American Studio Glass: A Survey of the Movement
May 15 - August 24, 2003

Toots Zynsky
Untitled Chaos
Filet-de-Verre (fused and thermo-formed color glass threads)
1994 7.75 x 15.5 x 6.5

Toots Zynsky (born 1951; resides Providence, RI and Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Before graduating with a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1973, Zynsky was one of the original group of artists to found the Pilchuck Glass School, in 1971. She went on to dedicated herself to the founding of yet another educational organization, UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, NY. There she explored and worked with hand-pulled glass threads, fusing them separately and combining them with blown forms. In 1982, in collaboration with Mathijs Tenuissen Van Manen, she developed a special technique for this process, which she named “filet-de-verre” (to mean fused and thermo formed glass threads). A trip to Ghana, West Africa in 1985 inspired a bolder use of color and form. In 1999, Zynsky received the Innovation in a Glassworking Technique Award from UrbanGlass. She has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her list of exhibits, which is long and wide, includes a major solo exhibition with a catalogue containing an essay by aesthetician Arthur Danto, that was launched in 2001 by The Glasmuseet in Ebeltoft, Denmark for travel to the Museo Carrer, in Venice, Italy and museums in Germany, Belgium, and several other European countries. Her works have been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions including Venetian Glass: 20th Century Italian Glass from the Olnick Spanu Collection at the American Craft Museum in New York in 2000. Zynsky was the first contemporary artist to be directly commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art. Zynsky’s work is contained in prestige collections internationally ranging from major American art museums to the The White House Collection, The Kunstammlungen der Veste-Coberg, Germany, The Dutch Central Bank Collection in Amsterdam, and the Yokohama City Museum of Art, Japan. Toots Zynsky works in a unique style by interweaving thousands of threads to form carefully crafted, colorful vessels of glass.

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