A new report finds that U.S. employers spend more than $1.5 billion a year to fight labor unions, hiring union-avoidance consultants and lawyers to prevent worker organizing. The report, published jointly by the Economic Policy Institute and LaborLab on Wednesday, estimates that employers spend roughly $1.7 billion annually on union avoidance consultants and law firms to prevent workers “from…
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I visited Linda Mary Montano at her home in Saugerties, New York, on a snowy morning in late January. When I entered, I was transported into a living shrine, and the octogenarian artist gracefully hovered about as if she were the resident angel. After a warm welcome, she floated upstairs to put on her “Chicken Linda” outfit, which allowed me a moment to take in the scene. Montano views chickens as divine in disguise, and she gave herself the name “Chicken Linda” as a way to connect with the Holy Spirit.
Filled with sacred altars, experimental sculptures, and religious iconography at every turn, Montano’s abode — the same family home she grew up in — reflects her 60-year journey as a devoted spiritual seeker and consummate creator whose practice obliterates the boundaries between art and life.
Born in 1942, Montano is a pioneering endurance performance artist. A unique category in our collective understanding of art, “endurance performance art” is a practice in which artists employ their bodies in extreme ways for creative purposes, and Montano’s practice is groundbreaking among them. She did her master’s degree in Catholic sculpture in Italy and her MFA in sculpture (live chickens) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as one of only two women in the sculpture department from 1967–69. “Sculpture was extremely large, unwieldy, and masculine during my time there,” she told me.
One of Montano’s artistic altars at her home in Upstate New York.
In the early 1970s, Montano began her adventure in performance art in San Francisco during the First Wave feminist art movement. She coined the term “art/life” during this time, influenced by Allan Kaprow, the artists from Los Angeles’s Woman’s Building, and other California creators. She cites Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art (MoCA), Bonnie Shirk, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, and Terry Fox as important influences from that era.
“The mood was one of improvisation, of inclusion of the female voice,” she stated. During that time, she also met her guru, Shri Bhramananda Saraswati, who encouraged her art. “I was given permission. It was the work of improvisational freak-out. He gave me the mic, he gave me the stage,” she said of this important connection.
Linda Montano’s work is a reflection of decades of spiritual seeking.
In 1977, her former husband Mitchell Payne was murdered, and she created a 22-minute video titled “Mitchell’s Death” to honor her grief. (That piece is now in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Conceptual Art, Los Angeles.) She turned to art to heal from the trauma, “Because I didn’t have verbal language, because I did not have emotional language, because I didn’t have an ability to even tell anyone he died or how I felt about it, or to lay in anyone’s arms, I laid in the arms of art.” Later, she had a long-term partnership and lived with artist Pauline Oliveros, a central figure in experimental and electronic music.
Montano’s practice is informed by her deep knowledge of religious theologies, notably her explorations in Zen, Hindu philosophy, and her strong alignment with Catholicism since her youth. She lived at Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskills for three years; studied with Shri Bhramananda Saraswati for over 30 years; and lived as a Maryknoll Sister for two years before her life as an artist. Describing her reawakening to the Catholic faith, she said, “Performing and doing these healings as Mother Teresa allowed me to re-see Catholicism as an invitation to focus on healing and cleansing and connecting, and not so much on punishment and sin and guilt and fear.”
Montano’s Catholic faith features large in her work.
In 1981, Montano published one of her five books titled Art in Everyday Life, which details how to do live-performance art as a daily activity. She has performed thousands of times and in outrageous ways, among the most extreme being her collaboration in Tehching Hsieh’s year-long rope performance, in which they were bound together by an 8-foot (~2.4 meters) rope from 1983 to 1984. She cites both Jungian shadow work and gratitude as the core experiences of that primal year. “The piece was pure, total permission to feel,” she said. “It was free rage therapy, free going down into the hell realms.” After working with Hsieh, she embarked on a 14-year endurance performance piece titled “Fourteen Years of Living Art” (1984–98). During that time, she studied Hindu chakra systems, wore single-colored clothing, and visited Manhattan once a month to give palm readings and tarot counseling sessions in a windowed storefront space at the New Museum. Montano praised curator Marcia Tucker, founder of the New Museum in Manhattan, for that unusual opportunity. “She had the vision to give me a room and to paint it every year — red, orange, green, yellow, blue, purple, white — seven colors, seven years,” she said. “What a gift.”
