Image: Philip Baldwin (American, b. 1947) and Monica Guggisberg (Swiss, b. 1955), Peoples' Wall (detail), 2018. Free-blown and cold-worked glass, and steel, 94 1/2 x 70 7/8 x 9 7/8 in. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Alex Ramsay
Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida will present "Monica Guggisberg and Philip Baldwin: Precession Through Glass" from November 15, 2026, to April 25, 2027. The exhibition, organized by the museum, brings together sculptures, installations and mixed-media works by the two artists, who use glass as a means of looking at the mysteries of the universe.
According to the museum, the show moves into territory where science meets the sublime, the visible meets the invisible and the rational meets the intuitive. It takes its cue from a remark attributed to Albert Einstein, that the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant, and sets out to celebrate what is not yet known. Its subjects range from the complexity of DNA to the puzzle of human consciousness, leaving room, in the museum's words, for the insights that can arise from the unknown.
Philip Baldwin, born in the United States in 1947, and Monica Guggisberg, born in Switzerland in 1955, work as a duo, and the works illustrated by the museum show how widely they range in scale and technique. "Peoples' Wall" (2018), in free-blown and cold-worked glass and steel, stands more than seven feet tall. "Aristotle's Amphorae" (2022) is a row of free-blown vessels made with under and double overlay and cutting, set on metal stands, while "The Neon Amphora" (2022) translates the same ancient vessel form into neon.
Larger installations include "Amphore Métaphore" (2022), an assembled work in free-blown and cold-worked glass and metal some fifteen feet long, previously installed at the Musée du Verre François Décorchemont in France; "Destination Unknown" (2020), which combines blown and cold-worked glass with found rocks and steel at a height of more than eighteen feet; and "Monoliti Humani" (2022–23), an assembly of blown and cold-worked glass more than sixteen feet wide.
The exhibition is co-curated by Virginia Shearer, the museum's executive director, and guest curator Sarah Qing Markovitz, with curatorial guidance from Rangsook Yoon, the museum's former senior curator.
