Changing Exhibition Gallery
May 15 to November 9, 2003
As an artist seeking a material to work in with love, I happened to see glass being made in Arkansas, Ohio, and West Virginia. Immediately, I knew this was a material in which I could work—it was and is the most modern and the most exciting fabric possible. That it had the art qualities of transparency, permanent color, internal tension, and changing variety may not have been as important as the simple brilliance of it.
More Images | Q&A with Curator | Chronology
Robert Willson (1912–2000) was a sculptor, “half Texan and half Choctaw Indian,” as he liked to describe himself. A maverick in art and in life, he worked outside the mainstream. His work explores themes inspired by ancient mythologies, pre-Columbian and other native American art, and the American West. A unique and visually arresting blend of European technique and Southwestern American style, his sculpture comfortably inhabits the shifting space between Old World and New, between modern times and ancient.
Willson is considered an important figure in the American Studio Glass movement, even though he was never directly connected with it. He was one of the few Americans working in hot glass, outside industry, in the 1950s, and he was one of the first American artists to work on Murano, the historic glassblowing island of Venice.
Willson earned his B.F.A. degree from the University of Texas in Austin, and he did his postgraduate work in art at the University of Mexico in San Miguel Allende. In Mexico, he was exposed to the revolutionary painters José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, as well as to pre-Columbian art. From 1952 to 1977, Willson taught at the University of Miami. He became interested in glass as a material for sculpture, and he applied for a scholarship to study glass at The Corning Museum of Glass in 1956. His first trip to Murano was partly funded by this scholarship.
After his initial trip in 1956, Willson returned to Murano almost every year. His work in glass was relatively little known in the United States, although early studio artists tended to seek him out. On Murano, he worked with such famous glassblowers as Alfredo Barbini (b. 1912). Barbini had to invent ways in which Willson’s vision of solid glass sculpture could be realized. They worked closely together on developing and refining the complex technique of “building” hot glass sculpture at the furnace, which is called a massiccio sculpting, or sculpting “in the mass.” Theirs was a special collaboration based on a profound mutual respect and admiration for each other’s aesthetic and technical knowledge.
With the exception of Tree Symbol, a gift of the artist in 1986, these images were selected from a recent donation to the Museum made by Willson’s widow, Margaret Pace Willson. Mrs. Willson's gift included 22 solid glass sculptures and paperweights, a monumental piece titled The New Doors of Life, and hundreds of drawings.
| Click below for larger images and more information for each object |
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