Mary Ann "Toots" Zynsky (American, b. 1951) Filet-de-verre Art Glass Vase

Description:

Mary Ann "Toots" Zynsky (American, b. 1951) Filet-de-verre Art Glass Vase, Rhode Island, late 20th/early 21st century, fused and thermo-formed glass threads, polychrome on blue ground, mark in applied glass thread "Z," ht. 10, lg. 19 in.

Note: Toots Zynsky's distinctive heat-formed filet de verre (glass thread) vessels enjoy a widespread popularity and deserved acclaim for their often extraordinary and always unique explorations in color. Defying categorization, her pieces inhabit a region all their own, interweaving the traditions of painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts.

Mary Ann Toots Zynsky was born in 1951 and raised in Massachusetts. Known professionally and to her friends as Toots Zynsky, she received her bachelor of fine arts in 1973 at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. There, she was one of a group of pioneering artists studying with Dale Chihuly, who made studio glass a worldwide phenomenon.

"Glassmaking was wide open," Zynsky remembers. "Hot glass slipped through the air, pulled and stretched. There was music and the furnaces were roaring. . . and everyone was working in concert. . . It was this material that hadn't been widely explored as an artist's medium. Everything was possible, and there was so much to be discovered. There were no rules. You could do anything you wanted."

In Chihuly's words, her class was a group with extraordinary energy, amounting to "the most creative, highly charged institutional experience I'd ever been a part of." Among Zynsky's classmates at RISD were other artists who went on to build successful careers, such as James Carpenter, Bruce Chao, Dan Dailey, and Therman Statom.

In the summer of 1971, Chihuly brought a small group of his friends and a few RISD students, including Zynsky, to Washington State. There, she participated in the founding and early development of Pilchuck Glass School.

By 1982, Zynsky was working on pieces combining fused nets of glass threads with blown forms. The Museum's vessel, Clipped Grass, was included in her first exhibition at Theo Portnoy Gallery in New York City that year. "Clipped Grass was the first piece that I made entirely with threads," Zynsky says. "But it was all hand-pulled thread, thicker and more uneven." She gave a name to the new technique that she developed, calling it "filet de verre," or layers of glass threads that are fused and hot-formed inside of a kiln.

Zynsky has made a life's work of studying and manipulating colored glass through the vehicle of her distinctive, undulating forms. Continually evolving, her work is a formal exploration in color and composition that has no end.

Her glass vessels are represented in over 70 international museum collections, including the Boymans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York, NY; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan; Kunstammlungen der Veste-Coburg, Coburg, Germany; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Musée de Design et d'Arts Appliqués (mudac),Lausanne, Switzerland; Musée des Arts Décoratifs du Louvre, Paris, France; Musei Civici Veneziani (Museo Correr),Venice, Italy; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT, Australia; National Museum of American Art (Renwick Gallery),Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, NSW, Australia; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, MS; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom. (excerpts from Masters of Studio Glass: Toots Zynsky, Tina Oldknow, The Corning Museum of Glass)
Estimate $8,000-12,000

No visible damage or repairs.


Items may have wear and tear, imperfections, or the effects of aging. Any condition statement given, as a courtesy to a client, is only an opinion and should not be treated as a statement of fact. Skinner shall have no responsibility for any error or omission.

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