Closing Event: Ghost Optics & Portals and Passages

Ghost Optics
April 2 through December 31, 2026

Visitors to the Museum of American Glass will encounter a site-specific window intervention by guest artist and curator, Jocelyne Prince. Her work, Ghost Optics, addresses early methods of flat glass and bottle glass production. Of particular interest to the artist was the variety of Americana imagery found on the historic glass bottles in the collection. Wanting to source these images as directly as possible, Prince dug into the WheatonArts mold collection and honed in on one particular mold, a flask for spirits, which had an inset for interchangeable emblems. The imagery for these emblems was a mix of patriotic, historic, and commemorative motifs. This mold was part of an industrial technology known as the “American System.” Similar to industrial advances in other kinds of production, the glass industry capitalized on a bottle mold with interchangeable parts – in this case an assortment of emblem inserts meant that one mold could be used to make a multitude of different bottles.

Working with the Paul Wissmach Glass Company in West Virginia, Prince hot cast the various emblems and then fed them into the industrial glass roller. The emblems are stretched, crackled, and sometimes even fractured—their ghost-like watermark characteristic becomes visible at certain angles and invisible at other angles. This material process mirrors how we test our patriotism and democracy. . . challenging its limits, and sometimes going beyond.


Portals and Passages
April 2 through December 31, 2026
Curator Jocelyne Prince has brought together five artists: Justin Ginsberg, Romina Gonzales, Ashley Raye Harris, Matthew Day Perez, and Alexander Wenstrup, who have an acute understanding of how just a few millimeters of glass can shift our perception of the world. Each work in this exhibition catalyzes the optical and sculptural space that exists within a sheet of glass. In some cases, the surface of the glass has been disrupted, or bears the marks of the action of its making, or the glass composition has been specially concocted to refract light, or the tiniest amount of air is trapped and visually manifested. A fascination with surface, the space just beyond the surface, what we see through the glass, the space within the glass, and what we see reflected in the glass preoccupies these artists.

The works in this exhibition have been selected in conjunction with, and as a complement to the research and activities that are part of the November 2026 WheatonArts symposium on window glass production methods, “Transparent Thresholds.”