Palette of glass: Bead artists showcase the many facets of glass

By Joe Pinchot
Herald Staff Writer

PITTSBURGH— Glass is so commonplace — it’s in our beer bottles, windows, drinking glasses and household decorations — that it’s easy to overlook what a flexible medium for art it can be.

In the right hands, glass can evince the same narrative and expressive power as paint or any other art medium. Glass can be clear or opaque, shiny or muted, mixed with other materials or left alone. It can be pulled into any shape imaginable, and made part of something beautiful, whimsical, revolutionary or familiar.

Those attributes are explored by the 44 artists from the International Society of Glass Beadmakers who contributed works to “Metamorphosis: The Life Cycle of a Glass Bead” in Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Museum in Pittsburgh.

In this context, the definition of a bead is not easy to pin down. A bead can be pea-sized and round, but it also can be the size and texture of gravel, long and thin, or disk-shaped.

Dianne Zack makes glass look like polished pebbles with water droplets clinging to them in “Racepoint Necklace.”

Terri Caspary-Schmidt crafted what looks like miniature Tiffany lamp globes for “Ivory and Olive Necklace.” Beth Williams created beads with a shimmery, watery quality for “Amber Necklace.” They are long and thin and end in what look like licks of flame or a corkscrew twist.

Barbara Cope Svetlick’s “The English Garden” shows beads that bloomed into flower petals, leaves and buds, colored with the delicacy of the real thing.


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Pam Dugger went for a different kind of texture in “Miami Rocks!” Her beads look like brightly colored shells that were melted into globs, leaving behind layers of color and texture.



In the aptly titled “Wonkie Gone Wild,” Debby Weaver fixed brightly colored and striped beads and disks that stick to and explode from each other along silver rods. “Wonkie” appears to be atoms caught in an hallucinogenic frenzy.

Collaborators Lea Zinke, Sherry Moroshoki and Fay Mellichamp went for a “lush and extravagant composition,” they said, in “After the Fall,” but the same could be said of each bead in the piece. Many are surfaced with dozens or hundreds of smaller beads that seem to rise, explode or cower.

Other artists created figures and narratives with their compositions. Jennifer Naylor’s “Under the Coral Sea” shows orange- and white-striped fish smiling with large, white teeth and bright red lips in a sea of colored beads.

Nobuko Ikuta fashioned an allegory of life in “Metamorphosis — You and Me.” In her necklace, a muscular man and an enormously bosomed woman hold a cord of life on which babies crawl and an embryo dangles.

Sharon Peters’ “Spring Has Sprung” depicts the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with the insect as a smiling, chubby caterpillar.

Carolyn Baum created a terrarium bead containing a lake, shore, trees and plants in intimate detail — down to the bark of the tree and grooves in the rocks — for “Rainbow Lake Necklace.”

“Curiosity Killed the Cat” by Francesca Cerrata shows a cat hunting a fish, and its sad face once it has been trapped in the bowl.

The exhibit also includes a case of beadmakers’ tools and a video of a bead being made.

The show is a fine complement to the museum’s permanent display, “Shattering Notions,” which details the making of glass, Pittsburgh history as a center for glassmakers, and the functional and creative uses of glass in everyday life.

The show runs through July 14. Information: 412-454-6000 and www.pghhistory.org