Little dreams in glass and metal

the long version

"With one hundred and twenty-two works, ranging in date from 1920 to the present, made by more than ninety artists, Little Dreams reflects the diversity of modern and contemporary enameling in the United States. It also represents the wide variety of forms of formats artists have chosen to explore using this highly versatile medium. More than half the artists included in Little Dreams are women; at least twenty-eight studied or taught in Cleveland; fourteen were born abroad and came to this country in the 1930s to escape Nazi persecution and the impending war in Europe; many studied under the GI Bill after serving in the armed forces during World War II. While sixteen were based in California, others lived in disparate regions of the country from New England to the Pacific Northwest; many were accomplished in other media but chose enameling as their preferred vehicle; eight couples worked collaboratively; and many used enamel as but one tool in their multi-media compositions. The artists' themes are similarly diverse, ranging from traditional still lifes, genre scenes, and religious subjects to abstractions and powerfully evocative explorations of nature, culture, and memory. This impressive array of makers and their equally wide-ranging subjects reflect the dynamic state of enameling in this country in the last half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first"--