Exhibition: Ancient glass

http://tinyurl.com/2qrthf (statesmanjournal.com)

"Willamette University graduate Richard Brockway wanted to be an archaeologist but ended up as an engineer. But he never lost his first love. Over a 30-year period, he traveled to the Middle East, Asia and Europe, amassing a collection of antiquities that has led to a new exhibit at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Ancient Glass: Selections from the Collection of Richard Brockway.
Brockway, who will make an appearance at the museum Thursday to talk about his collection, is lending 46 of his 150 pieces of glass from what museum director John Olbrantz calls one of the finest such collections in the country. Brockway also collects ceramics, sculpture, mosaics, coins and lamps. He operates an antiquities business,Ancient Art International, out of his Florida home.
The works on view at Hallie Ford's Study Gallery are small but precious: drinking vessels, tableware, toiletry vessels, beakers and storage bottles from Egypt, the Near East, Greece and Rome, selected to demonstrate the evolution of glass artists' skill and mastery of glassblowing techniques. . . . At the beginning of the 18th century BCE, Egyptians developed a method for producing hollow glass vessels, making a core mold of compacted clay or dung and winding molten glass around it.
Among the notable pieces in the exhibit is a gleaming blue Ushabti from the New Kingdom. The tiny mold-cast work is a mummy-shaped figure meant to be placed in a tomb to do the work of the deceased in the afterlife. A complete collection would consist of 401, one for each day of the Egyptian year, plus 36 foremen. A small but striking piece is the Eye of Horus, a mold-cast work of the late period, probably originally found on a statue or statuette of Horus, the falcon-headed god of Upper and Lower Egypt."

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The Hallie Ford Museum website is at:

http://www.willamette.edu/museum_of_art/index.htm

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