In 2022, RAM organized a landmark exhibition for its street-facing Windows on Fifth Gallery. With artworks chosen from RAM’s collection, On Fire: Surveying Women in Glass in the Late-Twentieth Century offered a cursory look at how women were shaping glass as an art material in the 1980s and 1990s. The exhibition title alludes to certain techniques of physically working with glass as well as the idea that some artists were innovating and making names for themselves—that they were “on fire” in their art world trajectory.

This exhibition, an expanded version of the 2022 show, offers a deeper dive into this vital period in contemporary craft by outlining the concerns of artists who explore the sculptural, visual, metaphorical, and creative potential of glass. Seen through the eyes of women, it reflects developments with the medium as an art material two and three decades after studio glass concepts were being implemented into university programs and contemporary practices.

Notably, a portion of the gallery is dedicated to supporting materials, such as images, articles, and books, which offer a broader context for understanding the artists, medium, and field.

Glass does not have a single history as it has been used in many different ways. Its usage in a decorative context still exists, but the twentieth century also saw the academic establishment of it as a viable art-making material. This exhibition includes various examples of work produced within the studio glass framework—as self-consciously made art reflecting artistic investigations of materials, processes, and ideas. Artists represented include Sonja Blomdahl, Kimiake Higuchi, Concetta Mason, Flo Perkins, Kari Russell-Pool, Ginny Ruffner, Acquaetta Williams, Ann Wolff, and Toots Zynsky. Expanding on the 2022 exhibition, this iteration also features examples from collaborative teams, such as John Littleton and Kate Vogel and Benjamin Edols and Kathy Elliott.

These artists explore numerous topics, including identity, beauty, color, pattern, nature, abstraction, form, the figure, metaphor, process, and the properties and abilities of glass as a material. There is also a range of techniques represented, including blowing, lampworking, casting, fusing, carving, polishing, pâte de verre, assembling, and various surface treatments. In essence, the exhibition summarizes the experimental nature of the artists and studio glass in general.

A critic of another recent all-female glass exhibition lamented about needing to draw attention to the fact that all of the artists were women—are they artists first or women first? These conversations can also be limiting as they sidestep more fluid gender dynamics. Yet, in this particular moment in time, it is indeed important to draw attention to components beyond the objects themselves. Who the makers are and how they move through the world influences the work even if it is not the identifiable subject matter.

Image: Ginny Ruffner

Tempest in a Spoon from the Structuring Beauty Series, 1999

Glass and enamel paint

Racine Art Museum, Gift of Stanley and Evelyn Asrael

Photography: Jarvis Lawson