Travel
If you’re looking for a meaningful family escape, one that dazzles as much as it educates, head upstate.
“Brilliant Color,” the Corning Museum of Glass’s luminous exhibition, is now in its final stretch, and it’s well worth the drive from Queens into New York’s Finger Lakes wine country.
I visited shortly after the exhibition opened in May, flying up on one of Corning’s private jets—a reminder that glassmaking here isn’t just an art form, but a legacy industry that helped build modern America. Corning, after all, is the maker of Pyrex.
What awaited was a kaleidoscopic journey through the chromatic revolution of glass in the 19th and 20th centuries, with more than 140 radiant works tracing how color transformed everyday objects into expressions of beauty and innovation.
For our readers in particular, Brilliant Color offers a fascinating intersection of craftsmanship and imitation—especially when it comes to gemstones. As curator Amy McHugh explains, glassmakers were long inspired by precious stones and sought to replicate them. So-called “paste gems”—glass made to imitate diamonds, emeralds, or amethysts—have existed for centuries, often using colorless glass backed with foil to mimic brilliance.
Later innovators pushed this further: Jewish Holocaust-survivor Leo Moser who led the famed Moser glassworks in former Czechoslovakia developed gemstone-inspired tones echoing emerald and topaz, while Frederick Carder created glass that resembled rose quartz, moss agate, and even malachite. In the exhibition’s “Innovations in Color” section, glass masquerades convincingly as nature’s rarest materials—without the price tag.
One of the most striking examples of this experimentation is pale-yellow uranium glass, prized in the 19th and early 20th centuries for its eerie green glow under ultraviolet light. Equal parts science and spectacle, it captures the era’s fearless pursuit of color at any cost. Yes—it’s radioactive.
Families will especially love The Studio, the museum’s hands-on glassmaking space, which I wrote about in March for TIME World’s Greatest Places 2025. (The Studio’s founding director, Amy Schwartz, is Jewish and expressed interest in The Bukharian Times after learning about our community in Queens last year.) Visitors can try their hand at making a glass bead pendant.
I gifted my mother one I made there; she dropped it, and it shattered. “I guess we’ll have to go back together,” I told her.
Set amid vineyards and rolling hills, Corning makes for an easy, enriching road trip—proof that world-class culture doesn’t always require a passport. If you’ve been meaning to go, Brilliant Color is your sign.
Corning Museum of Glass will also be kicking off its 75th anniversary this February 20, 2026, and has an exciting line-up of exhibits and programming.
Photos from author and
Corning Museum of Glass
Erin Levi