibition philosophy. Artworks, he noted, can only be fully understood and appreciated in the context in which they are presented. In other words, a work of art does not live in a visual vacuum. It is seen in relation to how and where it is displayed, as well as its relation to the other artworks with which it may be shown. Any change in those variables will have an effect on how we might think, or even feel, about the object.
Standing at the entrance of the Schumann Gallery show, Williams uses Karen LaMonte’s cast glass sculpture, “Reclining Dress Absence (2005),” to make a point.
Acquired for the collection just this year, the artwork was at first put on display at the entrance to the Stark Gallery, across the hall from where it is now. At first glance, the translucent white sculpture reads as a reclining woman, life-sized, in an elegant dressing gown, until you notice that the womanly form has no head, arms or legs.
In the Stark Gallery, the sculpture was situated in front of the collection’s huge painting of an empty bathrobe by Jim Dine. As a backdrop for the LaMonte artwork, the painting practically begged the visitor to compare the two.
Which, for the benefit of his audience, Williams does.
Although the Dine artwork was created in 2005, the same year as the LaMonte, his use of the bathrobe motif as a stand-in for Dine’s self-portrait goes back to 1964.
At the time LaMonte created “Reclining Dress Absence,” Williams explains, “She’d just begun exploring this whole idea of garments without an occupant.”
But LaMonte’s glass dresses are not as self-referential as Dine’s bathrobes.
“Her work is about something broader,” says Williams. “It’s very contemporary, about how femininity is portrayed and the role of women in society.”
In the context of the “Masters of Studio Glass” exhibition, the LaMonte sculpture is conspicuous as a figurative work in a gallery full of glass objects whose forms range from vessels to sculptural abstractions.
On the vessel end of the continuum, two vases designed by Steuben Glass founder Frederick Carder combine classical forms with showy gold and blue metallic surfaces that rival the iridescent glass of Tiffany. In fact, Louis Comfort Tiffany threatened to sue Steuben in 1913 because the latter’s “Aurene” iridescence closely resembled Tiffany’s “Favrile” glass.
A little farther toward abstraction is “Viaggio,” a glass vessel by Toots Zynsky, which was also acquired by the museum this year. Composed in the filet de verre (glass strand) technique, the undulating bowl-shaped form is composed of thousands of thread-like strands of glass fused together in a spectrum of colors: flaming red, ultramarine blue and brilliant green. The colors, as well as the feathery quality of the object’s surface, might put you in mind of a colorful tropical bird. In the context of the other works on exhibit, it displays only one of the techniques by which glass asserts its independence from any other sculptural medium.
The more abstract glass in the show includes “Blue Sliced Descending Form” by Harvey Littleton, the artist and educator whose 1962 glassblowing workshop at the Toledo Museum of Art kicked off the American Studio Glass Movement. Speaking of context, Littleton’s elegant arched form shares a vitrine with a sculpture by his colleague in that workshop, Dominick Labino. The untitled work is from Labino’s “Emergence” series of sculptures, each of which contains a progression of delicately tinted glass veils within a solid, rounded form.
No glass exhibition – or collection, for that matter – is complete without an artwork by Dale Chihuly. The “Masters of Studio Glass” exhibition boasts three, including two large multiple-piece sculptures, “Lapis Blue Persian” and “Pink Seaform with Red Lip.”
Referring to the briny precedent on which the Seaforms series is based, Williams says, “It looks like something that could be alive and pulsating on a reef somewhere.”
As he leads us from the Schumann into the Titelman Gallery, Williams says that the visitor to “From Exhibition to Collection” must keep its context in mind.
“When you know that all of the artworks in the room have been purchased from exhibitions, you get a sense of what the museum has been doing over the years.”
In the museum’s earlier years, there was more of an accent on collecting the work of Florida artists, he points out. “In the last 10 years or more, we’ve collected some Florida artists, for sure. But there’s been a broadening of the collection into nationally and internationally known artists. When you see the collection altogether, you don’t think about how it’s different, you think about what a well-balanced group of objects it is.”
Williams stops in front of “Swimmer,” a screenprint by Alex Katz that was published as an edition in 1974. The museum purchased its copy of the print in 1994 from its Collector’s Choice exhibition. Collector’s Choice was a recurring exhibition that was held every year or two. Galleries in South Florida lent the artworks, which were for sale to the public during the show’s run. Many museum patrons purchased works from the shows, and some gave funds to the museum to purchase works for the collection.
Florida artists honored with a purchase from their solo shows include printmaker Ken Kerslake, photographer Clyde Butcher and painter Michael Sastre.
“Ever since I saw this piece by Michael Sastre, I’ve been wanting to get it out for some show,” says Williams.
Purchased in 1993 from an exhibition titled “Made in Florida,” the large painting depicts a barefooted woman in an orange jumpsuit. She is seated in a white plastic lawn chair before a drab, concrete block wall.
The painting is from Sastre’s “Life in Krome” series. The title refers to the Krome Detention Center in Miami, which holds immigrants who are in the process of being deported to their countries of origin.
Other works in the show are from artists who have exhibited within the last year or two. They include “In the Common Interest,” an oil painting executed on both sides of a folding screen by Dale Kennington; a panoramic time-lapse photo of the mountains of West Virginia by Stephen Lawson; and “Evidence,” a blown-glass and mixed-media sculpture by Marc Petrovic.
Many other gems of the collection are also on display in the Titelman. “These artworks have never been seen together in this context,” says Williams.
“Masters of Studio Glass” runs through Sept. 11. “From Exhibition to Collection” is on display through Sept. 6.