NEW ORLEANS, LA.- Beginning this month, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) presents the first ever comprehensive look at the institution’s extensive collection of glass objects ranging from tiny ancient Egyptian amulets to large-scale works of contemporary sculpture. Opening Friday, August 30, Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art explores how a common material has inspired innovation in the arts and sciences for millennia. The exhibition is on view in NOMA’s Ella West Freeman Galleries through February 10, 2025.

Featuring an expansive range of objects drawn entirely from NOMA’s exceptional glass collection, the exhibition showcases a diversity of work to foreground how glass is connected to histories of scientific discovery, foodways, cultural exchange, and artistic innovation.

“A comprehensive historic glass collection comprises one of the hallmark areas of NOMA’s important holdings in decorative arts and design. Sand, Ash, Heat proposes a unique interpretive lens to consider these objects alongside works in other parts of NOMA’s collection,” said Susan M. Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of NOMA. “The exhibition demonstrates how we might use one ubiquitous material as a case study to examine a much broader history of human creativity across time and place.”

The history of glass is ultimately a history of art, culture, technology, and science. Sand, Ash, Heat highlights glass artistry and production across a span of over 4,000 years, exploring glass as a vehicle for the transfer of ideas around the world and tracing innovation in manufacture and artistic expression in this important medium.

In presenting a broad look at glass from prehistory to present day, Sand, Ash, Heat highlights celebrated traditions of glass alongside new perspectives on the material.

The exhibition includes a focus on the legacy of glass-making on the Venetian island of Murano, which since the 13th century has been at the center of a broad network of international glass exchange. With a debt to ancient Roman glass and to technologies perfected in Syria and Egypt, Venetian glass set the European standard for fine tableware emulated by glassmakers around the world.

Sand, Ash, Heat also features standout examples of “art glass” from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when artists began to look at glass in a new way. At that time, makers shifted from considering the function and decoration of glass to manipulating the material’s color and form to express ideas and artistic visions. Examples from Louis Comfort Tiffany, René Lalique, the Wiener Werkstätte, and others show how glass was an important part of the Art Nouveau style, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and other artistic advances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Additionally, key figures in the 20th-century American studio craft movement from New Orleans and beyond demonstrate how artist communities formed around glassmaking. Sand, Ash, Heat features former students and professors of Tulane University, including Gene Koss, Deborah Czeresko, and Mitchell Gaudet—underscoring the importance of the hot shop founded by Koss in 1976. And works by modern and contemporary artists, including Christopher Wilmarth, Lynda Benglis, and Olafur Eliasson, demonstrate the possibilities of glass to convey ideas and effect sensory experiences.

Today, artists continue to reference and update these traditions through their own experiments with glass, including a monumental black glass chandelier by Fred Wilson that highlights worldwide cultural exchange and a new work by Sharif Bey, the latest in a series of commissions inspired by NOMA’s historic holdings in decorative arts and design.

Exploration of glass in modern and contemporary art at NOMA continues outside in the museum’s Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, where visitors can see large-scale and site-specific art created in glass by Larry Bell, Maya Lin, Jean-Michel Othoniel, and others.

“This exhibition shows glass in its full complexity—rare or common, delicate or powerful. At all moments of human artistic and scientific achievement, glass was there,” said Mel Buchanan, NOMA’s RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts and Design. “Glass lenses improved human sight and allowed us to explore the solar system; advancements in glass architecture can be seen in both Gothic cathedrals and modern skyscrapers; and today’s glass phone screens and glass fiber-optic networks connect our world at a speed we could not have imagined even thirty years ago. Even a modest wine bottle and the glasses used to toast a loved one’s accomplishments are part of that shared human history in glass.”

Sand, Ash, Heat is a significant contribution to understanding and sharing NOMA’s permanent collection, which includes nearly 5,000 works of glass. In the 1950s, railroad executive Melvin P. Billups donated his superb collection to the museum (then known as the Delgado Museum of Art), honoring his wife Clarice Marston Billups in her hometown of New Orleans. The Billups historic glass collection forms the throughline for this exhibition and accompanying catalogue—alongside more recent strategic acquisitions to tell a more complete narrative.

Visitors can expect to see over 250 works of glass art, including:

• Ancient objects from around the world, including what is likely the oldest object in NOMA’s collection—a cast blue glass Ram’s Head from the 18th Dynasty of Egypt (1550–1292 BCE). Also included are examples of early Roman blown glass (100–400 CE), rare Chinese Han Dynasty ear ornaments (202 BCE–220 CE), and a faceted Sasanian Empire bowl (500–700 CE), and a glass cosmetic flask in the shape of a dromedary, or Arabian camel (700–900 CE).

• Glass from various points of innovation in the material, including examples of Venice’s famous featherlight “Cristallo” glass from the 17th century, and a very rare example of George Ravenscroft’s 1674 experiment with making “lead” glass.

• An extraordinary 1920s bottle by Maurice Marinot, who exhibited with the French Fauves before turning to glassmaking in the 1910s. He became one of the first artists to embrace a completely new aesthetic for the medium, making intentionally artistic work that incorporated entrapped bubbles into thick, sturdy vessels that contrasted with the material’s traditional delicacy.

• A “Ghost” chair designed by Cini Boeri, one of the first female designers to rise to prominence after World War II. Molded from a single sheet of half-inch-thick tempered glass, the elegant chair shows how modern makers experimented with form and production methods.

• Works by Gene Koss, who founded the hot shop at Tulane University, and other artists affiliated with the school’s rich history of glass-making, including Deborah Czeresko, winner of season one of Netflix’s Blown Away.

• Glass beadwork, including an example of New Orleans Black Masking Indian traditions. A newly-acquired “Shango” Spyboy Suit by Big Chief Dow M. Edwards of the Timbuktu Warriors is presented alongside works from NOMA’s collections of African and Indigenous art.

• A major 2017 sculpture titled The Way The Moon’s in Love with the Dark Chandelier by Fred Wilson, celebrated for his work that challenges racist assumptions in history, culture, and museums. The seven-foot-tall Murano-style black glass chandelier opens the exhibition with dichotomies between dark and light, metal and glass, floral and geometric, European and Middle Eastern, and history and today.

• Recently commissioned by NOMA, a work by Sharif Bey titled Domestic: Queen continues the artist’s longstanding artistic investigation of regalia, ceremony, and adornment. Inspired by the museum’s galleries and collection—set within a city rich in pageantry traditions—the sculpture draws from the visual heritage of African and Oceanic art, while also probing questions about power dynamics in today’s North American museums.