The welcoming installation in Danville’s new GLASS National Art Museum is composed of two works from Stephen Rolfe Powell’s Screamers series. They are large, vibrant, intricate and asymmetrical, each with a long, thin, curved tube of glass emerging from the side to stretch toward the sky. The necks of the vessels are positioned to appear intertwined but are not.
The two are in relationship, but the temper of that bond can morph with the interpretation of the viewer. Is it a marriage of forms? Are the necks curved like graceful swans or sly serpents? Do the pieces embody volatility or intimacy? Are they screaming at each other in anger or in love?
Beyond reflections on mood, Powell’s works in the museum’s main exhibit encourage contemplations on symmetry, balance, transparency and sensuality. The artist’s styles and series, including early works, exhibit a breadth that visually slaked the thirst of this viewer starved for color and light in the dour Kentucky winter.
An internationally known artist, Powell was part of the Danville community for most of his adult life. Thanks to an anonymous donor, the GLASS Museum has the largest collection of his works in the world. The Art Center of the Bluegrass acquired 84 pieces last year with the goal of keeping the collection together and sharing it with the public in this new museum. Powell was a champion of the arts in the region, and this main gallery is permanently dedicated to exhibiting his work.
“We are really honored to have so many of Powell’s pieces and to join other small cities that are national glass centers, like Corning, New York, and Tacoma, Washington,” said Liz Haffner, director of development and communications for the GLASS Museum. “The opportunity to acquire this art collection was a no-brainer, and we feel privileged to carry on Powell’s legacy in the place where he had such have an impact.”
Also on display are several pieces from Powell’s first major series—the Teasers. They look like elaborate vases and were inspired by nature, with references to figs and butterflies. Many of his later exhibit pieces are more fanciful. The appropriately named Whacko series is reminiscent of four-legged animals, if dogs and deer were possessed of an odd number of curlicued legs, a rainbow of fur colors, and transparent, headless bodies.
Many of Powell’s artworks are intentionally provocative. Consider these names: Copious Solar Lips, Whipping Salacious Stare, Honey Nippled Gaze. Some of his early pre-series pieces are even less subtle. The group of “Cheeks,” including yellow, red and peacock versions, are composed of two curvaceous, cleaved halves.
Powell was, in a word, playful.
An Artist and a Teacher
It was that sense of play that drew Powell to hot glass. Always an artist, he first worked in ceramics, but he discovered glass in 1981 during summer craft camps at Haystack Mountain School in Maine and Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. It quickly became his obsession, the emerging medium refracting his original artistic path.
Powell grew up in the burgeoning age of glass art. The studio movement began in 1962, and the Glass Art Society formed in 1971. In the 1990s, Powell’s Teasers series garnered international acclaim, riding the wave of surging interest in glass art. He went on to study and teach the medium in Ukraine, Japan and Venice, the birthplace of hot glass. His creations can be found throughout Kentucky—from Louisville’s Speed Museum to the Maker’s Mark Distillery—and around the world, including at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Auckland Museum in New Zealand.
Powell was drawn to the physicality and collaborative nature of hot glass. One online video at powellglass.com shows his studio mid-production, as he and his assistants heat the glass in a white-hot furnace, roll it on a table to form it, and sculpt it with a wooden paddle.
The rapid finishing process of one of his Screamers looks like a dance. One assistant stands on scaffolding, holding the glass piece down where the others can reach it. In between large pendulum swings, Powell and two more helpers torch the piece, snip it, buff it, join it, hold it and, finally, detach it to complete it. There is little conversation but a synchronous, creative flow.
Beyond his body of work, Powell left a legacy of glassblowing artists formed during the more than 35 years he taught at Centre College. He established the program in 1985. A gifted educator, he twice received Kentucky’s Teacher of the Year award and, in 2010, was honored with the Artist Award by the Governor’s Award in the Arts.
“GLASS is a perfect way to honor and extend Stephen Rolfe Powell’s legacy,” said Susie Silbert, the former curator of Contemporary Glass at The Corning Museum of Glass—the world’s preeminent glass museum. “Powell is a beloved figure, known as much for his richly colored sculpture as for his inspirational teaching. Through his work at Centre College and the atmosphere of possibility he cultivated there, he made Danville, Kentucky, a beating heart of contemporary glass known across the nation for quality, integrity and the excellence of its graduates.”
The GLASS Museum Vision
Establishing Powell’s collection at the Art Center of the Bluegrass was inspired and envisioned by his widow, Shelley Powell. In 2022, three years after his death, the center curated a retrospective of his work. The exhibit was a healing experience for Shelley, and she began collaborating with the museum about creating a permanent home for the collection.
The new GLASS Museum builds on the Art Center’s 20-year history as an artistic cornerstone in the region. With this addition, leaders are aspiring to create a national destination for glass art. Partners such as the City of Danville, South Arts, the Kentucky Arts Council, individual donors and local businesses help to make it a reality. The completed first phase of the Art See expansion plan included the installation of the GLASS National in the center’s original building and the renovation of a neighboring building that now houses a kids educational area, the Murrini Café, and a pay-per-piece art studio space open to all with pottery, wood and paper projects.
“We serve five surrounding counties, and there are kids who have never entered a museum before visiting,” Haffner said. “We hope to be an example for rural Kentucky that you don’t have to travel to a big city to see strong, provocative artwork.”
Aside from exhibit space, the center prioritizes patrons learning about the process and the opportunity to create themselves. The next phase of Art See will support construction of an on-site glass studio to house demonstrations and classes for the public.
Dark and Light
A second, smaller glass gallery is tucked upstairs on the right side of the museum building. In the future, it will feature the works of other prominent glass artists. But the current exhibit is of Powell’s Echo series, and viewing it felt otherworldly.
The room was dark, with black-covered windows and no ambient interior lights. Instead, spotlights were focused on round, flat platters of mosaic glass. They illuminated the beautiful, complex patterns. The echoes and the reverberations of light through the pieces created new, sometimes surprising, compositions on the tables beneath.
“A piece of glass art has a whole different form, in marriage with the light,” Haffner said.
IF YOU GO:
GLASS National Museum
401 West Main Street, Danville
859.236.4054
Open Tuesday-Saturday from 10:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Admission is free.
For those wishing to purchase a piece of glass art, a special sales gallery in the museum features 21 of Powell’s works. Smaller handmade pieces, some created by his former students, are available in the museum shop, Fern Curated Gifts.