- Do you ever wonder about the materials that make up our everyday items, like a window pane or a teacup?

How are they so durable?

And how has the same material been used in so many different kinds of objects?

Today we are visiting a special museum dedicated to a single material, glass.

(lively music) - Safety glasses on.

(lively music) - It's like freckles, but for glass.

Glass is a versatile ancient material that is still being explored.

And this museum likes to share how the story of glass is also the story of culture and of science.

Hi there, I'm Chrisena, and today we are exploring the Corning Museum of Glass.

♪ Let's go, let's go ♪ ♪ Let's go, let's go, let's go ♪ - Let's go.

♪ Let's go (chuckles) ♪ - The Corning Museum of Glass is leading the charge around the world to help people like you and me understand the art, history, and the technology of glass.

More than 3,000 years of history are housed in the museum's collection, ranging from ancient Egyptian to contemporary art.

The museum's mission is to inspire people to see glass in a new light.

You can even take classes and make your own glass at their studio on site.

(lively music) - [Mieke] Hi, Chrisena.

- Oh, hi, Mieke.

So nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you too.

Welcome to CMOG.

- Thank you.

Just admiring the art here.

- This is a piece called "Forest Glass" by Katherine Gray, and she used thrifted glasses in the form of trees and it is a nod to the use of trees in making glass in medieval Europe.

So it is a really fun piece to talk about and lots of details to notice.

- [Chrisena] It's wonderful.

- So this is "Global Cities" by Norwood Viviano.

One part is the map on the floor with cities labeled.

The second part is these blown glass forms above each city that represent the population growth and decline happening in that city over time.

And the third part is this graphic along our wall, which has each of these pieces represented chronologically, so from the oldest to the newest, with some world events kind of outlined as well.

- Now, I've seen a lot of paintings, but I've never seen something quite like this.

It's very immersive, three-dimensional.

What makes this different than a painting or a drawing?

- So with sculpture, and in this case with glass sculpture, you can walk around it, you can examine it from a whole bunch of different sides, and in the case of this work in particular, you can represent data in a 3D mode instead of just numbers or a graph.

- I see bright blues, I see dark blacks, I see some purples.

Do they have different meanings?

- They do.

So the colors also represent how old the cities are.

So the oldest cities are represented in black, the youngest cities are in blue, and the ones in between are in purple.

- And I also see a lot of different shapes.

This one sort of looks like an end table.

Some of them look like little saucers, they're nice and flat.

- So that is how the artist is showing the ups and downs of populations in these cities.

So you can see some of these cities have huge recent population booms.

And the clear, the colorless glass on the bottoms of a lot of them, represents the time from the city, we know the city existed, the city was founded, but there aren't any population records.

- Oh, wow.

I see these sort of white lines on each of the structures.

What is that?

- So those white lines make up a pattern called Reticello, which is from the Renaissance in Venice.

So the artist is making a nod to the history of glass making.

And Reticello is when you take thin white rods of glass called canes and you put them in a crisscross pattern.

And if you look really closely, you can see little air bubbles where all the crisscrosses are in the space in between.

- I see them.

It's like freckles, but for glass.

- It is, it is.

I think the air bubbles are really fun.

Let's go see another artwork that involves secret codes.

- Secret codes.

I'm in, let's go - All right, right this way.

(playful music) So this artwork is called "Evening", and it is a chandelier that blinks a poem in Morse code, and it's about the slow, silent fall of night.

So you have a light source that blinks a poem about light in light.

There's a computer involved.

So you can see the top line there has the transmitted text as it's blinking as the chandelier blinks.

The second line is the Morse code as the chandelier blinks.

And the third section is the poem.

- "From flower to flower, the hepaticas, widespread under the light grow faint.

The petals reach inward, the blue tip bend toward the bluer heart."

Dash, dot, dot.

I can follow along now.

- [Mieke] Great.

- If only I knew Morse code, I wouldn't need the translation.

(lively music) - So this is "Copper Pour, Molten Drawing Number One", and the artist uses a steel frame and drips molten glass and copper over it, so it's very much like drawing in 3D.

- So this is glass?

- It is, it is glass and some other materials too.

- [Chrisena] How long has glass been around?

- So glass has really been around as long as there have been volcanoes and as long as lightning has hit sand.

Humans have been making glass for about 4,000 years.

- Is it challenging to preserve and take care of works of art like this?

- It is.

There are multiple materials in here, each material needs something different.

One of the main responsibilities of a museum is to take care of the artworks in its collection so that future generations can come see them and that they're safe and well-preserved.

That is the job of our Conservation Department, and I can show you their lab.

- Let's go.

- Let's go.

(lively music) - [Chrisena] Hi!

- [Astrid] Lovely to meet you.

- [Chrisena] So, where are we right now?

- We're in the Conservation Lab.

- So this is where objects come when they need a little attention.

So we study them, we examine them, we see if they need any repairs and do the repairs.

We're kind of like glass doctors.

- And while they're in here, it's a good opportunity to learn about the objects, how they're made and what they're made of.

A lot of the times we're trying to figure out what an object is in order to approach how to fix it.

- There's often things that we can't see with the naked eye, so we have some tools that help us with that, like ultraviolet radiation and the microscope.

Let's take a look.

Safety glasses on.

- Oh, here we have an example of a piece of glass.

And before I would do any kind of treatment on this, I would first try to figure out what type of glass I'm looking at.

And the answer to that would sort of inform what kind of treatment we do.

So we're looking at this under two types of ultraviolet radiation.

If I looked at it under longwave, it's sort of unremarkable, but under shortwave it's that bright blue fluorescence that tells me that this is a lead glass.

Another exciting one is this sort of green transparent glass.

Under longwave, you see that bright lemony, yellow color that's characteristic of a uranium glass.

This is a type of radiation that's not visible to the human eye.

- [Chrisena] Why do they show up as different colors?

- The compositions of glass itself is different.

- One of my favorite types of glass, this was a teaching model of a soft-bodied marine creature that was made about 150 years ago in Germany.

There are lots of little pieces that all come together, but if we look at it under UV, we can see that all these little spots on there were glued on.

But then a different adhesive was used to attach that.

So I can tell that because it's fluorescing a different color.

So all of the models they made were invertebrates.

So those are animals that don't have a backbone and they are soft-bodied and they can't really be preserved, so we can't stuff 'em like you would a mammal.

And at this time, people were just exploring the oceans and the seas and seeing these creatures, but they had no way to teach people about them other than through drawings and these models that were able to capture kind of the spirit and the colors and the form of the animals that couldn't be preserved.

- [Chrisena] So this was very innovative at the time.

- Other models had been made with things like paper mache, but not in glass, and glass for these kind of creatures, so it includes squids and octopuses and sea slugs and fun things like that.

We should go over to the microscope and take a look at it.

- [Chrisena] Let's do it.

- Let's take a look at his head first.

So here we can see his little eye, we can see the different paint colors.

There's reds and blues and some yellow and these little dots.

You can see how the light kind of bounces off of that cracked surface.

And so moving light around can often be helpful in seeing where a crack is.

So here we can see these arms, so these are kind of tubes of glass with these suckers on there.

And you can see how kind of held together by this other material.

So these models were made about 150 years ago.

One of the big mysteries about these models is how they were made.

So we know that they used basic glass-making techniques and tools.

There are really no people alive today who have been able to figure out exactly how to make these and how to accurately replicate them.

- The mystery remains.

I'm feeling so inspired by all of the ways that this museum is dedicated to glass.

I'll never look at glass or through it the same way.

Well, I've got to go reflect in my journal.

See you next time.

(lively music)