OKCMOA shining light on glass art with Rose Family Collection

Last Updated on September 2, 2022, 10:05 AM | Published: September 1, 2022

OKLAHOMA CITY (Free Press) — The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is determined to show you that fine art is about so much more than oil paintings.

The longstanding OKC institution has seen major recent success with their exhibition of sports photography from the great Walter Ioos Jr. and is gearing up for a groundbreaking, large-scale presentation of the video and multimedia works of Iranian visual artist Abbas Kiarostami. 

But undoubtedly the museum’s most important and enduring presentation of alternative, non-painted artworks is their collection of glass works by medium master Dale Chihuly, believed to be the largest public collection in the world and on display since the museum’s opening two decades ago.

Now, thanks to a tremendously generous donation, OKCMOA has the opportunity to expand both the museum’s scope of glass sculpture artwork and the public’s appreciation of the medium as the new exhibit “Highlights from the Rose Family Glass Collection” opens Friday, September 2nd.

Family Legacy

Jerome and Judith Rose spent four decades turning their shared fascination with glass artwork – commonly referred to as studio glass – into a dense and breathtaking collection inside their Atherton, California home. When that collection, which features more than 150 unique pieces from some of the greatest names in studio glass art, was inherited by the couple’s daughters, they decided to find it an appropriate home where the extraordinary creativity and craftsmanship could be on display for all to see.

The home they found was the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, thanks in no small part to the museum’s expert handling of its Chihuly collection.

“Building and exhibiting their glass collection was my parents’ pride and joy,” the Roses’ daughter Sara Jane said in a press statement announcing the museum’s acquisition. “My sister, Lisa, and I are honored to be able to now share our parents’ collection as a permanent feature of Oklahoma City’s creative landscape and look forward to seeing how these outstanding works of art inspire and impact all who see them.”

New Perspective

As OKCMOA’s expansive collection of Dale Chihuly glass works is celebrating its 20th year at the museum in 2022, you might be asking why they decided to take on so many more pieces in the same medium.

The answer, it seems, is all about providing guests with a broader perspective of glass’s endless possibilities.

“Visitors to the museum are familiar with Chihuly and his way of working with glass and his kind of ethos, which tends to be blown glass and slumped, big, public sculptures in a lot of cases,” exhibit curator Rosie May, Ph.D. said. “And what you get in these new galleries are all the other different ways that you can work with glass.”

After so many years of presenting glass sculpture artwork to OKC audiences through a lens of Chihuly’s work, the museum is excited to provide a fuller picture of the art form’s potential.

“This tells a more complete story,” May told me about how the massive new acquisition fits into the museum’s established glass collection. “This is a medium that really was so excitingly and heavily experimented with in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In my estimation, no other artistic medium has been as played with in a very long time.”

Infinite Possibilities

The pieces on display in the new exhibit betray the comparatively small space of the two galleries that house them, with the huge range of works, techniques, and visions all presented in surprisingly close proximity. That’s actually by design. The museum directors attempted to recreate the feeling of experiencing the Roses’ collection as it was displayed in their California home.

Entering the first gallery, guests are met with the intricate carvings of “Cityscape” by Jay Musler, a large, cloudily painted, red-orange bowl sporting a dark city skyline hand-carved around the entire circumference. The exact piece greeted visitors upon entering the Roses’ house. (See the feature photo.)

All around are bowls, vases, vessels, and seemingly practical, useable forms, each delicately and lovingly crafted, and each exploring the beauty and intrinsic artistic potential within the otherwise utilitarian shapes that we associate with glass objects.

When you enter the second gallery, however, all of that goes out the window.

This is where the true, unhinged creative potential of studio glass is unleashed with a densely packed gallery showcasing the very wildest glass creations in the collection, sometimes gathered tightly into small, multi-piece showcases for individual artists of whom the Roses were especially fond.

There are the colorful, surrealist works of Ginny Ruffner, recalling a glasswork variation of Dali with the inclusion of a pear and a huge skeletal leaf alongside allusions to classical paintings.

There is the stunning and powerful “Flowered Soldier Emerald” by Charles Pariott, a vision of translucent green glass in the shape of a soldier’s helmeted head and overlaid with painted flowers in a quiet, wordless anti-war statement.

There are the shocking, brutalist works by Hank Murta Adams, a glass artist not interested in the clean beauty of glass, but rather its potential as a harsh, earthen, even ugly medium. His pieces gathered at the end of the second gallery highlight the ways that glass art can explore the form’s sandy, naturalistic origins, and are often adorned with shaped metals and heavily textured paints. Adams’ wild-eyed, Frankenstein-esque “Block Head” is surely one of the exhibit’s standout features.

Glittering Beauty

All of these dramatically different techniques and approaches shine a light for visitors on the vast – and still expanding – possibilities for the glass medium.

Though this collection is now a part of the museum’s permanent collection, it will only exist in this particular contained, curated format, including a “stair step” aesthetic based on the Roses’ own favorite way to display the pieces, until the Spring of 2023. Beyond that, the pieces are expected to migrate into new and existing exhibits all around the museum.

That means that this may well be your only chance to experience the full collection the way that the Roses themselves built and developed it, as a single, massive representation of the life’s work and passion of two people, and as a remarkable window into a glittering, beautiful artistic world.

“Highlights from the Rose Family Glass Collection” opens Saturday, September 3rd at Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

For museum tickets and more information, visit okcmoa.com.

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