The Flint Institute of Arts (FIA) in Michigan is the ideal venue for the new exhibition A Symphony of Glass: Paperweights from the Ellis Collection. The show comprises 270 extraordinary paperweights, both antique and contemporary, belonging to Lansing-based collector Eileen Ellis, a mathematician, musician, and the former director of Medicaid for the state of Michigan, who has lent more than half of her four hundred weights to the FIA, a museum and art school with a deep appreciation for the art form.
“The Institute not only has one of the best glass collections in America but also one of the best hot shops in the country for contemporary artists,” Ellis says. “I want to support the art form going forward, particularly as artists now have tools they never had 150 years ago.”
Ellis began collecting in the early 1990s, after studying paperweights at the Art Institute of Chicago (home to the renowned Arthur Rubloff Collection), the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah, Wisconsin, and the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York. She attended auctions, visited glass purveyors L. H. Sellman, Leo Kaplan, and the Heller Gallery and joined the now-seventy-two-year-old Paperweight Collectors Association (PCA), which holds biennial conferences in different parts of the country for hundreds of passionate collectors.
Ellis methodically trained her eye and became highly selective in her purchases. Her criteria? “A piece has to sing to me,” she says, admitting that she is also looking for rarity and top quality in her quest to form a comprehensive assemblage. Today her collection is equal to that in any museum. Its strength is in pieces made in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when paperweights first came into fashion during the Industrial Revolution, when writing paper became inexpensive and people sought hand-crafted objects to keep it in place. This is the so-called Classical Period of weight making, dominated by the French factories Baccarat, Clichy, Cristallerie de Pantin, and Saint-Louis. The weights of these companies feature intricate bouquets of flowers, cornucopias, birds, butterflies, bees, ladybugs, fish, salamanders, lizards, and millefiori— “a thousand flowers” in Italian, cross sections of mixed canes of colored glass.
Equally notable in Ellis’s collection are works by contemporary American masters, including Rick and Melissa Ayotte, Chris Buzzini, David Graeber, Cathy Richardson, Colin Richardson, Gordon Smith, Paul Stankard, Victor Trabucco, Mayauel Ward, and Debbie Tarsitano. Using the newest tools and ovens, these artists are bringing new ideas to an old form.
The curator of the Ellis show is Kathryn Sharbaugh, the FIA’s director of donor relations and special initiatives. Sharbaugh, a ceramist, has been involved with FIA for decades and is the author of Paperweights: Highlights from the Flint Institute of Arts Collection (2018), a catalogue for a show of that title. “After we opened a new wing at the Flint in 2018, we had a proper place to show our glass,” she recalls. “Then I visited Eileen and saw she had in her collection glass companies and artists we didn’t have. Her collection is huge and rare—and I’ve seen a lot.” She was delighted to curate the show.
The show is considered such a coup for the FIA that there is now talk that the PCA may hold its 2026 convention in Michigan, so collectors nationwide will have the opportunity to see Ellis’s treasures.
A Symphony of Glass: Paperweights from the Ellis Collection • Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan • to March 1, 2026 • flintarts.org
