Toots Zynsky (Mary Ann Zynsky) was one of Dale Chihuly’s first students at the Rhode Island School of Design, establishing her as one of the pioneers of the studio glass movement. Her classmates included Dan Dailey, Therman Statom, Bruce Chao, and James Carpenter, and she joined them in inventing and developing the techniques that would inform the following decades. In the summer of 1971, she joined Chihuly in Washington State, organizing the first workshop of what would become the now famous Pilchuck Glass School.
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Zynsky was born and raised in Massachusetts. She completed her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1973 and returned to Washington to further her art at Pilchuck. After several years of offering workshops and lectures, in 1980 she became the assistant director and manager of the hot shop at the New York Experimental Glass Workshop in NYC. Her experiments at this time led to her signature “filet de verre” technique, the fusing of layers of fine glass threads. Once fused, the threads are hot formed and slumped inside a kiln to shape her richly colored organic vessels. Prior to 1982 she was making her threads in the traditional manner, with assistants heating and pulling glass rods into the finer threads, but after visiting artist Mathijs Teunissen Van Manen and witnessing her method, immediately crafted a device that duplicated the laborious process. Zynsky joined Van Manen in Amsterdam in 1983 to further collaborate on the thread pulling machine, and ended up settling there for the next sixteen years. While based in Amsterdam, Zynsky traveled extensively, including six months in West Africa recording traditional music and establishing a second studio in Paris in 1990. She returned to Rhode Island with her family in 1999.
Zynsky’s lifelong commitment to the study and teaching of studio glass has earned her honors and international recognition. Her artwork can be found in major museum collections around the world, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery; The Toledo Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Musée des Arts Décoratifs du Louvre, Paris; the Glasmuseum, Ebeltoft, Denmark; and over 70 others