Mitten to Mountains: Museum of WA History and The Museum of Glass

First field trip of the year!

Since we are over-staffed for the gym this year, my chaperone availability is a bit more flexible. So on Wednesday, I got to attend a 9th grade trip to Museum of WA history and The Museum of Glass.

Fluted Point arrows - one of the earliest
pieces of decorative art - from the Clovis Tribe

My expectations for the history museum weren't high - we always have too short a time for my slow learning style to process information; it's overwhelming. As I assumed, I found myself still on the front quarter of the museum, trying to discern what was important to me from the information about the development of the geography (essentially a series of mass floods and glacial melts) when the rest of the group was running onto the next floor. I quickly darted through the Native artifacts and then decided to catch up and spent most of the time looking at their special installation of War propaganda, intrigued by the manipulative artistry of the posters.

But the main reason I'd been so excited to come on the trip was the Museum of Glass. It had been on my list of places to check out for some time. I had thought that the museum consisted solely of Chihuly's works but I was gladly mistaken. When we came in, the kids were still working off all the energy from the unstructured morning of running from floor to floor at the history museum. However, their demeanor quickly shifted when we were given a formal introduction and led into the "hot room", an on-site glass-blowing studio with live-coverage of a major visiting artist. This week's artist was Jiyong Lee and he immediately captivated their attention. Lee cuts and glues his glass pieces to create very precise, geometric work. He and his assistants were working on an evolved version of his kidney-shaped segment pieces, adding varying degrees of texture and color to this project. The kids rattled off questions, asking how long it would take to make (maybe 3 hours to make but 300 to cool) and what the largest piece ever made here was (the fountain outside.) Robby whispered questions to me and I filtered out to the host. He kept asking me about the heat and tried to posit how injured you would be if you fell into that 2,300-degree oven. "I'm not sure you'd be alive, Robby" I said.

Jiyong's design

The Fountain outside the museum

I thought that it was an ingenious way to begin a glass museum tour. As one who'd never really appreciated glass-blowing as anything but a kitschy gift-store market until I'd seen the process behind it, I knew that this was probably a strategic way to bypass any disengaged imagination of the students they received. For the rest of the tour through the galleries, the kids were clustered close to the speaker. Steven even came up to me, arms crossed and said he was afraid to put his arms out, for fear of breaking anything. It was nice to know they could focus when need be.

the various galleries were incredible and none of them Chihuly. In the lobby, the first man we saw was considered by our guide as one of the most impressive glass artists out there - Lino Tagliapietra - and he was turning 82 next week. We also stopped to look at an anomalous non-glass installation by a glass artist who is part-time poet and I was immediately taken by the piece 'Coastal Alchemy'. Then we headed into the full gallery space where we saw drastically different examples of how contemporary artists use glass.

First was Howard Bentre whose statuesque pieces didn't tickle the color palate of the viewer and yet carried a whimsey of their own with the inconsistencies of bubbly texture in their pillars and the sanctitude of the specially formulated patina embellishing them. His process was impressive also, using molds that took months to dry before he could carve into them.

Next we saw a 20th anniversary exhibit of the Hilltop artists, a program designed by Chihuly in collaboration with the city as a way to get at-risk youth off the streets and back in school. Kids had to have so much attendance/achievement in school to attend the class (the slogan was "no class, no glass") and eventually, it grew into a curriculum in which the advanced were then teaching other students. The results were amazing.

Other artists we saw included Jen Elek and Jeremy Bert, taking on another level of color with their outrageous, lit up designs and a final artist named Anna Skibska who made their glass look completely wire-like before constructing webs of incredible art.