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One town in upstate New York quietly became home to the world’s greatest glass museum

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New York, JUL 6, 2021 - Exterior view of the Corning Museum of Glass

Where 3,500 years of glass history live

Halfway between New York City and Niagara Falls, in a small town most Americans have never thought to stop in, sits one of the country’s most remarkable museums.

The Corning Museum of Glass covers 10 acres and holds more than 50,000 objects, from ancient Egyptian sculptures to smartphone-screen technology.

You can walk through centuries in a single afternoon, watch a 500-pound glass blob become a sculpture, and leave with something you made yourself. That last part is the reason most people come back.

Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, NY, Exterior.

A century-old company’s gift to the nation

Corning Glass Works opened this museum in 1951 to mark its 100th anniversary, handing it to the public as a gift.

On opening day, the collection held 2,000 objects, five staff members worked the floor, and a glass-walled building designed by Harrison and Abramovitz housed it all.

The company behind it, now called Corning Incorporated, has spent more than 170 years developing Pyrex, fiber optics and Gorilla Glass. The museum they built turned out to outlast any single product they ever made.

An exterior portion of the Corning Museum of Glass, as seen from Museum Way on a February 2022 afternoon. The unusually-shaped annex seen here, faced in glossy metal panels, was built during the museum's first major expansion, inaugurated in 1980 and designed by Latvian-American architect Gunnar Birkerts. It's an interconnected series of four galleries that surround a space that used to house the museum's Rakow Research Library (which later moved across the street). These galleries, now used as exhibition space for the museum's collection of ancient and antique glass, are elevated high above ground on concrete pillars, the better to avoid a repeat of the 1972 flood that wrought immense damage to the museum as well as the rest of the city.

The flood that almost ended it all

In 1972, Hurricane Agnes sent five feet of floodwater through the museum. Hundreds of glass objects took damage.

Thousands of library books were destroyed. The loss could have shuttered the place for years.

Instead, staff and volunteers from other museums across the country spent two years restoring what they could. The museum reopened within weeks of the flood, running on determination and borrowed help.

That story sits behind everything you see on the walls today.

New York, JUL 6, 2021 - Interior view of the Corning Museum of Glass

Walk through 35 centuries without leaving the building

The 35 Centuries of Glass Galleries take you from ancient Egypt and Rome through the Islamic world, Venetian Renaissance workshops, and into the modern era.

One of the earliest known glass portraits in existence came from Egypt, made somewhere between 1450 and 1400 B.C. You’ll pass through Asian glass, American glass, and a dedicated gallery on how Corning became one of the country’s top centers for glass cutting.

Every country and every era where glassmaking happened has something on these walls.

Museum-goers peruse the Contemporary Art + Design Gallery at the Corning Museum of Glass, as seen during a February 2022 visit. This 26,000-square-foot space is part of the museum's third and most recent expansion, designed by architect Thomas Phifer and inaugurated in 2015. "Cloudlike" is the adjective used by the museum itself to describe the space, whose exterior is faced in white glass and which is lit primarily by a skylight roof. Here is where visitors encounter the museum's collection of contemporary glass art, the largest in the world, dating from 1990 and later and organized according to the thematic ideas they explore.

The 2015 wing that changed what a museum could look like

Architect Thomas Phifer designed the Contemporary Art and Design Wing, which opened in March 2015.

At 100,000 square feet, it holds a 26,000-square-foot gallery, the largest space in the world set aside for contemporary art in glass.

Curving white walls and skylights run throughout, and a 150-foot window looks out over a one-acre green.

Works by Dale Chihuly, Lino Tagliapietra and Karen LaMonte hang here, and the display barriers protecting the large-scale sculptures are made from Gorilla Glass, the same material in your phone screen.

CORNING, NY - AUG 31: Demo at the Amphitheatre Hot Shop at Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, as seen on Aug 31, 2024.

Five hundred seats and one very hot furnace

The Amphitheater Hot Shop seats 500 people, making it the largest venue in the world for watching live glassblowing. It sits inside what used to be the ventilator building of the old Steuben Glass factory.

Daily demonstrations run with narration, and close-up cameras feed live video so you can see straight into the furnaces.

Glassmakers pull molten glass on steel pipes and shape it into vases, bowls and sculptures while the narrator walks you through every move. Admission covers the show.

CORNING, NY - AUG 31: Demo at the Amphitheatre Hot Shop at Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, as seen on Aug 31, 2024.

Pull up a blowpipe and make something yourself

The Make Your Own Glass program runs for all ages, and you don’t need any experience to sign up. Sessions start at 15 minutes for blown glass ornaments and go up to an hour for deeper glassblowing work.

You pick your colors and your shape, then work side by side with an experienced glassmaker. Options include flameworking, kiln fusing, sandblasting and hand engraving.

Most finished pieces need overnight cooling, so plan to pick yours up after noon the following day or have it shipped home.

