Toots Zynsky: Past/Present

Heller Gallery is pleased to present Past/Present, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of work by award-winning, Providence, RI-based artist Toots Zynsky, on view from January 23 - February 15, 2025. Following Zynsky’s recent solo show at the Newport Art Museum in Newport, Rhode Island, Past/ Present will include 11 works from the artist’s archive dating as far back as the 1980’s alongside eight of her most recent works. This exhibition, Heller Gallery’s first since closing their Chelsea space in June 2024, inaugurates The Curator Lab at 529 West 20th Street.

Zynsky’s distinctive style incorporates her unique technical approach entitled Filet de Verre, wherein sculptural vessel forms are created from thousands of hair-thin extruded Italian glass cane filaments fused together and hand shaped while still hot in her kiln.

Distinctly painterly, the instantly recognizable shapes and striking color patterns of Zynsky’s undulating forms speak eloquently of her profound relationship with color. A music lover who studied piano for more than a decade, in her younger years she was subject to a neurological condition called synesthesia, a phenomenon that manifests itself when stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway causes involuntary experiences in another sense.  In Zynsky’s case when she heard music, it translated into color. Rather than being a distraction or handicap, the condition was an enriching gift to the budding artist.

As repeatedly noted by critics and curators, Toots Zynsky’s glassworks offer an intriguing meld of seductive beauty and meaningful references to the experiences and issues she finds important, ranging from environmentally threatened bird species to her reactions to place, circumstance and experience.  In 1999 Arthur C. Danto, highly respected art critic and Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University wrote “In an age in which the relevance of beauty to art is widely questioned, Zynsky’s work is uncompromisingly beautiful. It is, however, what the poet André Breton would have called convulsive beauty. The intensity of adjoined color, the tactile vitality of fluted walls, the swirling energies of shape and pattern are transformed into a luminous whole through the interaction between glass and light.”  Most recently, this month Cara McCarty Curator Emerita, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and former MoMA curator, called Zynsky a “Choreographer of lines and color” whose works “resemble a sculpted drawing.”

Born in Boston in 1951, Zynsky studied glass in Dale Chihuly’s groundbreaking Rhode Island School of Design program, where she earned her BFA in 1973.  At Chihuly’s invitation in 1971 she became involved in the founding of the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, becoming one of the early pioneers and protagonists of the nascent Studio Glass movement. By 1980 she was assistant director and head of the hot shop at NYC’s Experimental Glass Workshop (today’s UrbanGlass).

In the pantheon of the Studio Glass world, few have made a mark that compares to that of Toots Zynsky, an innovative maker with an esteemed career spanning five decades and works in more than one hundred international museum and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cooper-Hewitt in New York City; the Musée des Arts Décoratifs du Louvre in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria.  She is also the recipient of numerous prestigious honors and awards including the 2015 Smithsonian Visionary Award, the Women’s Center of Rhode Island Annual Women of Excellence Award in 2013 and the Rhode Island Pell Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2006.

In the words of Toots Zynsky "The complexity of life and the complexity of glass are very much alike, sometimes murky, harsh and unworkable, and sometimes serenely beautiful.”