Through the Looking Glass: a Visit to the Corning Museum of Glass

My family and I were hosted by the Corning Museum of Glass for a visit in August. We received complimentary admission and passes to create our own glass sculptures. As always, the views expressed here are my own.

I’ve worn glasses since I was five years old.

My first few pairs were thick, dark brown frames that somehow managed to disguise the Coke-bottle thickness of the lenses they held inside. They were the polar opposite of fashionable, though I cared very little about such things back then. The important thing was that I could see the chalkboard, my friends and, one time, the brick wall on the playground just a fraction of a second before I slammed into it at top speed.

Fashion and safety aside, though, lenses – both physical glass and metaphorical references to one’s interactions with the world – have always been interesting to me. Lenses alter our perceptions of our environments. They bring blurry objects into focus in some cases and obscure our views in others. They determine how we interpret behavior, how we react to different situations and how we make judgments about the future. They can color our understanding of politics and allow a baby to see their mother properly for the first time.

On my family’s recent road trip – you know, the one sponsored by Toyota that also included an up-close-and-personal interaction with my father-in-law’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis – we were hosted by the Corning Museum of Glass. We got to see the process of creating glass sculptures, how to create (and break!) glass with different levels of strength, and the museum’s unique, audience-dictated Bubbleheads.

 

The highlight of our visit was that each of us got to make our own glass sculptures. The adults made flowers and the kids made ornaments.¹ We donned the protective glasses, gloves and aprons and took turns sitting on the work benches near the ovens. The employees handled the dangerous work of putting the melted glass on the ends of the pipes and holding it steady but we were able to manipulate the glass into its final shape.

 

 

It was during my turn at the work bench that I saw it. The young woman helping me had just dipped my glass back into the oven for reheating so I took a quick glance over at E. He had finished blowing air through the long pipe to give his sculpture its shape and he was watching the staff person twist the end of glass. His eyes were a mix of focus and wonder, somehow simultaneously narrowed to help him see more clearly and widened with amazement at the staff person’s actions. The glass, usually solid, fragile and beautiful, was instead pliable and inflating like a balloon. Its light orange coloring was a warning of dangerous heat and he seemed unable to believe that simply blowing into a metal pipe had such an impact on that kind of material.

E looked over at me to see if I had seen him work. I flashed a smile and pumped my fist once or twice; he grinned back, more than satisfied with my encouragement. The staff person helping me brought my reheated glass back over so that I could finish my flower. I grasped the pliers and pulled pieces of the hot glass into pointed petals before the staff person reheated the glass again so we could twist the stem. I finished the flower and returned to the waiting area. E was waiting for me and gave me a loud high five as I closed the gate behind me.

As we looked through the gift shop and made our way back home after the museum visit, it was the look on E’s face, the mix of expressions, that stuck with me. E and S both have better eyesight than I do – thankfully, they have their mother’s genes in that respect – so neither of them have to wear glasses. But their experiences working with the glass, even if all they did was blow into a pipe, seemed to be as revelatory as putting on a pair of glasses for the first time.

Many thanks to the team at Corning Museum of Glass for a wonderful visit. As an aside, the Bubbleheads demonstrations are generally only available during the summer but the museum has a number of different programs geared towards children and families throughout the year, which you can find here. 

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^{1. We just called them sculptures because because the kids, growing up in our Jewish household, didn’t immediately understand what an ornament was.↩}