NetWorks Rhode Island and the Chazan Collection Exhibition, WaterFire Arts Center (2024) Bio:
Toots Zynsky received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1973. In 1971, she assisted in the founding and early development of the Pilchuck Glass School. Later that year she explored new possabilites in creating large slumped plate glass sculpture. By early 1973 she began a series of video experiments and performances often in collaboration involving thermo-shocking plate glass with ice and molten glass, often incorporating contact micro-phones to register internal sounds of fracturing and infra-red photography to record heat transfer.
From 1980 to 1983, she was a key participant in the rebuilding and development of the second New York Experimental Glass Workshop, now UrbanGlass. In 1985 she was the first contemporary glass artist to have her work directly commissioned by MOMA, NYC.
While living in Europe in the 80s and 90s, Zynsky collaborated with Dutch inventor Mathijs Teunissen Van Manen to create glass thread-pulling machines and developed her unique filet-de-verre technique. During this time they also carried out a half year project in Ghana, West Africa, in collaboration with the Minister of Culture there,
making extensive recordings of that country’s music – the first known digital recordings made of African music.
Her love of sound and music is essential to all of her work.
Her work is represented in museums and private collections around the world and
among other awards, she has been a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pell Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2006, and the 2015 Smithsonian Institution Visionary Award. In 2016 she was awarded Corning’s prestigious Specialty Glass Residency giving her the opportunity to spend significant time for six months at Corning Incorporated’s research facility experimenting with unique new kinds of glass with unusual properties. While there she began developing a new body of work and collaborated with their scientists on special methods of glass forming.
In the words of Tina Oldknow, former Curator of Modern Glass at the Corning Museum of Glass “She is one of a small, core group of pioneering artists who made contemporary glass a worldwide phenomenon, and her distinctive kiln-formed vessels enjoy widespread popularity for their often magnificent, and always unique, explorations in color.”
Returning to the USA in 1999 with her family, she lives and works in Rhode Island.
She has served on the Board of Trustees of the Rhode island School of Design, the Board of Trustees of Festival Ballet Providence, participated in the establishment of the Providence After School Alliance and served on that Board of Directors for 15 years and has served on the Board of Governors of the RISD Museum for 20 years to the present.
Original NetWorks Catalogue Bio:
I began working with glass in 1970 because it is an extraordinarily versatile material and I believed that there were endless unexplored possibilities. I still believe this . I employ the vessel as my vehicle of expression because of it’s basic three dimensionality; giving me the possibility of working in 2 and 3 dimensions at once, with endless multiple surfaces and views – both interior and exterior. The structure of my pieces (made up of thousands and thousands of colored glass threads thermally fused together and then formed by hand while hot) and the color are one and the same and this purity is important to me.
Source: NetWorks 2008 Catalogue
Filet-de-verre (fused and thermo-formed color glass threads) 10 x 17 x 11 in.
Credits:
Produced by: Betsy Hart
Music courtesy of: Rachel’s “Family Portrait” from the album Music for Egon Schiele” 1996, ©Quarterstick Records – BMI
Executive Producer: Joseph A. Chazan M.D.
Additional resources:
Artist’s website: tootszynsky.com
Highlighting the work of selected artists who have played vital roles in shaping the contemporary visual arts community in Rhode Island. This collection of brief video portraits provides a window into the lives, practices, and cultural contributions of professional artists.
