Glass Sculpture at the Hunterdon Art Museum

Visited the Hunterdon Art Museum again today. The museum attracts and shows better art than one might expect in a small town. Curators do a good job of choosing work that both is accessible to laypeople and has artistic merit.

And of course the gallery space itself is special. The museum building was a grist mill in the nineteenth century, and renovations preserved the mill's rustic rafters and wide floor boards. Today, contemporary art is hung between live little pastorals: casement windows, set deep into the mill's stone walls, frame scenes of ducks gliding along the glassy river top.

Sculpture by Hank Murta Adams was showing on the first floor today. Most of the work combined glass with found metal objects. I liked the "Produce" installation best. It combined icy looking glass work with metal objects the artist might have found around old kitchens. The museum's Material Color exhibition, on the second floor, was also worth seeing.

"Produce," by Hank Murta Adams

"Bomb Cluster," by Hank Murta Adams

I always seem to enjoy the museum's first-floor gallery most, and I realized today why that may be. The museum seems to show sculpture on the first floor and more two-dimensional work on the upper floors. I may just prefer sculpture, generally, to painting and the like.