Gordon Park had to admit it: The paperweights were taking over.
While the corner of a table in his Chattanooga home has been cleared with enough space for him to eat his meals, Park acknowledges his dining and kitchen tables are pretty much covered in the prismatic fruits of his collecting passion.
Park, whose interest in glass art began in the 1980s with stained glass windows, met Rick Ayotte in a California gallery about 15 years ago. Today, the majority of Park’s 1,400-plus-piece contemporary art collection is the nature-inspired work of the New Hampshire glass artist and of his daughter, Melissa. What’s more, the vast majority of the art in Park’s collection is paperweights.
“It bothers me when people talk about ‘art glass and paperweights,’” Park says. “Paperweights are art glass. I mean, the amount of effort in making this three-and-a-half-inch diameter piece of glass is tremendous. Each one tells a story.”
When it came time to decide just where Park’s impressive Ayotte collection might find a forever home, his decision was easy. Park, longtime president of the Paperweight Collectors Association, has only ever had one complaint about the renowned Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah, a lakeside mansion filled with the world’s single largest collection of glass paperweights: that it isn’t closer to his home in Tennessee.
“It’s wonderful for Neenah. I think it’s important that the community recognizes they have a huge, huge resource,” Park says. “There’s no question it’s the greatest paperweight museum in the world.”
A sense of wonder
Like Park, museum founder Evangeline Bergstrom was enchanted by the tiny worlds that could be found within glass paperweights — dating back to a single treasured specimen of her grandmother’s she had admired as a child. At age 63, Bergstrom began nostalgically collecting them in her Neenah home. In 1939, her impressive collection was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. After her death in 1958, the home she shared with husband John Nelson Bergstrom was willed by the couple to the City of Neenah for the creation of the free, public museum that remains today at 165 North Park Avenue, leased from the city as an independent entity, and is now also named for founding board members Ernst and Carol Mahler, collectors of Germanic glass.
There’s something enchanting about the tucked-away location of the Bergstrom-Mahler. The rest of the houses in the neighborhood have remained quiet private residences. The museum features an expansive back lawn that extends to Lakeshore Drive with broad views of Lake Winnebago. Neighboring Riverside Park is a family and community destination that attracts picnics, concerts, and kids’ outings down the “rocket slide.” Pelicans, a sculptural fountain, sailboats and historic architecture dot the landscape, giving off a romantic air of Americana.
The morning after she drove into town from Chicago through a fierce rainstorm, Amy Moorefield drew open the curtains in her downtown Neenah hotel and breathed in that exact idyllic sight. On a morning walk, when she got her first glimpse of the museum she was being recruited to lead, she says she was pretty much hooked.
Moorefield, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University who has devoted her career to museums and wanted to since she was a 7-year-old Navy brat who found solace in them amid family moves, says she hasn’t regretted her decision to join Bergstrom-Mahler as executive director six years ago in a challenging pandemic environment. She remains enchanted by the museum’s unique location, though she admits it comes with its own set of challenges, and says the board’s wise 2012 decision to return the collection’s focus strictly to glass after a stretch of exhibiting other art forms has helped shape it into what it has become today.
“I was trained as a curator, particularly of modern contemporary art, and glass is part of that,” Moorefield says. “I was like, all right, you know, it’s painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, sound, video projection — [but this is] just glass. How cool is that to really focus on one? I found it very refreshing.”
By focusing on glass, Bergstrom-Mahler has carved a prestigious niche in the museum world. It is one of only 21 American Alliance of Museums-accredited institutions in the state of Wisconsin and has been since 1974. It is a member of the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, the Paperweight Collectors Association and Glass Art Society. It is consistently ranked among the nation’s top glass art museums, and its 5,000 (and counting) paperweights are the most anywhere in the world.
Curating the collection has become a source of pride for Casey Eichhorn, the museum’s deputy director who came to Neenah from the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame & Museum eight years ago without a glass art background. He says his passion for nature was an initial hook, as many glass works are nature inspired, but what has kept him most in love with his job have been the relationships he has formed in the glass art community.
