Dan Dailey welcomes you to his retrospective, "Impressions of the Human Spirit."

Currier Museum Retrospective Now On View

October 3, 2024

MANCHESTER, NH — Dan Dailey: Impressions of the Human Spirit is Dailey’s first comprehensive museum retrospective in New England, offering an extensive exploration of the renowned artist’s extraordinary work spanning more than five decades. The Currier Museum of Art exhibition opened on September 26, featuring 81 carefully selected objects from 1972 to 2023, ranging from vases to glass murals, blown glass sculpture, figurative lamps and chandeliers. The exhibition is open to the public and runs until February 2, 2025.

“Dailey’s meticulously crafted forms reveal Dailey as an acute observer of life,” says museum Director Jordana Pomeroy. “Each of his works brings a narrative to life, communicating the complexity of human emotion in glass. The Currier is privileged to work with Dailey on this important retrospective of his remarkable body of work.”

“Impressions of the Human Spirit is a retrospective examination of a transformative sculptor whose creative ideas and inventiveness expanded the vocabulary of art,” writes Senior Curator Kurt Sundstrom.

In the 1960s, Dailey was entrenched in the experimental San Francisco art scene, and was among the many discontented artists who rebelled against Abstract Expressionism. Desiring to tell stories and explore the human condition, Dailey turned to the figure and everyday life as a source of artistic inspiration. His chosen medium of glass, which was unfamiliar in the exclusive art world, was initiated by the resurgence of traditional crafts and the material-based teachings of the Bauhaus.

Dailey has maintained that experimental attitude and has stayed faithful to – while greatly expanding on – the traditions of craftsmanship, making his work groundbreaking and difficult to place within established art historical categories.

A beautiful catalog of this exhibition, published by the Currier Museum of Art and designed by Joe Rapone, with essays by Kurt Sundstrom PHD and Henry Adams PHD, is available at the Currier Museum Shop.

This exhibition is generously supported by Pamela A. Harvey. Additional support is provided by the Galena-Yorktown Foundation, the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, Patricia L. Wentworth, and Mark Fagan

UPDATE 12/4/24: ARTalk with Dan Dailey — In the video above, join artist Dan Dailey and exhibition curator Kurt Sundstrom for a lively conversation highlighting signature works selected for his retrospective, and Dailey’s storied career as a groundbreaking artist in glass.

The Currier Museum of Art connects art with diverse audiences, from its neighborhood to international and digital visitors, and embraces regional new museum-goers and under-served communities. The museum is dedicated to the social needs of its community though programs serving people with memory loss, families of those with substance-use disorder, those with physical and cognitive challenges, and military veterans.

Moody Currier and his wife Hannah Slade conceived the idea of founding an art museum in in the 1890s. A former governor of the New Hampshire, Moody died in 1898, and Hannah in 1915. Their estate and house formed the basis of the Currier Gallery of Art, which was chartered by the state legislature in 1919. The museum building opened in October 1929, a few days before the great stock market crash ushered in the Great Depression.

Source: https://currier.org/exhibition/dan-dailey/

"Banana Woman" of the Face Vase Series is Acquired by the Peabody Essex Museum

September 29, 2023

SALEM, MA — The Peabody Essex Museum has announced a major gift of the glass collection of New York-based philanthropists, Betty and Carl Pforzheimer. The Carl and Betty Pforzheimer Collection contains over 200 works of international studio glass and 40 pieces of historic European and American glass. Among these works is “Banana Woman”, a 1990 blown glass vase by Dan Dailey from his Face Vase series (1988-1997).

This acquisition significantly expands PEM’s noted historic glass collection while celebrating the extraordinary aesthetic possibilities that the combination of sand and fire achieves. Selections from this collection, which is remarkable for the diversity of form, scale and technique, will go on view in PEM’s Native American and American Art galleries this year. In 2024, the collection will be featured in the new Pforzheimer Gallery.

“Betty and Carl Pforzheimer have assembled an astounding collection, featuring the work of more than 90 artists, many of whom will be represented in PEM's collection for the first time,” said Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, PEM’s Executive Director and CEO. “The Pforzheimers’ generous donation of works and companion funding establishes PEM as an important destination for experiencing this remarkable medium and also assures the long term accessibility, care and scholarship of the Pforzheimer Collection for generations to come.”

Founded in 1799 by America's first global entrepreneurs, the Peabody Essex Museum is a museum of international art and culture dedicated to connecting art to the world in which it is made. Through its exhibitions, programs, publications, media, and related activities, PEM strives to create experiences that transform people's lives by broadening their perspectives, attitudes, and knowledge of themselves and the wider world.

Source: https://www.pem.org/press-news/significant...

Silken, 2007 by Dan Dailey — ***Silken***, 2007 by Dan Dailey

"Silken" of the Individuals Series is Acquired by the Chrysler Museum of Art

June 21, 2021

NORFOLK, VA — The Chrysler Museum of Art has acquired Silken, a blown glass sculpture made by Dan Dailey in 2007. Standing 22 inches high, the life-size bust will join Dailey’s glass vases Repair (1983) and Liquid Visions (1980) as part of the museum's permanent collection. Silken is one of 128 unique blown glass figures from Dailey's ongoing Individuals series that he began in 2004.

“As in much of Dailey’s work, there is no attempt at realism. The essential qualities of the figure are conveyed through facial expressions, and each Individual is ripe with suggestive body language despite the absence of a full body.”

