Glass is far from being a loner’s endeavour: necessitating a joint effort, the medium’s journey from molten malleability to firm translucence emerges from collective hot shop hours. Not every maker, however, has always been welcome in this shared ritual. A new exhibition at Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York explores the historic exclusion of artists of colour from the field of glass, despite the practice’s inherent collectivity.
Under the roof of the world’s largest museum dedicated to glass, Disclosure: The Whiteness of Glass veers away from tradition in structure and display. The artist collective Related Tactics (composed of Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nate Watson) invited six artists and thinkers to respond with poetic prompts to abstract visuals, which the collective created based on their conducted research about the systematic exclusion of Black artists and curators from the glass field. This research came out of an invitation from CMoG in 2020 to be published in the New Glass Review. The collective’s findings of almost non-existent Black presence in the practice encouraged them to organise the show, which takes its final form in glass artworks created by six all-women artists in response to their colleagues’ prompts.
