Nestled in Corning, N.Y., a picturesque city with some 10,500 residents, the Corning Museum of Glass draws on 50,000 works to tell the story of 35 centuries of glassmaking on its 10-acre campus.
The museum, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, displays everything from dice forerunners—called “astragali” and made in the Mediterranean between 200 BCE and 100 CE—to presidential glassware, and from church windows and mosque lamps to paperweights.
A section centers on glass making in ancient Egypt, and another addresses trick glass, which was made in Europe between the Middle Ages and the 18th century and some of which was “designed to be as difficult as possible to drink from without spilling the contents,” per an object label.
Another vitrine is full of roemer green glass cups, which have prunts on their handles and are often seen in 17th-century Dutch still life paintings.
Among the most surprising objects in the collection is a glass work made from a tire mold by renowned “ready-made” artist Robert Rauschenberg. In the work, a “rubber tire, practical and usually dirty, is reimagined in clear glass and displayed as an object of beauty,” a label states.
Many of the objects on view are beautiful and delicate, and glisten in the light. Others involve looking through a glass darkly, like one piece said to be about “white supremacy” and the “whiteness” of the glass field.
Nearby, Czech artist Marian Karel’s “Black Cube” draws inspiration from the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, while elsewhere, an 18th- or 19th-century Chinese snuff bottle with scented tobacco is decorated in a way that, per the label, “could reveal something about who the owner was, similar to the way a phone case might today.”
When the museum tells the story of religious objects, some objects are explored through rose-colored glasses, while others, including some Jewish ones, appear to hit a glass ceiling.
A display of “glass in religious observances,” which JNS viewed on a recent visit to the museum, referred to the many ways that glass has been used “frequently” in Christian services, including “candleholders, lamps, altar crosses, chalices, patens (plates for the Eucharistic bread) and reliquaries.” An altar cross, holy water fonts, a spoon and an aspersory, or holy water holder, were presented, all spanning the 17th and 18th centuries in Venice.
Another section—on Byzantine glass, mixed Jewish and Christian objects in the same glass case, although there was one bottle with Jewish symbols—dated from the late sixth to early seventh centuries, alongside several with Christian symbols.
Although the museum used dates with years in “BCE” and “CE” elsewhere, it referred to the bottle with Jewish symbols with “AD.”
A vase designed around 1914 and manufactured over the next six years by a Bohemian company is a gift to the museum from Roberta Elliott, whose paternal grandparents, Elisabet and Hugo Engel, bought it in Vienna.
“When the Nazis annexed Austria in March 1938, the Engel family was forced to flee because they were Jewish,” a label near the vase states. “They hid their belongings with a business associate in Vienna, escaped to Italy and eventually arrived in the United States on Dec. 7, 1941.”
Francis Elliott, Roberta’s father, reclaimed the family’s property “miraculously” in Vienna after the war, according to the museum.
“The vase remained a treasured heirloom until 2017, when Roberta Elliott donated it to the Corning Museum of Glass, so that the vase and its story will be preserved and shared for generations to come,” it states.
A workshop, which costs an extra fee beyond admission, in which visitors can make their own glass includes an option to make a mezuzah. And one of the objects on view in the collection, Australian artist Blanche Tilden’s 2008 “Yom Hashoah Ritual Sash,” references Holocaust memorial day.
“Blanche Tilden creates jewelry out of such unusual materials as used gear chains and richly colored cut glass with oxidized or distressed metals,” a label states. “The museum’s long sash can be worn like a necklace or across the body.”
The museum adds that “two colors are inspired by the tallith (Jewish prayer shawl), which is traditionally white with blue stripes.” Many Ashkenazi Jews have blue stripes, though many others have black ones, and Sephardic prayer shawls are often all white.
Two artists, whose works were on view when JNS visited, were identified as Israeli. Noa Hagiladi, born 1978, is identified as such alongside the 2006 work, “This Is My Baby, He Used to Say.” The glass forms, suggesting “stacked leaves,” honor the artist’s late father “and his bond with their family’s mango grove in Israel,” the museum says.