Portrait of Montano at her home
On my visit to see her that winter day, Montano stretched her arms out gracefully wide, revealing the saffron wings of her “Chicken Linda” outfit. She then guided me around her home from one altar-sculpture to the next: a Kali sculpture of toy bears stuffed into a bra with a polka dot dress; a lingam sculpture of layers of wigs with a bronze phallus protruding; a Mary Magdalene torso, upon which she lovingly rested her head; and her “Jesus Comes Off the Cross with a Heart” installation.
When I asked her about her life’s focus on endurance art and what it means to her now, she described her practice as an “ego-buster.”
She explained: “If you stay long enough with a chosen action for your art — something that you’ve created as an envelope or as a safe haven for a time, a space, and an action that’s repeated over and over again — what it does is kill the ego, invites the ego to go on vacation, let go — to meld, to mold, to incorporate this tiny little garbage can of ego into the larger framework.”
Just as I was departing her home-shrine, Montano pulled a little ceramic chicken from a shelf on the wall and thrust it into my hands as she lovingly closed the door behind me, retreating back into sacred silence.
On the heels of an uninspiring AI tribute to Leo Messi at Christie's last year, one of the greatest artworks about soccer — or football, as it should be called —ever created is coming to New York City this summer.
Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's “Zidane, a 21st century portrait,” a 2006 film celebrating French soccer legend Zinédine Zidane, will be screened from June 11 to July 19 at the Guggenheim Museum, timed with the first and last whistles of the FIFA World Cup.
The two-channel video piece has a deceptively simple premise: a 90-minute match between Real Madrid and Villarreal shot entirely from the perspective of Zidane, the attacking midfielder known for his sophisticated passes, technical mastery, and, less ceremoniously, his dismissal from the 2006 World Cup in the 110th minute after head-butting Italian center back Marco Materazzi.
Footage captured by 17 cameras placed throughout Madrid's Santiago Bernabéu Stadium and live broadcast views of the April 2005 La Liga match are expertly spliced and choreographed to assemble a rare, intimate picture of a player immersed in a game that is as much a mental as a physical feat. This approach plunks spectators right in the middle of the action, including the moment when Zidane angrily exits the field after a scuffle. Often described as "voyeuristic," the work pushes past surface-level inquiries into the cult of sports idolatry to plumb the psychological depths of portraiture, with stylistic references to Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez.
Since its 2006 debut at the Cannes Film Festival , “Zidane, a 21st century portrait” has screened at multiple cultural venues, but this will be its inaugural showing at the Guggenheim since the museum acquired one of 17 unique versions of the work. (Other editions will also be on view across the country this summer, including at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Bass Museum of Art.)
Viewers who get to see the work during its five-week run will be treated to a rousing, profoundly emotional experienceof soccer at a time of dampened enthusiasm for the World Cup and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). Never an ethical role model — the last tournament, in Qatar, was embroiled in accusations of migrant labor abuse and exploitation — the governing body most recently awarded Donald Trump a newly invented "FIFA Peace Prize" after the warmongering president failed to clinch a Nobel. Those who can set their principles aside will find themselves shelling out historically high prices to attend a match in the US, Mexico, and Canada.
Surely, Gordon and Parreno's work won't take the bitter edge off this year's highly compromised competition. But if it reminds the public of what makes the sport so compelling, so human — its elegance, its fervor — it may inspire a new crop of fans beyond World Cup season.
This fall, the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) in East Harlem will open the Puffin Foundation Center for Social Activism, dedicated to civic engagement, social justice, and the city’s rich history as a hotbed of political organizing.
The center will replace the museum’s Puffin Foundation Gallery for Social Activism, which opened in 2012 and is home to the permanent rotating exhibition Activist New York. The namesake Puffin Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Perry Rosenstein that awards grants to artists and art organizations to tell the stories of marginalized groups, is funding the renovation and expansion with an $8 million donation, the second-largest in the museum’s history.
“We're talking about a long historical arc here,” Sarah Seidman, the museum’s curator of social activism, told Hyperallergic in an interview. “Activists in New York have mobilized around a range of issues at various moments in time, all along the political spectrum. The unique juxtaposition of a diverse range of so many people in a fairly small physical footprint has created a lot of moments of unity or clashing, and we try to cover both of those things.”
The foundation has also supported major exhibitions at the MCNY about workers’ rights, women’s suffrage, and Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.