“I always am able to find those personal connections,” Eichhorn says. “That’s not just about taking care of the collection, and that’s part of why I’m passionate about working here.”
A collaborative community
Forty-seven miles south and west of Neenah in tiny Princeton, Wisconsin, Wesley Hunting has been making contemporary glass art for 40 years in his hand-built studio in the woods. And while Hunting, now retired with the reins of Hunting Studio Glass having been handed to son Wesley Jr., admits he generally prefers solitude to socialization, his relationship with the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum has been meaningful.
“Everyone should be involved with some kind of art and support your museums,” Hunting Sr. says. “The objects we see in museums are the only truly articulate thing about our history. And it’s interesting as hell.”
Hunting walks the talk. He and his son have been heavily involved as volunteers and donors with Bergstrom-Mahler, including their impressive recent contribution of hand-built furnaces.
Accessibility to glass arts has exploded in recent years, but in the 1970s, when Hunting Sr. was first getting into glass art, “those guys were kind of pirates,” Hunting Jr. explains. Buying a furnace for glass blowing wasn’t something people just did, so his father — admittedly already inclined toward DIY, anyway — learned to build his own.
“I just kind of learned about thermodynamics,” Hunting Sr. casually recollects, and from there he has gone on to hand-build seven or eight annealers that have sustained the studio in Princeton for decades.
When Taylor Moeller-Roy, deputy director overseeing Bergstrom-Mahler’s glass studio, needed a new bank of furnaces for art education, the Huntings’ hands-on assistance with the project saved the museum “about five figures,” Hunting Jr. estimates.
Up the road from Neenah in the other direction, Fish Creek-based glass artist Deanna Clayton recently joined the Bergstrom-Mahler board and says she has quickly gained an appreciation for just how much it takes to operate a museum that was designed to be perpetually free and open to the public.
She says there’s a strong sense of shared responsibility in the glass art community to maintain Bergstrom-Mahler’s mission.
“It’s fun to be a part of it, for sure,” she says. “I am seeing how things run and what it takes to run a free museum, and yeah, it’s a lot.”
Moeller-Roy says the spirit of collaboration and willingness to share knowledge and inspiration are reasons she’s loved the glass arts community since earning her BFA in art history and glass from UW-River Falls. For almost nine years now she has been working in her dream job, she says, helping others discover the joy of glass art at Bergstrom-Mahler.
A major part of Moeller-Roy’s job is leading glass art camps and classes for all ages, including children as young as five, where she says it’s her job to convince parents to “come let your kids play with glass.”
“Glass … does have this kind of element of scary, sharp, it can cut you, it can hurt you,” Eichhorn says of Moeller-Roy’s work. “But everything that we do here … is more about giving respect for the medium, and in a class or in a program, the very first thing that Taylor and her instructors talk about is safety.”
Glass is for the masses
So yes, glass is sharp, fragile and made with fire, so that fact combined with the museum’s location in a private neighborhood does conspire at times to make the museum feel a little untouchable, Moorefield says — flying in the face of Evangeline and John Nelson Bergstrom’s vision that the museum would be a centerpiece of community engagement. Moorefield says outreach has therefore been one of her key focuses as executive director. Observers say she has succeeded on that front.
“I do think that we found the right person to lead us forward,” Eichhorn says, “to lead us especially in the realm of contemporary art, and showing art beyond what’s in our collection, and becoming more community-centered.”
Moorefield created a staff position, currently held by Riley Seib, that focuses on outreach and education. She also worked closely with Fox Valley Technical College’s Rayon Brown, currently a museum board member, on braiding diversity, equity, inclusion, access and belonging into all collections and engagement efforts. In addition, serving as the host location for Catalpa Health’s “Pop!” fundraiser, she says, opened doors for the museum to serve the Northeast Wisconsin mental health community with art programming.
A number of initiatives have allowed the museum both to take its mission on the road as well as bring new people in. There’s “Ray,” the mini dragon mobile furnace that allows Moeller-Roy to give glass-blowing demonstrations outside the walls of Bergstrom-Mahler, and the annual GLASS Arts Festival, which attracts thousands to Neenah every August for the nation’s only outdoor, all-glass art event and juried exhibition. The festival received a JEM Grant from the State of Wisconsin to help with marketing, which Moorefield says has been a massive opportunity to gain new glass fans.