Dylan Brams, an American and Israeli born in 1979, layered 19 photos of daily attempts to blow glass to form a traditional Venetian pitcher called ampolina. The photographs form “039 to 058,” which Brams made from 2003 to 2018.
Israel is seen with something other than glassy eyes in “Ghosts,” which was designed in 2019 by Dima Srouji, identified as Palestinian and born in 1990. The Twam Family in “Jaba, Palestine” made the work in 2022.
“Glass making has been a foundation of the economy, culture and identity of people living in the area that is now Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Egypt for thousands of years,” a label states. “Many objects in the gallery around you were made and found there. They came to Corning through the art market.”
“These wavering, ephemeral forms designed by contemporary artist Dima Srouji mimic ancient glass containers. The Twams, a Palestinian family that has been making glass in the occupied West Bank for generations, made them,” the museum states. “The transparent objects here are ghosts of the meaningful archaeological objects that have been taken from the region and from the Palestinian people.”
Jay Greene, director of research at Do No Harm, which aims to “safeguard healthcare from ideological threats,” has researched field trips and museum visits, among many other topics related to education.
“In general, the way art is selected, displayed and explained in art museums can be very important,” he told JNS. “The consumers of art museums tend to be well above average in their education and wealth, so they have disproportionate political and social influence, and their understanding of the fashionable elite opinion on issues can be shaped by what they see in museums.”
“Art museum curators, who make most of the decisions about selection, displays and explanations, tend to be far-Left and have often embraced active hostility toward Israel,” Greene said. “This is a problem all over the country.”
“There has also been a conscious strategy to claim that everything Jewish and Israeli was actually previously developed by ‘Palestinians,’” he told JNS. “There was even a recent claim that the bagel actually originated among Arabs. The goal is to deny Jews ownership over anything and to cast everything Israeli as stolen.”
Museums that intend to display works and artifacts by Israelis and Arabs “should either carefully explore the historical record before repeating these kinds of claims or simply avoid the dispute and allow people to appreciate the art without too much explanation,” he said.
Jacob Wisse, associate professor of art history at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women and former director of Yeshiva University Museum, told JNS that he visited the Corning Museum of Glass with his children years ago, and night lights they made in a workshop “still get quite a bit of use in our home.”
“I remember being impressed by the museum, which makes me disappointed, though not too surprised, to hear that they’re trotting out fashionable political jargon,” he said.
“I don’t know what kind of real impact blatantly propagandistic museum wall texts and object labels have,” Wisse told JNS. “I suspect most visitors recognize when they’re being preached to and don’t necessarily appreciate the experience or take the most heavy-handed of the Stalinist jargon too seriously.”
But Wisse told JNS that he is concerned “when museums, which I value for the rigor, depth and richness of their curatorial voice, fall back, lazily, on untruths.”
“That should be a concern for everyone,” he said.
Not far from the anti-Israel display, the museum shows dozens of glass objects on a platform which contains a map of the Roman Empire, including Jerusalem, Haifa, Jalame and Beit She’arim.
“Many small factories produced glass in the Syro-Palestinian region during the fourth century AD,” the museum states. “One of these factories was located at Jalame, in Upper Galilee. Its craftsmen acquired raw glass, re-melted it and formed it into household products.”
A joint University of Missouri-Columbia and Corning Museum of Glass expedition worked at Jalame in the 1960s; in 1963, the team found a “huge slab” of glass at Beit She’arim in Israel.
“The slab weighs 18,000 pounds. It is the result of a failed attempt to make glass,” the museum states. “If the melt had succeeded, it would have provided enough glass to make 60,000 small bottles.”
Wisse told JNS that he hopes viewers will take away “wonder and awe” from seeing indigenous Jewish objects from Israel.
“To see ancient objects firsthand, created in the same place where the creators’ and users’ Jewish descendants continue to live, practice and thrive should be a source of amazement and, frankly, reassurance or comfort for Jews and non-Jews alike,” he said.
Greene told JNS that “the significance of ancient artifacts made by Jews and found in the land of Israel is that it helps support the Jewish claim that they have had a lengthy and continuous connection to that land.”
