Eyes protected by safety goggles, hands encased in sticky gloves, six Ringling Museum staff members crouch around a coffin-sized glass vessel.
On a count of “three. . .two. . .one,” they lift the sculpture from its padded supports, pivot on the wooden floor of the Astor Gallery, and gently set Beth Lipman’s “Cradle” onto a display platform. The piece, a replica of a Shaker cradle in which the dying were rocked to the end of their lives, glows in the overhead spotlights. Its placement in the gallery, in the view of Matthew McLendon, curator of modern and contemporary art, the installation team and Lipman, is perfect.
“It cannot go anywhere else in the world,” Lipman exclaimed. “It’s perfect. It could not look better.”
“Cradle” is one of three Lipman works painstakingly installed in the museum’s Astor Galleries, not the usual location for contemporary art. A false wall has been built in one room for Lipman’s “Sideboard with Blue China,” which is 25 feet long and more than nine feet tall, made with a full range of glassmaking techniques, including kiln formed, cast, blown and lathe worked.
Installing glass artworks is not for the faint of heart (hence the goggles, sticky gloves and an array of padded wooden crates in the galleries last week), but potential breakage is simply part of the process for Lipman.
“I use it as an opportunity, not a hazard,” she said recently in a break from gluing hundreds of pieces of glass “wallpaper” onto the wall where “Sideboard” is displayed.
Each numbered piece is glued to the wall according to a large template; as McLendon wiped the inked numbers off each piece, he joked that his Ph.D was being put to good use.
The title of “Sideboard with Blue China” comes from an Oscar Wilde quote, “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” There’s no actual blue china in the piece, which is entirely clear glass.
“In this piece I’m combining things we desire and consume with a portrait of the human body,” said Lipman, a Wisconsin-based artist whose interest in glass goes back to summer camp when she was 14 years old and blew glass for the first time.
McLendon came to Lipman’s work through her New York gallery and agent, Claire Oliver.
“When Claire exhibited ‘Sideboard with Blue China,’ she said you have to come see this,” McLendon said. “She’s working off a Victorian visual vocabulary. Victorians were the great material collectors of the world. But this has a twist. All of this modeling is human organs; the material possession becomes the embodiment of our selves.”
The Astor galleries, which typically have Victorian-era furniture on display, provide the perfect setting for Lipman’s work, said McLendon. “Here’s a very conceptual artist using glass as her medium. It links perfectly with our historic collection. It’s a perfect marriage of a brilliant contemporary artist reinvigorating the Old Masters.”
Comments are closed.