Walking into the Naples home of Larry and Rita Sibrack, your eyes hardly know where to land. A busy composition of spindling ceramic shells and sponges juts from one wall. In the living room, the feminine motif of a cornflower blue glass corset juxtaposes a truncated human form cast in glass and covered in inky handprints. Light refracts off an array of objects that delight and beg for contemplation.
The couple lives among their collection, some 150 glass and ceramic pieces curated and commissioned over nearly four decades. Though filled with the fragile and precious, their home feels inviting, not pretentious. Rita’s knitting baskets nestle under tables displaying chromatic forms and figures; a tall stack of rags on a kitchen countertop turns out to be porcelain.
These aren’t your nana’s porcelain vases and crystal candy dishes—playful, dynamic and avant-garde, the Sibracks’ collection is a direct representation of the artistic duo.
Rita, a lover of figurative art, is magnetic and converses frankly without being brusque. Larry, a retired dermatologist and clinical faculty member at Yale, speaks in soft, deliberate sentences. His discerning eye developed at a young age, maturing into a fascination for glass and ceramics over the years. “They’re three-dimensional sculptures that have a fourth dimension—light,” he says.
The couple moved to Naples from Connecticut part time in 2001, impressed by an exhibition with blown-glass juggernaut Dale Chihuly at the then newly minted Naples Museum of Art (now Artis—Naples, The Baker Museum). Twenty years later, they settled full time into the coastal hamlet and its ever-growing arts scene.
Photography by Tina Sargeant
Larry and Rita Sibrack
The Sibracks began collecting after they married in 1989, each bringing a honed eye for aesthetics and art born of formal- and self-studies. Larry, a native Michigander, recalls visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts with his pianist mother growing up. Later, while studying medicine at Yale, he had a professor who made a habit of taking classes to the university’s acclaimed art museum. “He’d ask us what time of day it was, what style of clothes, or if a ship was going east or west in a painting,” Larry says. “Dermatology is very visual, and he taught us how to see.”
“I grew up on a chicken farm,” Rita interjects jovially. Before they wed, she had collected Victorian china and Japanese ceramics, making for an organic transition into contemporary forms with Larry. She was drawn to the dynamic coloring represented in the mediums, with pigments appearing more luminous in glass and richer, more intense when suspended in the opaque medium of a ceramic glaze.
The New Jerseyan adorns herself with sculptural necklaces, cocktail rings and vibrant outfits—deliberately arranged compositions that have become more difficult to assemble since Rita became legally blind in 2015.
A few years after marrying Larry, her vision started to deteriorate, an early sign of the degenerative eye condition, retinitis pigmentosa, which she was diagnosed with in 1992. The shift was deceptively gradual. Rita continued to drive safely for about a decade after the initial symptoms. Until a few years ago, the couple still traveled and collected art voraciously. Now, they mostly stick to Southwest Florida, and Rita’s experience of art is predominantly tactile.
Her fingertips hold memory. Rita vividly recalls most of the collection and identifies works by probing their shapes and detailings, like the ‘stitching’ on a surrealist glass corset. “I broke a Chihuly,” she admits. “But as long as it’s not too delicate, I can figure it out.” Despite challenges, the couple faces their new reality with wry humor and wit. “If she doesn’t like what I buy, she can’t see it anyway,” Larry quips.
When the Sibracks visited glass artist Anne Wolff’s workshop in Sweden, Rita ran her fingers over the artist’s tools and pieces of unworked glass. “She remembered me because I was [touching] everything,” Rita chuckles. The Sibracks brought home Wolff’s Feet House, a sculpture with two feet—unflinchingly truthful, from their tapering ankles to wince-inducing bunions—creating a negative space within a solid, shimmering polygonal cube of glass.
The couple’s physical connection to the works makes up only a fraction of their appreciation—they place more value on the relationships formed through their years of collecting and the robust culture of apprenticeship existing within the medium. “Glass blowing is a collaboration, and it’s all choreographed,” Rita says, likening the process to a dance with several members. As collectors, the Sibracks have contributed their own two-step.
Larry was president of the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass from 2020-2022. He’s lectured in museums across New England and volunteered as a docent at Artis—Naples, The Baker Museum. His preferences lean toward abstracts.
Beyond the living area, the blue hues of a tall sculpture on the patio echo the pool water beyond. Perception VI, a fluid form recalling icebergs by Peter Bremers, encapsulates the Dutch glass master’s fascination with climate. The elliptically shaped construction—one of Larry’s favorites—resembles the movement of waves or ice caps, like one sinuous body of water washing over itself infinitely, reflecting the ongoing nature of environmental issues.
Back inside, Rita grows animated talking about Boy and Girl Twins, a piece by Vivian Wang depicting a mother clad in golden robes cradling twin infants, who look out from her arms with lively curiosity. Wang combines painted ceramic clothing with cast glass faces, hands and feet to create sculptures inspired by antique Chinese figures. “We’ve been friends for 15 years now and we chat on the phone,” Rita gushes.
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Rik Allen’s Belladonna Pacificus (2018)
The Sibracks value their relationships with the artists whose work they collect. “What makes the contemporary glass movement unique is its sharing of creativity and knowledge—from artist to artist, artist to apprentice, artist to collector, collector to collector,” Larry says. Rik Allen’s Belladonna Pacificus (2018)
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K. William LeQuier’s Sentinel (2012)
K. William LeQuier’s Sentinel (2012)
In the entry hallway, Tim Tate’s hypnotic 21st Century Guernica reflects the couple’s penchant for provocative art. While the Sibracks’ entire collection aims to defy preconceived notions of glass and ceramic’s expressive range, Tate’s piece ups the ante with its stark political message. Reflected in its circular, mirrored form, a ring of motifs from Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (an immense 1937 painting hauntingly representing the violence of the Spanish Civil War) encircles another ring of tiny refugee figures in ghoulish vessels that look more like caskets than boats.
Glassblower Robert Mickelsen’s Shake stands sentinel in the center of the home, its two vertical columns projecting colorless, ageless, genderless glass hands that reach toward one another, their fingers outstretched, about to clasp. “The five hands on one side are clear; the five hands on the other are opaque,” Larry says of the appendages’ only distinction. Shake’s message—our differences are miniscule in light of our similarities—visibly moves him. “It has to do with inclusion,” he adds. “We try to live by the artist’s message.”
Photography by Tina Sargeant