The Puffin Foundation Center for Social Activism will debut with a new version of Activist New York, which will be installed during a brief closure of the gallery beginning July 19.
“It’s thrilling as a way to both go broader and include more pieces from more movements,” Seidman commented, noting that the exhibition is the institution’s “number one field trip” for schoolchildren.
Seidman explained that she curated the upcoming iteration of Activist New York based on artifacts in four categories: demonstrations, organizing, direct action, and art media. It is an approach she hopes will allow the museum to tell stories that stretch across the centuries, presenting activism as a connective thread in New York City history.
“We have a poster about Serbian refugees from World War I, juxtaposed with a poster from Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, a contemporary Brooklyn-based artist who has work in our collection related to anti-Asian violence and harassment during the pandemic that she did as an artist in residence for the Human Rights Commission,” Seidman said.
The refreshed display will also include new interactive elements, such as a protest music listening station and a touchscreen where visitors can learn about graphics used by different political movements and even make their own digital posters.
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, "I Am Not Your Scapegoat" (2020)
It will be accompanied by the center’s first temporary exhibition, Halumii Ktapihna: Lenape Legacies and Future, opening on September 25. The show marks the 400th anniversary of the “purchase” of Manhattan from its Indigenous inhabitants by Dutch colonist Peter Minuit by looking at both the history and contemporary lives and legacies of the city’s original Lenape/Lunáapeew communities.
The center plans to host six public events each year, including lectures, film screenings, book talks, and family programming. The donation from the Puffin Foundation will also fund an annual fellowship for the next 12 years.
MCNY’s expanded focus on activism and the history of diverse communities and underrepresented voices comes at a time when museums are feeling the pressure to avoid any association with a so-called “woke” agenda, or risk losing federal funding.
President Donald Trump is fighting to purge mentions of America’s history of slavery, racism, and discrimination from exhibitions and programming across the Smithsonian Institution. The Institute of Museum and Library Services has advised grant applicants to follow similar guidelines, citing several of Trump’s Executive Orders, including “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” and “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again.”
“We’re certainly aware of the moment we are all living through,” Seidman said. “We’re just continuing to do what we do, which is tell stories of a range of New Yorkers, of all ages and backgrounds and political persuasions.”
At night, the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba appears like a tangled string of Christmas lights along the coastline, casting colored silhouettes across the waves that lap ashore. Sailors and Marines pack the local sports bar blaring pop music. Others frequent the bowling alley or play video games under intense strobe lights. Yet in contrast to the brightly illuminated base…
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump demanded that Republican senators fire Elizabeth MacDonough, the parliamentarian for that chamber, due to her recent decision to block funding for the White House ballroom in an upcoming reconciliation bill. The Senate parliamentarian is a nonpartisan advisor who provides counsel to Senate leadership regarding its rules. On some occasions…
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California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) President Ravi S. Rajan was met with loud boos from students at the school's graduation ceremony last Friday, May 15. As Rajan took the stage to deliver his commencement address, students held signs that read “Hold the Admin Accountable” and “Save Our Faculty & Staff” in front of the lectern, references to recent financial issues and staff layoffs at the esteemed Southern California art school.
“Graduates, today is about you, not me,” Rajan insisted as the chorus of boos swelled. After delivering the line, “Some of you have told me that the future feels like something that is happening to you, rather than something you are shaping,” Charmaine Jefferson, chair of the board of trustees, joined him onstage and unsuccessfully appealed to the students to let Rajan finish his speech.
The students’ discontent comes at a time of crisis at CalArts, which is facing a multi-million-dollar budget deficit and significant cuts to staff and faculty. At the end of 2024, more than 75% of the staff announced their intention to form an employee union, citing low pay, increasing workloads, and lack of job security among their grievances.
“He was booed because many people at CalArts, faculty and students alike, see him as the source of many of the school's financial issues,” Matthew LeVeque, who received his MFA and DMA from the CalArts Herb Alpert School of Music, told Hyperallergic about the reaction to Rajan’s speech.
“His main responsibility is fundraising, but CalArts is in a several-million-dollar structural deficit that he claims ‘can't be fundraised out of,’” LeVeque continued.
CalArts faculty during the "Chop from the Top" rally in March (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
Reached by Hyperallergic for comment on the commencement, a CalArts spokesperson said the school “values free expression and critical inquiry.”
