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Work from the Permanent Collection
Dorothy Sturm
Born in Memphis in 1910, Dorothy Sturm left for New York at the age of twenty to study in the Arts Student League. After returning to Memphis in 1935 she became one of the founding faculty members of the Memphis Academy of Arts, which would later become the Memphis College of Art.
In the following decades, as her preferred media evolved from paint to paper collage to textiles, her work became more abstract. She began working in glass in the 1960’s, at which time her work reached the point of pure abstraction. Writing about Sturm in the catalog that accompanied her Brooks Museum retrospective in 1965, Robert McKnight said her “enamels suggest the wonder of life on another environment, either beneath the sea or through the microscope; things we think exist and wonder of their beauty, but never have time to come to grips with.”
Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the American Embassy and the Salle Franklin in France.
Her memory is honored by the Metal Museum's Dorothy Sturm Memorial Gallery.
Enamel
 The production of enamel is an ancient process dating back to the 13th century BCE. The enamels in our permanent collection are examples of vitreous enamel, created by fusing powdered glass to a metal base through a firing process which reaches temperatures of up to 850 degrees Celsius. The powder melts and then hardens to a smooth, durable coating. Special care must be taken with vitreous enamel as it has a tendency to crack or shatter when the base is stressed or bent. The core of the Metal Museum’s collection of enamels is comprised of the work of Dorothy Sturm.
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