Women Rewrote the American Studio Glass Movement. A Corning Museum Show Makes the Case
At the Corning Museum of Glass, a new exhibition is revising a familiar origin story. “Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio,” on view through January 10, 2027, centers the women who helped shape the American Studio Glass Movement while working against a culture that often excluded them from the studio floor.
Curator Tami Landis built the exhibition from a simple but consequential premise: the movement’s history has too often been told through collectors and male-led institutions, even though women were making technical and artistic breakthroughs from the start. In interviews, Landis heard repeated accounts of women being discouraged from working in glass, denied access to studios, or told they lacked the physical strength for the medium. Some were sabotaged by professors or peers; others were pushed to work alone, at smaller scale, and outside the institutional spaces that defined the field.
The exhibition gathers rarely seen works by both well-known and lesser-known artists, including pieces that Landis catalogued, photographed, or mounted for the first time. Installed in the museum’s prominent Heineman Gallery, the show also marks a curatorial shift. The space previously framed the museum’s studio glass collection through the family that endowed it. Landis wanted something different: not a collector’s narrative, but an institutional one that acknowledges how the medium was built.
Among the artists on view is Edith Franklin (1922–2012), whose “Vessels from the First Toledo Studio Glass Workshop” greets visitors near the entrance. Franklin was initially turned away from the invitation-only Toledo Museum of Art Glass Workshop because she was not a university professor. She asked again, was denied again, and then paid a fee to join. “I wasn’t invited. I invited myself,” she later recalled. The 1962 workshops are widely regarded as the birthplace of the American Studio Glass Movement, yet little work from them survives. Franklin’s three translucent vessels, on loan from the Toledo Museum of Art, are among the rare remnants.
The exhibition also highlights Ruth Tamura (b. 1943), whose “Marbles from The Great Marble Tournament on Bay Fill” gives the show its title. Tamura studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts, earned the first-ever MFA in glass there in 1969, and completed an MFA in ceramics at Mills College the same year. While still a student, she helped develop the glass studios at both schools, later becoming acting head of the CCAC glass program and one of the first women to lead a university glass program in the United States. She also worked with Dale Chihuly on the grant that helped establish Pilchuck Glass School in 1971.
Taken together, the exhibition argues that women were not peripheral to the American Studio Glass Movement. They were central to its technical and institutional foundations — and to the broader history museums are now being asked to tell.