“We recognize that moments of passionate expression are part of a vibrant academic community, particularly during periods of institutional change,” the spokesperson said.
A chart designed by CalArts faculty outlines how the administration allegedly mismanaged the budget crisis, claiming that between 2016 and 2025, the school “grew richer in paperwork and poorer in pedagogy.” The school’s budget woes have been exacerbated by a recent decline in enrollment from 1,500 to roughly 1,200, according to a 2025 letter from the Office of the President.
This past March, the faculty union held a major “Chop from the Top” rally on campus. “The CalArts administration has proposed a $5 million cut to faculty and associated staff positions over the next two years through layoffs and non-renewals,” Westley Garcia-Encines, director of operations in the School of Theater, said in a statement for the demonstration. “It’s not fair that our most precarious coworkers have to shoulder the worst of these cuts.”
He noted that the school has experienced a 30% reduction in faculty over the past two years “through voluntary separations, bridge to retirement offers, and now non-renewals.” The administration disputes that figure, however, citing only a 16% reduction, though they do not include "voluntary departures" of faculty, which the union counts at 18.
A CalArts spokesperson told Hyperallergic at the time of the rally that the institution is “reorganizing its leadership structure and conducting a top-to-bottom review to better align resources and improve efficiency.”
The union also held a smaller rally before graduation, though both Garcia-Encines and students who spoke with Hyperallergic explained that the students’ uproar was a spontaneous expression of discontent, inspired by but not organized in collaboration with the union.
"Listen to your students," read one sign at CalArts's May 2026 graduation (photo courtesy Drew Gebhardt)
The boos that drowned out Rajan’s speech are part of a larger pattern at graduations this year, as speakers at other schools around the country were met with similar reactions from students, often in response to issues surrounding the rise of AI.
Although not directly addressed by students’ signs or chants at graduation, it is worth noting that CalArts announced a partnership with Chanel last year to create a new Center for Artists and Technology that will focus heavily on artificial intelligence and machine learning. According to LeVeque, the project “has been widely unpopular considering the rate at which AI is rendering creative labor negligible.”
In addition to budget issues and staff layoffs, students said they feel that the president and the board are increasingly distanced from and out of touch with their needs.
“Ravi and his office make decisions that actively hinder the learning experience of students, partly because they have no concept of student life or the wishes of students,” Drew Gebhardt, who just received his MA in Film from CalArts, told Hyperallergic.
“I would like to see a truly open line of communication between faculty, staff, students, and the upper administration and the board,” Gebhardt continued. “I would hope to see a school that operates on the same values that it espouses to its students.”
At long last, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) has revealed six commission proposals for a monument celebrating the legacy of groundbreaking jazz vocalist Billie Holiday. Through the Percent for the Art program, Holiday's monument will be installed outside the Jamaica Performing Arts Center in Queens, where the singer lived and performed.
DCLA has invited members of the public to share their input on the conceptual designs by Thomas J Price, Tanda Francis, Nekisha Durrett, La Vaughn Belle, Tavares Strachan, and Nikesha Breeze to help inform the final selection. Renderings of each artist's proposal and supporting text are available on the DCLA website, depicting the myriad ways in which Holiday's legacy can be interpreted and represented.
A portrait of Billie Holiday (photo William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress)
The plan to commemorate Holiday with a public monument emerged in 2018, when the DCLA announced the She Built NYC initiative in an effort to remedy the lack of historical monuments dedicated to influential women in the city. The jazz vocalist was highlighted alongside Staten Island's historic Robbins Reef Lighthouse keeper, Katherine Walker; schoolteacher and civil rights figure, Elizabeth Jennings Graham; and pediatrician, educator, and reproductive rights activist Helen Rodríguez Trías. The COVID-19 pandemic stymied the initiative's progress for several years, but DCLA revitalized the project in 2024.
The working title of Tanda Francis's proposal is “Blood at the Root.”
Holiday was born in Philadelphia and endured a traumatic childhood in Baltimore until 1929, when she joined her mother in Harlem and began performing at nightclubs as a teenager. Without any formal training, she became one of the first Black women to sing alongside a White orchestra, and her iconic, instrument-like voice greatly influenced the jazz and swing genres as they developed. Holiday's haunting recording of “Strange Fruit” (1939), a protest poem-turned-song directly confronting the lynching of African Americans, cemented the singer's legacy in both music and civil rights history.
