Paperweight c. 20th century

This paperweight was made by an anonymous artist, and it's now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It looks like a tiny world in glass. Imagine the artist gathering molten glass, swirling it, and embedding these vibrant flecks of color like confetti frozen in time. There's something so playful about the way these colors are suspended, like memories or dreams captured in solid form. I wonder, what was on the artist's mind when they were making it? What did they want to contain, or preserve? It reminds me a bit of a Cy Twombly sculpture—that same sense of gesture, but here it’s trapped, not brushed. We painters, we're always learning from each other, even across different mediums. There's an unspoken conversation happening through making. This paperweight is a beautiful little monument to that exchange, reminding us that art is all about seeing the world in new ways, and then sharing that vision.