CORNING, NY - AUG 31: 35 Centuries of Glass exhibit at Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, as seen on Aug 31, 2024.

A $55 million Studio that opened in October 2024

Last fall, the museum opened a major expansion of The Studio, growing it from 24,000 to 60,000 square feet at a cost of $55.3 million.

The new space includes North America’s first large-scale glass casting center, with six large kilns and a 500-pound gravity-feed casting furnace.

A technology center brings in CNC machines, 3D printers, neon-making equipment, and metal and wood shops.

Seven individual artist studios make up the Residency Center, and a two-year Glassmaking Institute trains working artists in furnace work, flameworking and cold working.

CORNING, NY - AUG 31: Demo at the Innovation Hot Shop at Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, as seen on Aug 31, 2024.

A 200-inch telescope disk and fiber optics you can explore

The Innovation Center connects three floating pavilions with a 300-foot bridge, and the exhibits inside cover glass technology that reshaped daily life.

The 200-inch telescope disk that Corning cast in 1934 stands as the museum’s signature object.

Interactive displays explain how fiber optic cables move data at the speed of light and how Gorilla Glass protects the screens on billions of phones worldwide.

You can touch most of it, which makes the science land differently than reading about it ever would.

This exhibit in the "35 Centuries of Glass" gallery at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York comprising an inkstand, various pen wipers and trays, and a pair of vases exemplifies the work of the studio of Louis Comfort Tiffany, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries famously turned out a wide variety of different goods in a unified Art Nouveau aesthetic. With a long and storied career of almost 60 years stretching from his recruitment by a Brooklyn glasshouse all the way through his death at an advanced age, Tiffany is easily the most renowned glass artist in U.S. history, as well as that nation's leading exponent of the Art Nouveau movement, with a roster of well-known masterworks too numerous to list. As seen during an April 2022 visit to the museum.

Tiffany Studios, paperweights and Frederick Carder’s legacy

A dedicated gallery covers the full range of decorative work that came out of Louis C. Tiffany’s workshops.

Nearby, the museum holds one of the world’s most complete paperweight collections, with more than a thousand examples running from the earliest mid-19th-century pieces to large modern works.

The Frederick Carder Gallery recognizes the English glass master who founded Steuben Glass in Corning in 1903. These three sections alone could take an hour if you slow down and look.

Title: Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York Physical description: 1 photograph : digital, TIFF file, color. Notes: Title, date, and subjects provided by the photographer.; Gift and purchase; Carol M. Highsmith; 2009; (DLC/PP-2010:031).; Credit line: Carol M. Highsmith's America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.; Forms part of: Carol M. Highsmith's America Project in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive.; The Corning Museum of Glass explores every facet of glass: its unique place in art, history, culture, science and technology, craft, and design. The Museum is home to the world's most comprehensive collection of glass--more than 45,000 glass objects, spanning 3,500 years of glassmaking history.

Four architects and 75 years of glass buildings

The campus spans buildings designed by four generations of architects over 75 years. Wallace K. Harrison laid down the original 1951 International Style structure.

Gunnar Birkerts added a flowing wing in 1980 that won the AIA 25 Year Award in 2006. Smith-Miller and Hawkinson brought glass and steel additions in 2001.

Thomas Phifer’s 2015 wing wraps itself in large white glass panels that reflect the surroundings without mirrors. That last building earned LEED Silver Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

Comprising the entire ground floor of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, the 18,000-square-foot GlassMarket is one of the largest museum gift shops in the U.S. As seen in February 2022.

Kids get in free and two days to explore it all

Anyone 17 and under gets in free, every day. Adult tickets cover two consecutive days, so there’s no pressure to rush.

Free WiFi runs throughout the campus, and more than 40 phone charging stations are scattered across the building. Wheelchairs are available at no charge on a first-come basis, and elevators reach every public floor.

From mid-May through mid-October, a courtesy shuttle connects the museum to The Rockwell Museum and historic Market Street, a half-mile away in Corning’s Gaffer District.

New York, JUL 6, 2021 - Exterior view of the Corning Museum of Glass

Visit the Corning Museum of Glass in New York

You’ll find the museum at 1 Museum Way in Corning, New York, right off Interstate 86 at Exit 46. Parking at the Welcome Center is free.

It’s open every day of the year except Jan. 1, Thanksgiving, Dec. 24 and Dec. 25, with hours running 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. A combination pass covers both the museum and The Rockwell Museum next door if you want a full day.

Check the official website for current admission prices, studio session availability and the Guest Artist calendar before you go.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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John Ghost is a professional writer and SEO director. He graduated from Arizona State University with a BA in English (Writing, Rhetorics, and Literacies). As he prepares for graduate school to become an English professor, he writes weird fiction, plays his guitars, and enjoys spending time with his wife and daughters. He lives in the Valley of the Sun. Learn more about John on Muck Rack.

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