Born in Innsbruck, Austria, Ettore Sottsass graduated in architecture at the Turin Politecnico in 1939. In 1946 he settled in Milan and began to work in graphics and illustration. A few years later he opened his own studio. From 1949 to 1954 he designed and built several public housing projects in Turin. He was invited to participate in several editions of the Triennale. In 1958, he became a consultant for Poltronova and Olivetti, the company for which he designed the first Italian calculator, Elea 9003, which won him one of the four Compasso d’Oro awards (1959 edition) he collected during his twenty-year collaboration with the company. For Olivetti he designed office machines and typewriters such as Praxis, Tekne, and Valentine, objects whose design quality put them into the permanent collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 1981, he opened the Studio Sottsass Associati, working in the fields of architecture, graphics, and industrial design. Together with Marco Zanini, he founded the Memphis Group, which pursues its objective of creating a radical iconographical update in figurative language. For Memphis, Sottsass designed furniture, lamps, and accessories, including a series of multicolored glass pieces made of elements crafted by Toso Vetri d’Arte (1982-1986). His preceding experience with glass dated back to 1974, when he designed a series of objects for Vetreria Vistosi. His interest in glass led him to design several pieces for Venini in the ’90s and several limited series of works in glass for the Galleria Marina Barovier.

Born in Daytona Beach, Florida, Susan Sacks is a third generation Floridian. She received a Bachelor’s degree from Tulane University in New Orleans and a Master’s from Northeastern University in Boston. Upon moving to New York City, she started her writing career as a copywriter in advertising. Shortly thereafter, she began a simultaneous career in screenwriting while studying at New York University and Columbia University. She has had several scripts optioned and one film produced by HBO. She specializes in doing adaptations from book to film and true stories. She has edited many projects, including on Venetian Glass, her most recent book being MURANO: Glass from the Olnick Spanu Collection.

Sacks lives in San Francisco and still works in both advertising and film.

Benjamin Moore was born in Olympia, Washington. From 1970 to 1972, he attended Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington. He spent 1972 at the Instituto de Artes Plasticas in Guadalajara, Mexico, and in 1974, he obtained a B.F.A. with a Major in Ceramics from the California College of the Arts in Oakland. In 1977, he received an M.F.A. with a Major in Glass-Sculpture from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design and began working as a designer for the Fostoria Glass Company in Moundsville, West Virginia. From 1978 to May of 1980, he worked at Venini in Murano, where his first assignment was to help the team of maestro Checco Ongaro by performing various tasks. In the spring of 1979, Ongaro offered to execute some of Moore’s designs. The result so impressed Ludovico Diaz de Santillana that he was asked to continue the collaboration with Venini as a designer until 1980. After several teaching positions that took him from the Niijima Glass Art Center in Japan to the Haystack Mountain School of Design to the Rhode Island School of Design, he presently serves as a Board Member at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington. In addition, Mr. Moore owns and operates the Artist’s Glass Studio Benjamin Moore, Inc. in Seattle, Washington.

Work in the collection

David Revere McFadden is currently Chief Curator and Vice President for Programs and Collections at the Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design (formerly American Craft Museum) in New York City. Prior to this he was in Taos, New Mexico acting as Executive Director of the Millicent Rogers Museum; before that, and since 1978 he was with the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York; initially as Curator of Decorative Arts/Applied Arts and then as Assistant Director for Collections and Research. Mr. McFadden graduated magna cum laude at the University of Minnesota, where he also received an M.A. in the same subject (History of Art). He has organized over 150 exhibitions, and has been the author of over 100 catalogues, essays and critical reviews, including L’Art de Vivre: Decorative Arts and Design in France 1879-1989 (1989); Defining Craft: Collecting for the New Millennium (2000); Venetian Glass (2000) and Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation/Contemporary Native American Art from the Southwest (2002). Mr. McFadden has published over 100 catalogues, articles and reviews, including works dealing with historical and contemporary decorative arts and design. For Scandinavian Modern Design 1880-1980, he received the Wittenborn Prize; and for Wine: Celebration and Ceremony, the Presidential Design Award.

