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9 books match the query 'Glass'

cover of Ancient Glass in the J. Paul Getty Museum

Ancient Glass in the J. Paul Getty Museum

Anastassios Antonaras

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024

Illustrated with stunning new photography, this catalogue details the J. Paul Getty Museum’s phenomenal holdings of ancient glass, spanning three millennia.

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of ancient glass—astonishingly delicate, richly hued, and fancifully shaped—is among the most celebrated in the United States. Ranging from the Bronze Age to the medieval period (1500 BCE–1000 CE), the 584 objects included in this publication originated from a wide geographical area, including the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and central Europe.

This catalogue, written by acclaimed scholar Anastassios Antonaras, begins with a fascinating essay on the history of glassmaking—a highly technical art form that is still practiced similarly today—and continues with detailed and informative entries on the works. Each entry is accompanied by vivid photography. The book also includes a history of the collection, glossary of glassmaking terms, technical study, and full bibliography.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/ancient-glass/ and includes 360-degree views and zoomable high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.
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cover of Beyond Breaking the Glass: A Spiritual Guide to Your Jewish Wedding, Revised Edition

Beyond Breaking the Glass

A Spiritual Guide to Your Jewish Wedding, Revised Edition

Rabbi Nancy H. Wiener, Dmin

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2012

This is the book for today's couples, providing all you need to plan a meaningful and spiritual wedding celebration.

This compendium explores the rich history of wedding rituals and customs practiced by Jews through the years. Included are multiple options of traditional, contemporary, and creative rituals as well as prayers for couples of all approaches, orientations, and identities.

Beyond Breaking the Glass is a rich source of practical information for planning a Jewish wedding, and includes a variety of ceremonies, checklists, references, and a planning timeline. This beautiful guidebook will help all couples create a wedding that will resonate with Jewish tradition while offering the very best of contemporary innovations.
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cover of Country of Glass: Poems

Country of Glass

Poems

Sarah Katz

Gallaudet University Press, 2022

Country of Glass is the debut poetry collection from Sarah Katz, who offers an exploration of the concept of precariousness as it applies to bodies, families, countries, and whole societies. Katz employs themes of illness, disability, war, and survival within the contexts of family history and global historical events. The collection moves through questions about identity, storytelling, displacement, and trauma, constructing an overall narrative about what it means to love while trying to survive. The poems in this book—which take the form of free verse, prose poems, sestinas, and erasures—attempt to address human fragility and what resilience looks like in a world where so much is uncertain.
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cover of Glass, Light, and Electricity: Essays

Glass, Light, and Electricity

Essays

Shena McAuliffe

University of Alaska Press, 2020

Fleet-footed and capricious, the essays in Glass, Light & Electricity wander through landscapes both familiar and unfamiliar, finding them equal parts magical and toxic. They explore and merge public and private history through lyric meditations that use research, association, and metaphor to examine subjects as diverse as neon signs, scalping, heartbreak, and seizures. The winner of the 2019 Permafrost Prize in nonfiction, Shena McAuliffe expands the creative possibilities of form.
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cover of Glass: A World History

Glass

A World History

Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Picture, if you can, a world without glass. There would be no microscopes or telescopes, no sciences of microbiology or astronomy. People with poor vision would grope in the shadows, and planes, cars, and even electricity probably wouldn't exist. Artists would draw without the benefit of three-dimensional perspective, and ships would still be steered by what stars navigators could see through the naked eye.

In Glass: A World History, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin tell the fascinating story of how glass has revolutionized the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Starting ten thousand years ago with its invention in the Near East, Macfarlane and Martin trace the history of glass and its uses from the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Rome through western Europe during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution, and finally up to the present day. The authors argue that glass played a key role not just in transforming humanity's relationship with the natural world, but also in the divergent courses of Eastern and Western civilizations. While all the societies that used glass first focused on its beauty in jewelry and other ornaments, and some later made it into bottles and other containers, only western Europeans further developed the use of glass for precise optics, mirrors, and windows. These technological innovations in glass, in turn, provided the foundations for European domination of the world in the several centuries following the Scientific Revolution.

