Studio Glass

Anna and Joe Mendel Collection

April 8, 2010 to January 3, 2011

"Two-heart Woman" Vase

A hundred works of contemporary art glass offered as a gift to theMontreal Museum of Fine Arts by Montreal collectors Anna and Joe Mendel will bepresented from April 8, 2010, to January 30, 2011. Studio Glass: Anna and Joe MendelCollection follows the first selection, The Body in Glass, which visitors to the Museum wereinvited to discover in the fall of 2008. With this major gift of works, the Museum becomesthe only Canadian institution to offer a comprehensive survey of international art glass.Admission to the exhibition is free, as it is for the Museum’s entire permanent collection.

Anna and Joe Mendel are passionate about the intrinsic qualities and expressive potential ofcontemporary art glass, which they have been collecting for the past twenty years. Theircollection includes the various styles of the Studio Glass Movement since the 1980s. StudioGlass began in the United States in 1962, when Harvey K. Littleton launched the idea ofbuilding studio kilns to enable artists to express themselves, free of the limitations ofindustrial glassworks. His idea came to fruition in the 1980s. In the Anna and Joe MendelCollection, glass sculpture predominates. The Mendels favour a wide range of artisticapproaches that include figuration as much as abstraction, with the artists’ virtuosity alsofactoring into their choices. The collection contains works by renowned contemporary glassartists and the major international schools, such as those of the United States and the CzechRepublic. Canadian creativity is also well represented, due to the collectors’ discerningacquisitions.

Works by some seventy artists reveal glass transformed in the mould, blown, thermoformedor bound through symbiosis to a variety of materials. Studio Glass: Anna and Joe MendelCollection presents glass works by American pioneers such as Harvey K. Littleton, DominickLabino and Marvin Lipofsky. The work of Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová, thefamous Czech couple renowned for monolithic and monochrome sculptures in mouldedglass, also appears in the collection, as does that of the generation of artists they trained,including Jaromir Rybák and Aleš Vašíček. Howard Ben Tré and Michael Glancy blend thefusional arts to create sculptural works that play with the transparency of glass and theopacity of metal. Lucio Bubacco, Ginny Ruffner, Paul Stankard and Maude Bussières havereinvented traditional techniques, such as work with the blowpipe. Jay Musler’s astoundingfigurative approach breeds metaphors illustrating his social and environmental concerns,while Dan Dailey’s original style is marked by his interest in drawing and humour.

In addition to collecting, Anna and Joe Mendel are very active in the world of art glass inboth the United States and Canada. They have sat on the Board of Directors of the ArtAlliance for Contemporary Glass and established the Houdé-Mendel Bursary, awardedannually to a graduate of the College Studies Diploma (DEC) at Espace Verre in Montreal.The bursary provides free use of the Houdé-Mendel kiln for a year. The Mendels are nowsharing their generosity and enthusiasm with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts by pledgingtheir support of a series of ten annual lectures on contemporary art glass. The first, in 2008,was given by glass artist Dan Dailey. It was followed in 2009 by a lecture given by LauraDonefer and Susan Edgerley. This year’s guest speaker will be Clifford Rainey, who willdiscuss his artistic process and his forty-year career on May 29 at 2.30 p.m. His presentationwill be followed by a talk given by Tina Oldknow, curator at the Corning Museum of Glass,who will survey the creation of contemporary glass around the world.

The Anna and Joe Mendel Collection is unique in Canada. Today, the Mendels are sharingtheir passion for contemporary art glass with visitors to the Museum thanks to this major gift,which has enriched the Museum’s Department of Decorative Arts. These pieces enhance theLiliane and David M. Stewart Collection, which features glass objects created by both industryand artists and includes a major corpus of Canadian works from the Louise and Lauretted’Amours Bequest.

Diane Charbonneau, Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Montreal Museum ofFine Arts, is in charge of the presentation of Studio Glass: Anna and Joe Mendel Collection.

 

 

Dan Dailey; Born in Philadelphia in 1947; "Two-heart Woman" Vase; From the series "Face Vases"; 1991; Blown glass, sandblasted surface drawing, acid polished, vitreous enamel; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift, Anna and Joe Mendel Collection; Photo Bill Truslow