Lino Tagliapietra, "Endeavor." Photo: Greg R. Miller.

If you're a museum making your traveling exhibit debut, the Smithsonian is a pretty good place to step out on stage.

That's exactly where the Museum of Glass is this week: it's very first traveling show, "Lino Tagliapietra in Retrospect: A Modern Renaissance in Italian Glass," opened at the Smithsonian Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery last Friday. Tacomans got to see it first, of course, as it was up from February through August this year--an enormous show filled with the Venetian master's signature curvy elegance, lacy murrine work and elongated goose-necked vessels.

It's an exciting thing for MoG, which until now has relied mostly on outside shows and curators. Now five years old, MoG's turning its attention to becoming a fully-realized museum with a full-time in-house curator, its own collection, and serious scholarship in the form of self-organized shows like "Lino."

Following the Renwick, Lino Tagliapietra in Retrospect will travel to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA (April 8 – July 19, 2009); the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA (September 26 – December 27, 2009); and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (February 1 – May 31, 2010).

Here's what MoG says about it:

"Lino Tagliapietra in Retrospect" is the first exhibition to look at Tagliapietra’s art and forty years of his career—from his years working in the glassmaking industry on the island of Murano, to his historical 1979 trip to Pilchuck Glass School to teach Italian glassmaking techniques to American glassmakers hungry to expand their technical knowledge and skills, to his legacy as the world’s greatest living glassblower and designer.
“To organize a traveling exhibition of this magnitude requires the collective commitment of Museum staff, the artists and the collectors,” comments Museum of Glass director Timothy Close. “The staff of the Museum of Glass is very proud that this show has been selected for exhibition by such prestigious institutions on both the east and west coasts. And this is just our first—we are currently preparing two additional shows for travel: Preston Singletary: Echoes, Fire and Shadows and Kids Design Glass. Both of these exhibitions will open at the Museum of Glass in 2009 and begin traveling in 2010.”