RAM Collects: Contemporary Perfume Bottles

March 12, 2025 – February 21, 2026
at Racine Art Museum

Audrey Handler
Perfume Bottle, 1998
Glass
Racine Art Museum, Gift of Anne Cole Ruderman
Photography: Jarvis Lawson

Perfume bottles may not be the first thing people think about relative to how glass is used, but they have a history of production and refinement that spans centuries and continents. More than just functional items, these bottles reflect layered choices relating to design, history, luxury, class, and skill. In modern societies, they are also pivotal in product brand development and advertisement.

Some contemporary glass artists have utilized perfume bottles as spaces for experimentation and exploration—not necessarily function. This desire to challenge functionality has run parallel with the desire to produce usable and practical objects. Whether creating bottles as the focus of their practice or as a limited area of production, artists combine their individualized styles and techniques with a long line of historical precedents.

RAM’s permanent collection—the largest collection of contemporary craft in North America—features over 20 glass perfume bottles from the last quarter of the twentieth century. Most of the artists represented also created other kinds of work in glass. For example, Audrey Handler is well known for still lives combining glass fruit and miniature figures, and Jon Kuhn created the beloved Pendulum Cluster that hangs overhead at RAM’s front entrance.

More About the Exhibition

Exhibition Notes (PDF)

Press Room

Artists in the Exhibition

Robert Burch, William Carlson, James Clarke, Tessa Clegg, Audrey Handler, Janet Kelman, Jon Kuhn, Dominic Labino, Steven Maslach, James Minson, John Nygren, Andrew Shea, Yaffa Sikorsky-Todd, and Brent Kee Young