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Beauty Lives Where the Circle Meets the Square

A new show at her hometown museum puts Toledo, Ohio–based artist Hannah Bowlus’s striking glass compositions on display.

By Jon Spayde
September 29, 2026

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Photo courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art

Generative Design Thinking: Origin Point, a 2024 sculpture by Toledo, Ohio–based artist Hannah Bowlus, incorporates blown and cast glass, steel, and hardware, 72 x 72 x 72 in.

For her first museum exhibition, Toledo, Ohio–based glass artist/designer Hannah Bowlus is betting on the beauty of geometrical limitation.

The work on display in Hannah Bowlus: Origin Point, running until January 3 at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA), is based entirely on the cube, the sphere, or a combination of the two forms. It also illustrates the compatibility of form and function, art and industry: lamps, furniture, installation work, and sculptures share space in the show.

Among the pieces on view are Aurora Module (2022), three elegant circular discs of diminishing size embracing a lightbulb; Aetherion As Cube (2025), a glowing assemblage of stacked glass panels that might be a lamp or a light sculpture; and Pixel Wall (2023), a programmed bank of red, blue, orange, purple, and green LED lights set in little squares.

Photo courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art

Hannah Bowlus.

“All of this work is based on using the circle and the square as the starting point for the design and is the origin point, if you will, for the design process and for the inspiration,” she told Robin Stanton Gerrow of the Bowling Green Independent News. “It’s ruminating on the idea of these shapes together and separately and what they can do together. I’m really sitting down with an idea and taking it as far as I can go.”

Bowlus’s rise from art school to major-museum exposure has been swift. Her BFA thesis exhibition at Bowling Green State University was in 2024; since then, she’s shown her work at venues that include Belger Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, and Habatat Galleries in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan. Bowlus pays the bills by working at 2-Scale, a company in the Toledo suburb of Holland, Ohio, that builds exhibits and displays—including some for the TMA.

Origin Point is mounted, appropriately enough, in a gallery in TMA’s Glass Pavilion, built in 2005 as a showcase for the museum’s holdings in glass, which include a world-class collection of American production and studio glass. The Pavilion is currently moonlighting as a mini-TMA, showing a selection of major works in all media while the museum’s main building is closed for reinstallation of the collection.

Photo courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art

Cubetrix, a mixed-media sculpture, 6 x 6 x 2 in.

Photo courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art

Aetherion as Cube, 2025, glass, 6.5 x 6.5 x 7 in.
Photo courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art

Slime Units, 2021, blown glass and hardware.

Jon Spayde is a writer and editor in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A former contributing editor to American Craft, he writes on art, psychology, education, and personal growth for a number of regional and national publications.

Learn more about the exhibition and artist online.

Exhibition Website Artist Instagram

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