Vitrana

Composed of 33 cast panels and weighing approximately 1,000 pounds, Dominick Labino’s glass mural was designed and executed especially for the Toledo Museum of Art in 1969. In 1965 Labino retired as Vice-President and Director of Research at Toledo’s Johns-Mansville Fiber Glass, Inc. to pursue a second career as a studio glass artist. He contributed his valuable technical know-how to the 1962 Toledo Workshops (see Gallery 5), which spurred interest in glass as an artistic medium, helping to introduce and de-mystify this difficult material to many artists.

Labino brought his expertise as an engineer to his glass art, using chemistry to experiment with color. To make Vitrana, Labino cast molten glass into rectangular molds, inlaying different colors of glass free hand during the casting process to achieve the unique effects of each panel. The name Vitrana was chosen to combine the base of the Latin word for glass (vitrum) with a suffix meant to suggest the flow of molten glass and the colors suspended within it.