Harvey K. Littleton Vessel

Harvey K. Littleton, Vessel, Blown glass with silver oxide decoration, 1965.

This small vessel is witness to a revolution: not a social one, but a material one.  In 1962 the American ceramist Harvey K. Littleton initiated an artistic movement in glass known as the American studio glass movement. The son of a Corning Glass Works physicist, his dream was to bring glass out of industry and into the hands of artists. With glass scientist Dominick Labino he developed a small furnace that was uniquely suited to studio use. Littleton and Labino held two seminal glassblowing workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art, where artists were introduced to molten glass as a material for contemporary art. This experimental activity changed everything about how glass might be made, and how it might be expressed in art, craft, architecture, and design. In 2012, the fiftieth anniversary of Littleton and Labino’s Toledo workshops—or the birth of American studio glass—will be celebrated in museum and gallery exhibitions across the country, including exhibitions of their work at the Corning Museum of Glass.

Tina Oldknow
Curator of Modern Glass
Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York