Reviewed by:
Courtenay McLeland, Head of Digital Projects & Preservation
Thomas G. Carpenter Library, University of North Florida
d.c.mcleland@unf.edu
https://doi.org/10.17613/vw44-7398
Paul M. Hollister (1918-2004) was a noted art glass scholar with a variety of interests that included the growth of the studio art glass movement. Voices in Studio Glass History: Art and Craft, Maker and Place, and the Critical Writings and Photography of Paul Hollister from Bard Graduate Center offers a digital exhibition, multimedia archive, and annotated bibliography of Hollister’s writings and documentary efforts related to the post-World War II studio glass movement in the United States. This multifaceted scholarly resource grew from years-long collaborations that began as two separate projects, one to create an anthology of Hollister’s writings and another to digitize selections from his extensive collection of 35mm slides. These efforts merged and additional oral history interviews, new transcriptions, and images were added, rounding out the coverage.
Content is organized into three broad categories accessible through in a menu at the upper right of each top-level page. The broad categories of Places of Studio Glass, Glass Community, and Hollister Annotated Bibliography each expand to greater depths of material. There is also an informative About the Project page that makes clear the many contributions made by collaborators.
Within the Places of Studio Glass area there are seven pages for schools or other sites selected for their significant coverage in Hollister’s writings or photographs. Included in the title banner of each place page is a table of contents that provides an overview of sections within. Quotes sprinkled throughout the pages enrich the exhibit experience, though a welcome enhancement would be a link or other way of quickly learning the original source of the quote. It is unclear whether some of the quotes were gathered in association with this project, with one particularly timely quote from Ben Wright on the Pilchuck place page.
The Glass Community page provides records for persons who were either interviewed by or featured in Hollister’s writings. These records vary in coverage and provide a mixture of features that may include an image of the artist, a brief biographical entry, images representing the artist’s body of work, audio or video interviews, and a bibliography of Hollister writings related to that individual.
The Hollister Annotated Bibliography offers Hollister’s critical writings on studio glass published between 1976 and 1995, and includes entries about Paul and Irene Hollister plus transcripts provided by Bard Graduate Center. Many entries include full-text articles in PDF, though some provide links to full-text articles, such as those from the archives of the New York Times or digitized American Craft articles from the American Craft Council. While entries are generally arranged in chronological order, at the end of the bibliography there are areas in which this organizing principle has not been applied. A feature of the bibliography that users will appreciate is a section beneath each annotation with the names of the artists mentioned within the article. Additionally, when a mentioned person is among those with a presence on the Glass Community page, the name is linked back to that entry.
Built in WordPress with collaboration from a team of developers, the clear and engaging design provides visitors with an enriched experience of the material. There are thoughtful visual enhancements, such as highlighted names or text that complement the content without overshadowing it. This freely accessible scholarly and archival resource will be of most value to those conducting research in Paul Hollister’s areas of scholarship, post-war studio glass, and the schools that were significant to the movement, though casual visitors will also find much to explore. Welcome enhancements would be a timeline or chronological listing of significant events as well as a sitewide index or search feature.