MIA Receives Significant Gift of Contemporary Glass Artworks

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Significant gifts of contemporary glass artworks donated to 5 U.S. Institutions by Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

MINNEAPOLIS, MN, FEBRUARY 1, 2013
In honor of the 50th year of the studio glass movement in the United States, which dates to 1962, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser are dispersing their entire glass collection to art institutions around the country. Four encyclopedic art museums—Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)—as well as the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y., have already received 140 works of art from their collection. Additional institutions will receive work in 2013.

The gifts include several objects by notable glass artists, such as Michael Glancy, Klaus Moje, Ann Warff Wolff, Richard Marquis, Sylvia Levenson, Harvey Littleton, Mark Peiser, and the duo Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova. The Greenberg-Steinhauser collection, comprising almost 400 artworks in glass dating from 1975 to 1995, is considered among the top five studio glass collections from that period in the United States.

“We’re giving away as much of the collection as institutions find interesting,’ Greenberg said. “I hope we’ll find homes for everything. It’s important for us to share what was truly a passion in our lives with a lot of other people.”

Eike Schmidt, James Ford Bell Curator of Decorative Arts & Sculpture at the MIA, said, “Dan Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser’s generous gift of thirty-two important contemporary
glass objects gives a meaningful push to the MIA’s holdings in this area. Building upon this prominent donation and previous gifts from Susan and Dan, we are delighted to be one of five institutions nationally to showcase contemporary glass through significant works.”

Greenberg said, “The MIA has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to contemporary materials such as glass and wood. The depth of its collection and its passion for collecting was a wonderful surprise to my wife, Susan, and me when I returned to the Twin Cities and saw the changes that had taken place since I had left as a child in 1945. The arts have always been significant to Minneapolis and an important part of my past is here. I hope this gift enriches the experiences of visitors to the MIA and strengthens the museum’s collection.”

This glass gift follows Greenberg and Steinhauser’s 2008 gift to the MIA of 40 works of contemporary wood art, which was the focus of the 2009 MIA exhibition “An Ingrained Richness: Recent Gifts of Wood Art from the Collection of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.”
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Press contact: Anne-Marie Wagener, awagener@artsmia.org; (612) 870-3280