Flowers in Glass
Glass Paperweights and Sculptures by Paul Stankard
Akron Art Museum
9 November 2002 - 2 February 2003
Akron Art Museum presents Flowers in Glass: Glass Paperweights and Sculptures by Paul Stankard. The exhibition features over 60 of the legendary glass artist’s floral paperweights and sculptures. The works are all from the collection of Cleveland area glass collectors Mike and Annie Belkin, who own one of the largest Stankard collections in the world.
Considered to be one of the most important and prolific paperweight artists, Paul Stankard is simultaneously a master glass artist and an astonishing realist sculptor. Throughout his thirty-year career, he has challenged the limits of glass as an art form. His early works focused on uncannily accurate glass flowers, perfect in color and delicate detail. Inside his glass creations, he constructs amazingly minute, highly detailed microcosms of plants and insects. Viewing his work, one is instantly transported to a different time and place—from a meadow of wild flowers to a pond resplendent with water lilies. It is difficult to believe that you are not confronted with nature itself, miniaturized and preserved forever at its peak by crystal-clear glass.
Look more closely, though, and there is even more to these swirls of worlds than the complexity of botany. By experimenting with color and composition, Stankard has achieved his own personal interpretation of nature. Layers of glass create fiction, metaphor and allusion. Some of the flowers, such as the coronet in Coronet, Blueberries and Damselflies, are not even native to nature, but the artist’s fanciful inventions. In a number of the more recent sculptures that Paul Stankard has termed “Botanicals,” tiny root people, words or the female form–which represents the earth spirit–become clear, intermingled among the roots. In commenting on these botanical interpretations, the artist has stated: “I am interested in integrating mysticism, informed by botany, into my work, giving the glass an organic credibility. Through the work, I explore the cycles of nature with wildflowers as a personal metaphor. The addition of tiny root people and word canes as emblems allude to unseen forces of growth and decay.”
Moreover, Paul Stankard has altered the way people view paperweights by changing their very shape. The artist has transformed paperweights from the traditional, round French style (what most people consider when they think of paperweights) to rectangular blocks composed of two or more laminated glass pieces forming one complete scene. In this regard, his paperweights have come to be viewed as sculptures, and Stankard has emerged as one of the most influential glass artists of his time. Indeed, his works are featured in museums throughout the world—from Washington, D.C. to Tokyo, Japan.
Paul Stankard does not just depict the natural world; he uses art to express his awe at the miracle of nature and to hint at the unknowable wonders lying beneath the world’s visible surface. The artist himself has noted: “My work is my prayer,” and his stunning sculptures express this spiritual component silently through form and color. Come to Flowers in Glass and delight the eyes, the intellect and the soul!
Flowers in Glass is organized by the Akron Art Museum from the collection of Mike and Annie Belkin.
AKRON ART MUSEUM
70 East Market Street, Akron, Ohio 44308