“As soon as they come through the doors and see how beautiful the glass is, that we are open and welcoming, they’ll come back,” she says.
Glass is for everyone, Moeller-Roy adds.
“Accessibility is the biggest thing when it comes to glass. Glass can feel very out of reach, especially with the price of it,” she says. “We always have our art activity day for $20 so no one has to feel like they can’t be here because of that financial boundary. We also have started different scholarship programs, which can make it more accessible, especially for families with kids’ camps.”
Our time to shine
With collectors like Park seeking to contribute art at unprecedented levels, Bergstrom-Mahler recently found itself running out of space. It was tight on space to begin with — a private Tudor-style home is beautiful, but not necessarily designed to house expansive art galleries. Moorefield began working toward and silently fundraising for a facilities overhaul basically from her first day on the job.
She recalls a conversation with benefactor John Bergstrom of Bergstrom Automotive, a Neenah resident and indirect descendant of John Nelson and Evangeline.
“He said, ‘You’re just going to shine it up, right?’” Moorefield remembers. She liked that comment enough to name the public phase of the campaign “Our Time to Shine,” which reached its crescendo June 26 at a ribbon-cutting and unveiling of the museum’s newest and renovated spaces, including the Miron Construction Gallery that Moorefield says allows the museum to bring in larger exhibitions, and the Community First Credit Union Welcome Center that makes the museum more accessible to people who use wheelchairs.
The “Our Time to Shine” campaign was silent until it reached about 80% of its goal, Moorefield says. Then it “totally blew up” on its way to the finish line.
“It was absolutely humbling, the people that were donating $25, several thousand dollars,” she says. “There was a very first member of the museum who gave an incredible gift, but it just … it felt so good to be able to have conversations with people, and really they got it, they understand that we need to do this to be more accessible to the community and to protect the collection.”
And it’s no longer just time to shine for Bergstrom-Mahler. It’s room to grow. At the ribbon cutting event, Moorefield announced that Park has recently made an additional gift to name the Gordon Park Glass Studio and expand the museum’s vault.
“He’s fully supporting an expansion to double the footprint of our permanent collection of vault storage, which is huge, because we’re working with at least eight to 10 donors within the next 10 years [who] are going to be giving major gifts to the collection,” Moorefield says. “For us to keep our collections on site, as opposed to having to get storage off site, is a big deal.”
A museum that matters
Wes Hunting Jr. has followed in his father’s footsteps with Hunting Studio Glass while putting his own stamp on contemporary glass through his series like “Remnant” and “Optical.” He and his contemporaries are pushing the envelope, and the Bergstrom-Mahler’s collection today reflects both Evangeline Bergstrom’s paperweight-collecting roots as well as cutting-edge contemporary pieces recently acquired from artists like Alexis Silk, which Clayton describes as “spectacular.”
While paperweights will always be Bergstrom-Mahler’s bread and butter, the museum has evolved into an all-encompassing art glass destination.
“Amy, specifically, has done a great job of making the museum matter,” Hunting Jr. says, “in terms of engaging people at a national scale with American artwork, international artwork, and how awesome glass as a medium really is.”
And for those who haven’t yet discovered glass art, or one of its preeminent institutions, Moorefield is more than OK with still being considered a hidden gem.
“I love it when people say ‘we didn’t know this place existed,’ because it gives us an opportunity,” she says. “I feel like once we get someone through the door of the museum, yeah, then we sold them.”
Photography by Shane Van Boxtel, Image Studios
Styling by Zury Romo
2026 GLASS Arts Festival
Saturday, Aug. 8 • 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass, Neenah
Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass
Founded: 1959
Location: Neenah
Executive director: Amy Moorefield
What it does: An American Alliance of Museums-accredited art museum dedicated to providing “extraordinary glass experiences” for all, including exhibitions, education, events and community outreach
Employees: 14, plus two contracted fundraisers
Board members: 14
bmmglass.com