Clear, compelling, and quite provocative, Glass is an amazing biography of an equally amazing subject, a subject that has been central to every aspect of human history, from art and science to technology and medicine.
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cover of Glassworks: The Art of Frederick Birkhill

Glassworks

The Art of Frederick Birkhill

Frederick Birkhill

The Artist Book Foundation, 2020

Glass as an art form has an ancient tradition; the archaeological record suggests that artisans in Egypt and Mesopotamia were fabricating glass vessels and ornaments during the fourth millennium BCE. Its durable nature, range of colors, malleability, and most of all, its optical transparency are qualities that have made glass a premiere art medium. Over a lifetime, Frederick Birkhill (1951–2023) has explored the unique qualities of glass and the numerous techniques and intricacies of working with it. The result of these decades of study is a body of work that is extraordinary in scope, technical expertise, and sheer virtuosity. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to present a new monograph honoring this gifted artist: Glassworks: The Art of Frederick Birkhill.

From his time in England at Burleighfield House, the studio of stained-glass artist Patrick Reyntiens, to his unprecedented visit to Lauscha, the village in the former East Germany famous for both its art and scientific glass production, and his subsequent career as an explorer, teacher, and master of the glass arts, Birkhill has devoted himself to furthering the appreciation of the medium and sharing his vast experience with colleagues, collectors, and students.

Complementing the scholarly contributions by authors with significant backgrounds in the glass arts, the book features in its extensive plate section the lavish photography of Henry Leutwyler, which offers readers an opportunity to examine the complex details and artistic mastery of Birkhill's oeuvre. In addition, the monograph offers a glossary of glass-art terms, a detailed chronology of the artist's life, his extensive exhibition history, and a list of the numerous awards he has received. For those who are passionate about the glass arts, this monograph is a feast for the eyes.

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cover of Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art

Grime, Glitter, and Glass

The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art

Nikki A. Greene

Duke University Press, 2024

In Grime, Glitter, and Glass, Nikki A. Greene examines how contemporary Black visual artists use sonic elements to refigure the formal and philosophical developments of Black art and culture. Focusing on the multimedia art of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Greene traces the intersection of the visual’s sonic possibilities with the Black body’s physical, representational, and metaphorical use in art. She employs her concept of “visual aesthetic musicality” to interpret Black visual art by examining the musical genres of jazz and rap, along with the often-overlooked innovations of funk and rumba, within art historiography. From Bailey’s use of multilayered surfaces of glitter, mud, and recycled materials to meditate on Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism to Stout’s life-size cast of her own body that recalls funk musician Betty Davis to Campos-Pons’s performative and sculptural references to sugar that resonate with the legacy of Celia Cruz, Greene outlines how these artists use mediums such as molded glass sculptures, viscous wet plaster, and dazzling mannequin heads to enhance the manifestations of Black identity. By foregrounding the sonic elements of their work, Greene demonstrates that these artists use sound to make themselves legible, recognizable, and audible.
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cover of Optical Play: Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture

Optical Play

Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture

Julia Bekman Chadaga

Northwestern University Press, 2014

Longlist finalist, 2015 Historia Nova Prize for Best Book on Russian Intellectual and Cultural History 

Julia Bekman Chadaga’s ambitious study posits that glass—in its uses as a material and as captured in culture—is a key to understanding the evolution of Russian identity from the eighteenth century onward. From the contemporary perspective, it is easy to overlook how glass has profoundly transformed vision. Chadaga shows the far-reaching effects of this phenomenon.

Her book examines the similarities between glass and language, the ideological uses of glass, and the material’s associations with modernity, while illuminating the work of Lomonosov, Dostoevsky, Zamyatin, and Eisenstein, among others. In particular, Chadaga explores the prominent role of glass in the discourse around Russia’s contentious relationship with the West—by turns admiring and antagonistic—as the nation crafted a vision for its own future. Chadaga returns throughout to the spectacular aspect of glass and shows how both the tendentious capacity and the playfulness of this material have shaped Russian culture.

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cover of Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life During the Long Gilded Age

Undercut

Cut Glass in Working-Class Life During the Long Gilded Age

Joseph Larnerd

University of Delaware Press, 0

How did workers experience cut glass during its cultural heyday? Rather than privilege the stories of factory owners or wealthy consumers, Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life During the Long Gilded Age refracts the medium’s history through the labors required to make and maintain these dazzling artifacts as well as popular representations of this work, from demonstrations at world's fairs to images of domestic workers with finished pieces in their charge. Cut glass and the many manifestations of public interest in its labors offered working people, too, occasions for self-reflection and, perhaps, self-realization. Foregrounding their lives, Undercut offers a multifaceted social art history of a once-popular genre of decorative art that cuts across class, gender, and race.

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