#contemporary-craft

#contemporary-craft

The vibrant medium of glass takes center stage in Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass. Featuring more than 100 glass art pieces created by 29 Native American and First Nations artists, this exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York also includes works by leading glass artist Dale Chihuly, who first introduced glass art to Indian Country as an instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

"A portion of my research has fixated around a unique blend of clay materials that possess qualities of elasticity rather than qualities of plasticity traditionally found in common clay recipes," he says in a statement. "To put it plainly, it behaves more like rubber than clay, and sets up very quickly once the components are measured and mixed." Brooks begins by extruding long coils in different colors, also sometimes rolling the medium into paper-thin slabs.