Karsten Oaks

Contortion

2016

When I hear music, it translates into color. —Toots Zynsky Toots Zynsky’s distinctive heat-formed filet de verre (glass thread) vessels enjoy a widespread popularity and deserved acclaim for their often extraordinary and always unique explorations in color. Defying categorization, her pieces inhabit a region all their own, interweaving the traditions of painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts. Mary Ann Toots Zynsky was born in 1951 and raised in Massachusetts. Known professionally and to her friends as Toots Zynsky, she received her bachelor of fine arts in 1973 at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. There, she was one of a group of pioneering artists studying with Dale Chihuly, who made studio glass a worldwide phenomenon. “Glassmaking was wide open,” Zynsky remembers. “Hot glass slipped through the air, pulled and stretched. There was music and the furnaces were roaring. . . and everyone was working in concert. . . It was this material that hadn’t been widely explored as an artist’s medium. Everything was possible, and there was so much to be discovered. There were no rules. You could do anything you wanted.” In Chihuly’s words, her class was a group with extraordinary energy, amounting to “the most creative, highly charged institutional experience I’d ever been a part of.” Among Zynsky’s classmates at RISD were other artists who went on to build successful careers, such as James Carpenter, Bruce Chao, Dan Dailey, and Therman Statom...

Arc III, 2017 by Albert Paley Sand cast glass, steel Internationally renowne, and influential metal sculptor, Albert Paley forges ferrous metal into pieces that combine organic form...