Littleton work on display

An upcoming exhibition at the Asheville Art Museum will offer a wide-ranging look at the father of the Studio Glass Movement.

A Hand in Studio Craft: Harvey K. Littleton as Peer and Pioneer highlights recent gifts to the Asheville Art Museum’s Collection, as well as material loaned by the family of glass artist Harvey K. Littleton. This exhibition places Harvey and Bess Littleton’s collection into the context of their lives, as they moved around the United States, connected with other artists, and developed their own work. This exhibition, curated by Associate Curator Whitney Richardson, will be on view in the Judith S. Moore Gallery at the museum, located in downtown Asheville, from January 19 through June 27, 2022. 

Littleton, a Corning, New York, native who died in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, in 2013, founded the Studio Glass Movement in the United States in 1962 when, as a teacher, he instituted a glass art program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the first of its kind in the United States. He taught the next generation of glass artists — who taught the next — and his influence can still be seen today. Before he dedicated himself to the medium of glass, Littleton studied industrial design, ceramics, and metalwork at the University of Michigan and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

He met his wife, the former Bess Tamura, a painting student, at the University of Michigan. Over the course of their careers, Harvey and Bess collected artwork by their fellow artists and amassed an impressive collection from the early days of the Studio Glass Movement and the height of the American mid-century Studio Pottery Movement. “This exhibition offers the viewer an exciting opportunity to see some of Harvey K. Littleton’s early work in ceramic and metal — directly from his family’s collection — before he began making art in glass,” Richardson said. “Best known for his glassworks, those will be on display alongside the work of his students and his peers making clear the influence he had on them and the Studio Glass Movement.”