Toots Zynsky

American artist Toots Zynsky is an acknowledged master of the International Studio Glass Movement. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design where she began working with glass in radically new ways — first as thermoformed sculpture and later in video-performance. After graduating, she travelled extensively and lived in Europe (Paris and Amsterdam) from the early 1980s until 1999. During that time, she also designed a special project for Venini in Murano.

Her practice is based on a technique she developed and named “Filet-de-Verre”, which involves the thermal fusion and forming of large quantities of coloured glass threads, produced in her studio from glass canes made in Murano, Italy.

Zynsky’s artworks are represented in over seventy international museum collections, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Corning Museum of Glass, New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; MUDAC, Lausanne; the Musée des Arts Décoratifs du Louvre, Paris; the Musei Civici Veneziani (Museo Correr), Venice; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.