Glass Today: 21st Century Innovations

artist George Chaplin</a>. He had no direct connection to the Shakers, but his works are also an expression of the emotions that respond to color. There is no “narrative” in Chaplin’s works. Their colors are at once diffuse when seen from afar, and intense when seen up close. There is indeed a “conversation” here, a shared conviction that color is not only a journey to somewhere, but in itself a worthy, fulfilling, and thrilling destination. To surround oneself with color is to live joyfully!</p><p>Organized by consulting curator M. Stephen Miller, this exhibition is one in a series exploring Shaker craft in dialogue with contemporary art.</p><p><br></p>" />

artist David Hockney</a> and the composer James <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Glass-Today--21st-Century-Innovations/"/Artist/James-Sellars/9591BFCACAB56B21">Sellars.

Their work together in the late 1980s became a synergy of art, technology, and music that resulted in a multi-media masterpiece, the animated film Haplomatics. The film introduces a genus of abstract beings called Haplomes, which come to life through Hockney’s prints and Sellars’s narration and innovative musical score. Haplomatics, the exhibition, features Hockney’s innovations in printmaking with the thirty-five xerographic prints that were used to create the film’s visual effects. Drawn from the collection of the <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Glass-Today--21st-Century-Innovations/"/Organization/New-Britain-Museum-of-American-Art/745FB6F77D4BC9B1">New Britain Museum of American Art</a>, Hockney’s xerographs will be displayed alongside the complete film for its first public debut.</p><p>The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, Haplomatics: An Automated Techno-Fantasy by James Sellars and David Hockney by Thomas Schuttenhelm (Hirmer Publications, forthcoming 2024). The book will serve as a companion to the exhibition and provide insight and access to a rare yet significant work. In addition to reproducing the Hockney Haplomes and the full text of Haplomatics, the book will provide a detailed chronicle of the collaboration between Sellars and Hockney and describe the intersectional ties that exist between the text, music, images, and the animated video. The publication can function as an introduction and handbook for Haplomatics, an exhibition booklet, and a micro-biography of the era and the artists.</p><p><br></p>" />

Edgar Degas</a>, <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Glass-Today--21st-Century-Innovations/"/Artist/Claude-Monet/C537B4C4E3634C6E">Claude Monet</a>, <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Glass-Today--21st-Century-Innovations/"/Artist/Camille-Pissarro/8C18012151ABD3E1">Camille Pissarro</a>, and <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Glass-Today--21st-Century-Innovations/"/Artist/Pierre-Auguste-Renoir/691CC2F7F69EB433">Pierre-Auguste Renoir</a>, organized the first exhibition of the “Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc.” in Paris. Although working independently, rather than as a unified movement or school, they came to be known as the Impressionists—a term first used to disparage their works as unfinished “impressions.” Defined by their loose brushwork, vibrant color palettes, and attention to capturing the ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere, these artists rejected established academic traditions and developed innovative approaches to depicting modern life.</p><p>Impressionism’s influence was felt globally, but perhaps nowhere as profoundly or as long lasting as in the United States. American artists working abroad had opportunities to see and study Impressionist works, but it was not until 1886—when the movement had lost some of its radical edge—that the first large-scale exhibition of French Impressionism was held in the United States. The New York Tribune reported that although Impressionist pictures were often criticized for their “blue grass, violently green skies, and water with the coloring of a rainbow,” Americans would nevertheless benefit from studying the “vitality and beauty” in these works.</p><p>Over the next three decades, artists working across the United States adapted Impressionist aesthetics to depict modern American life. While their works embody the optimism and nationalism that then defined American culture, by the turn of the twentieth century, rapid urbanization and industrialization had transformed the nation, giving rise to new artistic tendencies. A group of younger artists, often described as Realists, rejected Impressionism’s colorful palette, instead portraying the grittier side of urban life. However, like their Impressionist contemporaries, they continued to paint the American scene, focusing on life in the city, the country, and the home. Drawn from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the works in this exhibition highlight the evolution of Impressionism’s blue grass and green skies into a distinctly American art.</p><p><br></p>" />