The Toledo Museum of Art, where glass objects have had pride of place for a century, is now broadening its strong collection in multiple directions. On the evening of April 12, Sophie Ong, the museum’s Hirsch Glass Curatorial Fellow, will lecture via Zoom for the Art Glass Forum | New York on recent acquisitions, exhibitions and reinstallations that reveal glass’s historical significance and expand the museum’s narratives.

Ong joined the museum in Fall 2020. She curated a year-long exhibition Chameleon Effects: Glass (Un)Defined, extended through May 2022, which brings together historical and contemporary works from the TMA’s collection to explore 4,000 years of technical and formal experimentation in glass and examine the versatility of glass through its relationships with precious stones, metalwork, ceramics, photography, and performance. Ong has overseen the museum’s recent reinstallation of the Cloister Gallery, which offers fresh angles—chronologically, culturally, geographically, and materially—of an interconnected and global Middle Ages.

Ong has brought important acquisitions to TMA’s collection, including a fifth-century green beaker that German glassblowers covered in claw forms. She joined the TMA from the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris. She served as co-curator with Diane Wright for TMA’s Winter 2022 show, The Age of Armor: Treasures from the Higgins Armory Collection at the Worcester Art Museum. Ong and Wright’s next co-curated show, Bestowing Beauty: Masterpieces from Persian Lands, opens on April 23, 2022. Ong earned degrees from Smith College and Rutgers University and specializes in northern European art from the 13th through 16th centuries. She has a secondary concentration in Islamic art and architecture. Her research focuses on the production and reception of late medieval sumptuous arts and questions of media interactions. Among the institutions where she has previously worked are The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Frick Collection, Smithsonian Institution, Smith College Museum of Art, and Rutgers’ Zimmerli Art Museum.

IMAGES:

(LEFT) Late Roman or Early Merovingian (probably Germany), Claw Beaker, about 400, glass; blown, applied, tooled, 6 × 3 15/16 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 2021.40.

(RIGHT) Egypt (Cairo), Mamluk period, Mosque Lamp, ca. 1349-1355, brownish colorless glass; blown, tooled on the pontil, enameled and gilded; applied foot-ring and loops for suspension, H: 34.3 cm (13 7/16 in.); Diam (without suspension loops): 25.7 cm (10 1/8 in.), Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1933.320.