In her proposal, Francis balances Holiday's powerful impact with the hardships she endured and the trauma she carried until the end of her short life. The artist's rendering includes a large bust of Holiday at the base of a shallow, blood-red tiled pool, with sculpted petals from the singer's signature gardenia blossoms spiraling from above her ear down to the pool's edge. Community members would inscribe the petals with their own triumphs and tribulations, emphasizing Holiday's power as a collective voice.
Nekisha Durrett's proposal, “Bending the Note”
The gardenia blossom is central to Durrett's proposal as well. The artist would depict Holiday's face on the edge of a petal on a circular plinth that takes the form of a record. The singer's beloved chihuahua Pepe is included in the rendering as well, gazing adoringly at Holiday.
Price also references the singer's memorable bond with Pepe, but his concept design takes a more abstract approach compared to the realistic figurative sculptures he's known for in an effort to capture Holiday the person rather than Holiday the legend. The design is based on an intimate photograph of Holiday pressing her face into a little dog.
Thomas J Price's conceptual design, “Held Within”
Conversely, Belle's proposal explores the space between woman and legend with a pensive depiction of Holiday at the edge of a reflective pool, preparing for a public performance with a final moment of privacy. Strachan's concept design is informed by the vocalist's profile, creating an architectural vessel that holds Holiday's memory, sound, and presence.
Lastly, Breeze's concept design depicts a figure of Holiday carved from black marble, inviting viewers to sit at the base while singing in perpetuity.
La Vaughn Belle's proposal, “Billie Holiday: Still, at the Crossing”
In addition to the online feedback form, an exhibition of the proposal renderings will be on view at the Jamaica Performing Arts Center through the end of May.
The DCLA noted that the Percent for the Art program's deciding panel for the commission, which has a $600,000 budget, is comprised of “representatives from City agencies, local leaders, community members, public art professionals, and stakeholders dedicated to preserving Billie Holiday’s legacy, including family members and scholars.”
The winning proposal will be announced this summer.
Tavares Strachan's proposal, “The Very Thought of You”
In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.
F. John Sierra (1942–2026) Muralist, illustrator, educator, and champion of Chicano art
His 1982 "The Planting of Cultures" mural became a cultural landmark in Fresno, California, and he co-founded the Latin America-focused contemporary art center Arte Américas in the city in 1987, serving as its artistic director until 2000. His work has been shown in museums such as the Mexican Museum in Chicago and the Oakland Museum of California, and in 1982, the city of Fresno designated an annual John Sierra Day on July 17.
Valie Export (1940–2026) Austrian feminist performance and film artist
A "Feminist Actionist," her playful, powerful, and provocative work undermined patriarchal society through guerrilla gestures that reclaimed and reinterpreted the female body. She co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative in 1968 and wrote the landmark “Women’s Art: A Manifesto" in 1972, as well as made feature films, curated exhibitions, taught at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, and opened the Valie Export Centre in Linz, Austria, to promote performance art research.
Mary Lovelace O’Neal (1942–2026) Painter and Civil Rights luminary
Mary Lovelace O’Neal (photo courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery New York and San Francisco)
The painter, educator, and Civil Rights activist's monumental works moved between abstraction and figuration with gestural marks and explosive energy. She is perhaps best known for her Lampblack paintings, in which she applied loose black pigment in layers onto canvases before punctuating it with a chalkboard eraser, her hands, or white and colored lines.
Noel Galea Bason (1955–2026) Designer of Malta's coins and monuments
Perhaps best known for designing Malta's Lira coins in 1986 and Euro coins in 2007, as well as medals, commemorative pieces, and public monuments, he was a key contributor to the nation's cultural identity. He has held solo exhibitions in France, Yugoslavia, and his home country, including a retrospective at the Museum of Archaeology in Valletta in 2024.
Jamshid MirFenderesky (1947–2026) Iranian-Irish Renaissance man
Jamshid MirFenderesky (photo The MAC via Facebook, screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
The Iranian-born Renaissance man was an art gallery owner, painter, poet, guitarist, and more, who was based for decades in Belfast, Ireland. Trained in classical guitar and gifted a guitar by the Shah of Iran, MirFenderesky established Fenderesky Gallery in Belfast in 1984, a cultural salon that promoted generations of Irish artists.
