Disclosure: The Whiteness of Glass, 2024
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, May 25, 2024 – August 24, 2024
Disclosure: The Whiteness of Glass is a research-driven exhibition by Related Tactics (Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nate Watson), an artist collective that celebrates community action, collaboration, and making as forms of resistance to the racism, exclusion, and inequity that exists in the field of contemporary glass. The works on view range widely in scale and form, from ephemera of the glass studio—shards, raw materials, and artist sketches—to neon and sand-cast glass sculptures. Viewers have a rare opportunity to engage with a novel project that harnesses the social nature of glassmaking itself, a discipline that requires connection, communication, and teamwork.
Disclosure is traveling from The Corning Museum of Glass, who published Related Tactics’ initial dataset in their 2020 issue of New Glass Review. Much like a game of telephone, the collective invited a series of artists to creatively translate hard data about the demographics of those working in the glass field. The exhibition showcases three iterative stages of interpretation: data visualizations by Related Tactics; artist instruction responses by Einar & Jamex de la Torre, Cheryl Derricotte, Emily Leach, Corey Pemberton, Ché Rhodes, and Joyce J. Scott; and glass responses by Pearl Dick, Raya Friday, Vanessa German, Helen Lee, and Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez. The resulting work—over 100 drawings and objects—celebrates and reflects the invited artists’ diversity of practice.
“This exhibition is a documentation of a socially engaged, relational project designed to create community among BIPOC artists, using the glass community as a case study,” said Related Tactics. Using the demographic data the group collected for the New Glass Review article as their starting point, they united two groups of artists for a multi-phase collaborative glassmaking and community-building studio process. “The overarching process is a means of contending with the wounds of misrepresentation, tokenization, and marginalization, while creating a space for mutual support, creative exchange, and the development of a collective imaginary.”
This project was supported by a Center for Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship, and the exhibition originated at the Center for Craft in 2022-2023. Disclosure was also made possible with support from Crafting the Future and in-kind support from the Glass Program of Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University.
📸 Katy Anderson
