Artist

Toots Zynsky

born Boston, MA 1951

Media - portrait_image_113352.jpg - 90232 — Courtesy Toots Zynsky.

Also known as: Mary Ann "Toots" Zynsky
Born: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Biography: Toots Zynsky was born Mary Ann, but was called Toots almost from birth. She earned her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design then went to Seattle to study with Dale Chihuly at the Pilchuck Glass School. Since then, she has returned to Pilchuck as a teacher.
In the mid-1980s, she spent six months in Ghana, on a special research project, recording Ghanaian music. In 1995, her work was shown at special exhibitions in Tokyo, Zurich, Italy, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
: Luce Artist Biography
Toots Zynsky created the unique filet-de-verre technique, a process of pulling very fine threads from glass canes that she uses to form bold and organic vessels. While Zynsky was living in Amsterdam, the Dutch inventor Mathijs Teunission Van Manen visited her studio to see this technique. Surprised at how time-consuming the work was, he mechanized the process with a specially engineered machine inspired by fiber-optic technology. Zynsky designed the torch for the 2002 Paralympic Games, fashioning delicate layers of fibers into a prosthetic limb that symbolized the athletes' strength and achievement.

Works by this artist (2 items)

Hot Chaos IV

Artist

Toots Zynsky

Date1996

glass threads

Tiger FM

Artist

Toots Zynsky

Dateca. 1992

fused glass

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Toots Zynsky was born Mary Ann, but was called Toots almost from birth. She earned her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design then went to Seattle to study with Dale Chihuly at the Pilchuck Glass School. Since then, she has returned to Pilchuck as a teacher. In the mid-1980s, she spent six months in Ghana, on a special research project, recording Ghanaian music. In 1995, her work was shown at special exhibitions in Tokyo, Zurich, Italy, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

TOOTS ZYNSKY: I'm Toots Zynsky. I live now in Providence, Rhode Island. I grew up north of Boston but prior to moving to Providence, I lived in Europe for 16 years.

I began working in glass in 1970 at Rhode Island School of Design. When I visited all the departments, everything looked a bit too quiet and static to me. I had a lot of energy and needed to be moving all the time, and I came upon the glass department, which wasn't even a department yet. They actually were just finishing building the studio. It hadn't even been listed in the school catalog as something that was available, and I saw the hot glass being swirled through the air. They were actually making a film that day, and there were about 10 people in there swirling hot glass around. There was music thumping and in this constant motion that looks really like spontaneous choreography. The idea that you had to always be moving while you were working with it was great appeal to me, but obviously the material itself was so alive that it was captivating.

One of the pieces, “Hot Chaos IV,” is on display right now in the Luce Center, and it’s a piece from 1994. I was working in Paris at that time. I had a wonderful studio there. The piece was really a part of a series of work that I did in response to seeing a remarkable exhibition in Paris of the Blaue Reiter group, the German abstract expressionist movement, and it was a remarkable exhibition on many levels. Just the strength of the imagery was very powerful. The color and the harshness of the lines had a big effect on me, and I started exploring that in my own work, and it's actually very easy to translate my work to painting and back and forth or drawing, which I do, because my work is all made out of thousands and thousands of lines and those lines are glass threads. I refer to them as splashes, like you refer to a splash or stroke of paint.

So the work comes from my work with “filet de verre,” which is a technique which I developed incorporating thousands and thousands of colored glass thread, which I then lay out, fuse together, and subsequently form while it's still hot. So there are aspects of almost every other traditional method of glass forming that I've incorporated into my work because I've had experience with all those methods of forming glass over the years, and when I started evolving this technique, I was able to call upon something from all of those different methods, which enabled me to develop and continue working with this new technique.

So if you see the evolution of my work, it goes from years and years of no color, nothing to do with color, and nothing to do with two-dimensionality because I think the work I do now is a combination of two-dimensionality that you would find in a painting but also the three-dimensionality of the object itself. In fact, I rediscovered my love of color probably mostly when I moved to Europe and was surrounded by great museums on every block practically and so much of the great masters of history available to me to stand in front of as well as wonderful contemporary works in exhibitions and in galleries and museums.

It's always a great honor to have one's work included in a preeminent museum like the Renwick, and I particularly love the Renwick because of its focus, and I'm standing here in a room surrounded by some of the great icons of the 20th century. It's part of the movement that I grew up with, and I think it's been a very powerful movement in America and it’s extended around the world. There are some great, great people here who have extraordinary talent, and it merits at least a gallery if not a whole museum focus to it.

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Toots Zynsky

Works by this artist (2 items)

Videos