Susanne K. Frantz is the former Curator of 20th-Century Glass at The Corning Museum of Glass in New York. She held that position for 13 years until relocating to the Czech Republic in 1998 as a Fulbright Senior Scholar. During her five years of residence in Prague, her research focused on the evolution of glass sculpture in Bohemia between the two World Wars.

Frantz’s book, Contemporary Glass: A World Survey from The Corning Museum of Glass (Harry N. Abrams, Inc. New York, 1989), remains a primary reference in the field. In 1996 she was awarded the Henry Allen Moe Prize for writing of distinction in the arts by the New York Historical Association. Among the exhibitions that she organized for Corning were Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová: A 40-Year Collaboration in Glass and The Glass Skin: Recent International Sculpture (with the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art and the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf). Her 2003 exhibition The Other Side of the Looking Glass: The Glass Body and Its Metaphors was curated for the Turtle Bay Museum in California. She also organized Particle Theories: International Pate de Verre and Other Cast Glass Granulations in 2005 for the Museum of American Glass, New Jersey, and in 2008 she authored Lino Tagliapietra in Retrospect: A Modern Renaissance in Italian Glass (University of Washington Press).

Ms. Frantz is past President and Honorary Lifetime Member of the Glass Art Society and former editor of the Glass Art Society Journal.

Marino Barovier was born in Venice into one of the oldest families of Murano glassmakers. The glasswork produced by the Barovier family has been documented since the fifteenth century, and Barovier & Toso glassworks is still active today in Murano. In 1983, he joined his wife Marina in the study of the history of twentieth-century Murano glass. Marina and Marino Barovier have organized and curated monographic exhibitions on some of the most important designers of Murano glass, including Carlo Scarpa and Napoleone Martinuzzi, as well as Artisti Barovier and Ercole Barovier. In addition, they were the co-authors and editors of the catalogues of these exhibitions, further defining the production of Murano glassmakers during the twentieth century. This was a great contribution to the limited bibliographic material available at the time. In 1995, Marino Barovier was appointed by the City of Venice to curate the exhibition Glass at the Biennale, held at Ca’ Pesaro Museum on the occasion of the centennial of the Biennale. In 1996, Marino Barovier curated the exhibition The Murano Zoo, held at Palazzo Ducale in Venice. The exhibition included most of the glass animal sculptures made in Murano between 1920 and 1970. In 1996, he promoted the new Biennale of contemporary glass entitled Venezia Aperto Vetro. In 1997, Marino Barovier organized and curated the exhibition Carlo Scarpa: I Vetri di un architetto, held at Palazzo Martinengo Museum in Brescia. The accompanying anthology, also written by Barovier, entitled Carlo Scarpa: I Vetri di un architetto, is the most significant opus on the glass designed by Scarpa. In 1998, he organized and curated the exhibition La Verrerie Venitienne de Carlo Scarpa: 1926-1947, held at the Wielemans Huis in Brussels, Belgium. In 1998, he co-authored the book Sottsass Glass Works, a compilation of all the glassworks designed by Sottsass up to that time. In 1998, he authored the book Tagliapietra: a Venetian Glass Maestro, featuring the works of one of the most significant artists of contemporary glass in the world. In 1999, he organized and curated the exhibition Carlo Scarpa a Murano- Creation en Verre d’un Architect held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Montreal, Canada, which featured works selected exclusively from the Olnick Spanu Collection. In 1999, he authored Il Vetro a Venezia: dal moderno al contemporaneo for publisher Federico Motta and subsequently published in three languages. The English version was titled Glass in Venice: from Modern to Contemporary. In the year 2000, he curated the exhibition Venetian Glass held at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. The exhibition displayed, for the first time in America, a large portion of the Olnick Spanu Collection. In addition, he compiled the historical research and supplied all the documentation for the accompanying catalogue Venetian Glass. In 2001, he curated the exhibition Murano: Vetri dalla Collezione Olnick Spanu held at Spazio Oberdan in Milan, and supplied all the documentation for the accompanying Italian language catalogue. In 2002, he curated the exhibition Vittorio Zecchin 1878-1947, Pittura , Vetro, Arti Decorative held at Palazzo Correr in Venice, and authored the book by the same title. Barovier is a consultant for the major auction houses and various glass collectors, and is curator of the glass collection of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia.