By Louise Irvine

At the beginning of Women’s History Month, we were delighted to welcome Toots Zynsky on a surprise visit to WMODA. Toots is a pioneering woman artist in the Studio Glass movement and she told us how her career began by studying with Dale Chihuly at Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s and helping him to establish the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State.

Toots was in South Florida to give the Myrna and Sheldon Palley glass art lecture at the Lowe Art Museum in Coral Gables. We are so grateful that she changed her flight plans to come and see the WMODA collection at our new Hollywood location. The museum’s staff and volunteers gathered around Toots to hear her talk about her experiences as a woman glass blower in the male-dominated hot shops of the 1970s.

Toots described how her love of music and dance led her to study glass art. She was thrilled by the roaring furnace and pulsating music in Chihuly’s RISD studio and was energized by watching everyone work together with the molten glass as if participating in a choreographed dance. All fired up, Toots began to explore the creative possibilities of glass and pushed the boundaries of the material. She experimented with blown, slumped, fused, spun and even shattered glass, often combining different forms.]

In 1980, Toots became Assistant Director at the Experimental Glass Workshop in New York City, now Urban Glass.  During this time, she combined hand-pulled glass threads with blown forms and her distinctive filet de verre technique began to evolve. She uses thousands of ultra-thin glass threads pulled from Italian canes, which are fused together and hand-shaped while still hot in her kiln.

She compares her technique to painting as she arranges handfuls of colorful threads in many layers on a flat surface for fusing before reaching into the hot kiln to manipulate the undulating forms.  Music has been an important part of her life since she began playing piano as a child and she says, “When I hear music, it translates into color.”

Toots spent many years living in Europe and particularly enjoyed working in Venice with the Murano masters.  Her filet de verre process was improved in the 1980s when she worked with Teunissen Van Manen, a Dutch artist and inventor, who designed a glass thread-pulling machine that could produce hair-thin filaments.

Toots discussed some of her pieces on display in the Hot Glass Gallery, explaining where and when each was made. The earliest piece in the collection is Ciclimino, which was made in 1984.  She singled out her Bushfiredesign, part of her Tierra del Fuego Series exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1989. The vibrant orange and yellow colors are reminiscent of the Kente woven textiles from Ghana, where Toots spent six months researching a special music project.

Toots also talked about her recent Endangered Series inspired by the birds she enjoyed on childhood rambles, many of which are threatened or have vanished. The scope of this series expanded to include endangered birds in other parts of the world and the vessels combine her brilliant use of color and texture with profound conservation messages. It would be fabulous to have one of these avian designs in the WMODA collection one day.

When she returned to the USA in 1999, Toots worked from a succession of studios in Providence, RI, where she made the Girasole Serena and Oggigiorno designs now in the WMODA collection. She helped the WMODA team achieve the best display of her work by turning key pieces to her favorite view. Now Arrufato, which translates as “ruffled,” is shown to best advantage in the Hot Glass Gallery.