In conjunction with the autumn exhibition at LE STANZE DEL VETRO and associated as usual with events in the history of the Venini glassworks, the Glass Study Centre has organized a conference entitled Thomas Stearns, a Young American Artist at Venini. The conference will focus on the art of the American artist, who arrived at the Murano furnace in the early 1960s and soon formed a good working relationship with the director of Venini, the architect Ludovico de Santillana. Although eventually better- known for his works in the field of painting, sculpture and weaving, the Oklahoma artist (born in 1936) started his pioneering artistic experimentation with the medium of glass. Indeed, he won an Italian state scholarship to further his study of the topic. This soon brought him into contact with Venini, for which he became a close collaborator. The remarkable craftsmanship of his early works and the originality of his compositions immediately set him apart from other glass artists of the time and earned him an invitation to be a Venini “guest designer”. The results of this collaboration were then shown at the 31st International Art Biennale of Venice in 1962. The conference will explore Stearns’ career by surveying his technical achievements and analyzing the well-known repercussions of his innovative experimentalism. His glass art must, in fact, be seen in a wider international context, given the influence that his Murano experience had on the Studio Glass movement and on other contemporary artists. Lastly, the series of papers by art historians, such as Rosa Barovier Mentasti, Kevin McManus and Carla Sonego, will provide a comparison of Stearns’s techniques and practices in the perspective of a broader, multi-faceted development.

Programma Stearns