— CAROLYN SWAN NEEDELL, Curator of Glass

An exhibition of Dailey’s figurative work titled "Dan Dailey: Character Sketch" opened at the museum in February, 2020. The show featured 33 works that span four decades of the artist’s career, including Silken.

"Artifacts at the End of a Decade" Exhibition Opens at the UMCA

March 15, 2021

AMHERST, MA — The online opening for the University of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition, Artifacts at the End of a Decade took place Thursday, February 25th, at 6:00pm. Co-curated from the UMCA collection by Jill Hughes, 2021 MA Art History candidate, and Jessica Scott, 2021 MFA Studio Arts candidate, the exhibition presents the artists’ book Artifacts at the End of a Decade in its entirety for the first time since 1989.

In August of 1979, Steven Watson and Carol Huebner mailed 200 invitations to artists they had never met, asking if they would like to contribute to a project about the previous decade.

More than fifty artists replied, “Yes,” and two years later the project was completed. Artifacts at the End of a Decade is the result — an unbound artists’ book whose “pages” consist of 44 unique pieces of photography, ceramics, fiber, print, clothing, painting and glass, contributed by Dan Dailey and many other artists, including Martha Rosler, Fab 5 Freddy, Laurie Anderson, Sol LeWitt, Michelle Stuart, John Ashbery, Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs, and Robert Kushner.

Artifacts at the End of a Decade 1981 by Dan Dailey. Etched and polished glass. Photo by Stephen Petegorsky — ***Artifacts at the End of a Decade*** 1981 by Dan Dailey. Etched and polished glass.
Photo by Stephen Petegorsky

“The forced perspective of this shape recalls the many steps of an upside-down temple or ziggurat, bringing the viewer to an imagined sense of the far past. The light passing through the transparent etched glass skyline simultaneously allows us a vision beyond the plate towards a possible destination.

"The combination of the image, font and materiality of the piece suggests a science fiction of a fabled or failed utopia. Artifacts was being published in 1981 at the same time as the original Blade Runner was being filmed. Many of us ask ourselves if the world is even more unreal now than Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott imagined it.”

— Jessica Scott

To view the digital exhibition, including virtual tours and audio guides by Jill Hughes and Jessica Scott, visit the exhibition page here.

Source: https://www.umass.edu/arthistory/news/digi...

"Venice and American Studio Glass" Exhibition Opens at Le Stanze del Vetro

December 1, 2020

VENICE, ITALY — The exhibition “Venice and American Studio Glass” opened at Le Stanze del Vetro on September 6, 2020, and is on view until January 10, 2021. Curated by Tina Oldknow and William Warmus, the exhibition gathers together 155 outstanding examples of contemporary art, craft, and design in glass by American artists, with a selection of iconic works by legendary Venetian maestros.

Dan Dailey, a pioneer of American studio glass, designed the exhibition layout for “Venice and American Studio Glass,” in which his work is also featured. The diversity of work in glass, both traditional and ground-breaking, demonstrates the enduring and versatile legacy of Venetian glassmaking in America.

Artists in the exhibition such as Harvey Littleton, Richard Marquis, Lino Tagliapietra, Dale Chihuly, Ginny Ruffner, Dante Marioni, and Nancy Callan, among many others, have had a profound influence on the development and evolution of American studio glass.

“It was back in 2016, when David Landau, one of the founders of Le Stanze del Vetro, was talking to Laura de Santillana, the granddaughter of Paolo Venini, that the idea struck. As he told me, 'I wanted to make sure that people realized that glassmaking in Venice was not only beautiful in itself and had its own history, but also... that it had an enormous effect on American Studio Glass.' Landau went on to invite Tina Oldknow and William Warmus, both former curators at The Corning Museum of Glass, to organize an exhibition to examine this relationship, and met with enthusiastic affirmative responses.

'It’s a story that’s been touched upon several times but has never been systematically thought out,' says Oldknow. The result was 'Venice and American Studio Glass,' which explores the many ways in which Venice in general and glassmaking on Murano in particular have influenced and inspired American glass artists from the nascent days of Studio Glass to the present day.”

— EMMA PARK, Glass Quarterly

Art historian and philanthropist David Landau is behind Le Stanze del Vetro exhibition space on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. It is a joint initiative between The Cini Foundation and the Swiss-based, non-profit foundation Pentagram Stiftung, headed by Marie-Rose Kahane, David’s wife. The aim of Le Stanze del Vetro’s programming is to introduce 20th- and 21st-century glass to as many people as possible, and to make them aware of its history, its beauty, importance, and function.

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Tina Oldknow is an independent curator and art historian specializing in contemporary art, craft, and design in glass. William Warmus is an art writer, independent curator, and art critic.

They have both been curators of modern and contemporary glass at The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York.

Take a virtual tour of “Venice and American Studio Glass” at Le Stanze del Vetro.

From his rural New England studio, Dailey collaborated closely with Oldknow, Warmus and many of the artists throughout the exhibition planning process. He gave studio assistant Ken Gray the assignment to design and build a 1:20 scale model of the Stanze del Vetro galleries and the 155 works to be placed within. The laser-cut, painted cardboard structure was made to fold flat for shipping, with reference photos and instructions for snap-together assembly upon arrival in Venice.