At the top of our list of places to visit in the United States is the Corning Museum of Glass. When you think of Corning, you think of kitchen glassware and cookware, like Pyrex™ for example. When we at Glass King think of Corning, we think of pioneering an industry, innovation, huge advancements in technology, and a common passion for all things glass related.
One of the neat features of this unique place is that children are welcome and there are glass making and glass blowing workshops geared to almost every age group. From nightlights to clocks, beads and ornaments, the workshops run the gamut.
The glass galleries are exceptional, with exhibits celebrating thirty-five centuries of glass making. A few of the current exhibitions include: The Rise of Venetian Glassmaking, Glass in Nature, Origins of Glassmaking, Glass in 17th-19th Century Europe, and Asian Glass. There are four galleries in addition to the Contemporary Glass Gallery and each one contains numerous exhibits that rotate throughout the year.
The Hot Glass Show is a live demonstration on glass blowing in front of a live audience with cameras actually inside the furnace. Vases, bowls and sculptures are hand crafted from blobs of molten glass and fired while a narrator describes the entire process in detail.
Other demonstrations at the Corning Museum of Glass include Flameworking with 5000 degree torches, Optical Fiber, which explains how information is transferred using ultra-fine threads of glass, and Glass Breaking, which allows visitors to break glass!
The Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass is a school where every kind of glass-making and blowing is taught. There are classes with world-class instructors and scholarships available. We would love to attend a few of those classes taught there!
As if galleries full of exhibits, live demonstrations and shows, and classroom settings weren’t enough, there is also the Rakow Research Library that contains
thousands of books, periodicals, papers, sketchbooks, catalogs, films, videos, and over one hundred and thirty archives of artists’ materials. The digital collection is impressive with rare books that date back to the thirteenth century.
The state of the art auditorium is where lectures by noted artists, glass historians, and glass experts are held. Upcoming lectures include the Corning Museum of Glass is featuring the 2012 Rakow Commission lecture by artist Steffen Dam and Conversations with Karol Wight: Traveling the World for Glass.
If you are interested in up and coming glass artists, as we at Glass King are, you can shop online and purchase items through the museum as well.
Lastly, the conservation department painstakingly restores broken and damaged glass objects and antiquities. Window Glass Repair and glass replacement are easy enough for us at Glass King. We work with decorative glass; stained glass, mirrors, and we do custom glass and mirror work. Fixing a damaged Roman vase, however, requires a great deal of training and a special artistic touch that we marvel at. With over 45,000 objects under their care, the conservation department employees carefully handle, store, repair, and recreate rare and precious specimens every day. Not the sort of work for someone with slippery fingers!
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