Peter Paone (1936–2026) Legend of Philadelphia's art scene
Peter Paone in 2025 (photo Christian Giannelli for Michener Art Museum, courtesy Michener Art Museum)
His paintings, combining disparate items such as asparagus, cakes, and cats, were inspired by Dutch vanitas works. He was an educator and longtime member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Library and Archives Committee, with his works featured in that institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.
"His imaginative paintings and prints conjured new worlds populated by unusual objects and people that asked the viewer to construct their own narratives," Laura Igoe, chief curator at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where a solo exhibition of his work just closed, said in a statement to Hyperallergic.
"Despite Peter’s independence as an artist," curator of photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Peter Barberie added, "modern life and the history of art pulse through his work."
Remo Salvadori (1947–2026) Italian sculptor and installation artist
Beginning in the 1970s, he redefined the fields of sculpture, installation, and site-specific art with works that investigate perception through water, metal, and everyday objects. Inspired by Arte Povera as well as conceptual art, spirituality, and geometry, he participated in the Venice Biennale in 1982, 1986, and 1993, and Documenta in Kassel in 1982 and 1992.
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After months of failed votes on Democratic war powers resolutions intended to end President Donald Trump’s illegal assault on Iran, the US Senate finally advanced legislation to a final vote on Tuesday, when a fourth Republican broke ranks. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) joined three other Republicans and all Democrats but one for the 50-47 vote on a motion to discharge Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D-Va.)…
The Ain Jalout Tower complex is located in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza Strip. Considered one of the most prominent residential complexes, over the years it has served as a refuge for dozens of families. In January 2024, during the early months of Israel’s war on Gaza, these towers were subjected to heavy bombardment following waves of forced displacement of residents…
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The Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG) opened its new exhibition Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio on May 16, 2026, as a major initiative of the Museum’s year-long celebration of its 75th anniversary. Tough Stuff is the first survey exhibition of work by women artists working in glass during the breakthrough decades of the American Studio Glass Movement, the 1960s and 1970s. Featured in the exhibition are more than 200 objects by artists such as Claire Falkenstein, Audrey Handler, Margie Jervis, Susie Krasnican, Kathleen Mulcahy, Ginny Ruffner, Ruth Tamura, Toots Zynsky, and many others.
“Tough Stuff emerged out of a desire to open a new door into the multifaceted histories of glass in the United States,” said Tami Landis, Curator of Postwar and Contemporary Glass at CMoG. “The exhibition is grounded in conversations with artists about their experiences and challenges in developing their own studios and signature styles.”
Left: Kathleen Mulcahy installing Drops on a Landscape at Alfred University, Alfred, New York (1973) (courtesy Kathleen Mulcahy); Right: Ruth Tamura glassblowing at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California (1967) (photo from the Marvin Lipofsky Papers, Rakow Research Library, Corning Museum of Glass)
American art of the 1960s was characterized by both material and conceptual innovation. This period of transformation redefined glass as a serious artistic medium and laid the groundwork for what became known as the Studio Glass Movement. While scholarship has often framed this movement around a narrow lineage of male artists, the reality was far broader. Women played a central yet often overlooked role individually and collectively, which Tough Stuff brings into sharper focus. By highlighting works from the 1960s through today, the exhibition explores the history of studio glass through these women artists’ stories, acknowledging their persistence, ingenuity, and influence while expanding the historical narrative to reflect a richer, more inclusive vision.
Visitors will explore never-before-displayed works from CMoG’s permanent collection and the Rakow Research Library, along with notable loans from many of the featured artists. These featured works will showcase both a wide breadth of techniques and illuminate the broader social, cultural, artistic, and gender politics of the time that impacted female artists.
Left: Joan Reep, “Silver Glass Bowl” (1973–74) (courtesy the Corning Museum of Glass, gift of the artist); Right: Audrey Handler, “Small Double Bubble Sculpture” (1969) (courtesy the Corning Museum of Glass, gift of the artist)
Complementing and continuing the work of Tough Stuff into the future, the Museum’s Rakow Research Library’s robust Oral History initiative will make the first-person accounts of many of the still-living artists from this period available to the public. The living archive will feature oral histories, photography, archival ephemera, and more, holding a record of these artists’ voices transmitting their own histories to future generations of glassmakers and glass enthusiasts.
Tough Stuff and its related programming are supported by a generous gift from Rochester-based philanthropist Mary Spurrier.
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