Interview with the prestigious curator Susie J. Silbert

I think that the best way to characterize my experience at The Corning Museum of Glass over the last seven years is that it was FULL. Full of incredible highs—New Glass Now, major changes to New Glass Review, historic Rakow Commissions, major reinstalls of the contemporary galleries; full of connections to artists, collectors, scholars, gallerists, and more—and also full of challenges. Big changes like that don’t come without some deserts to cross and hurdles to jump, so my time was full of plenty of those too.

I’m proud of what I achieved while I was there and it is largely because of the collaborations, partnerships, and relationships I enjoyed with so many excellent colleagues across the Museum and artists, collectors, scholars, and others across the field. So I really see my success as the result of a collective and there is no better experience than being part of a good team.

Absolutely it was difficult to leave the Museum! I have been so incredibly honored to have this role and I appreciate and value the opportunities and responsibilities that came with it.

Getting to be a voice for artists and an advocate for their work from that platform was absolutely a dream and I am very proud of the things I was able to accomplish from that position. BUT, believing in artists, advocating for them, and creating opportunities was my work long before I came to Corning and it will continue to be my work for long after. So I am very hopeful for the future.

A lot happened in seven years, so there are many contributions I could list: from major acquisitions by contemporary artists like Vanessa German, Larry Bell, and Olafur Eliasson, to pathbreaking Rakow Commissions like Rui Sasaki’s transportative, room-size installation Liquid Sunshine: I am a Pluviophile and David Colton’s Untitled, Corning Museum, the first glass cannabis pipe ever acquired by an art museum. And of course, there is the groundbreaking exhibition New Glass Now which changed the narrative on contemporary glass and brought the work of so many different artists to Corning, to the Renwick Galleries of the Smithsonian and to the Toyama Art Glass Museum in Japan. The things I set in motion will keep unfolding for the next couple of years in exhibition, acquisition, and other areas, which is also nice.

But those are just lists of things, my real contribution—what I am most proud of—is what those things represent: that the field of contemporary glass is open. That what art made from glass IS, who it is made BY, and who it is FOR, are open questions, always evolving and expanding. It has been gratifying to see other institutions move in directions I’ve had a hand in opening up—the Renwick Galleries now have a cannabis pipe, for instance—and crazy rewarding to hear from people who have felt that change. Museum visitors, artists, docents, and others have told me in the last few weeks that I made them feel more included in the Museum and in glass than they ever had before; that they felt like they could be themselves in new way. Nothing could be more gratifying to me than that. It’s hard enough to be a person in the world, so if I contributed, even just a little bit to helping people feel a little better about themselves, that is big success.