Beth Lipman is a glass artist. She takes inspiration from Renaissance and Baroque still-life paintings, as well as from America in the 18th and 19th centuries, and makes clear glass objects whose silhouettes come from historic imagery. These objects are then arranged into extravagant compositions of fragility, transparency, mortality. Colorless, the scene puts one in mind of Herman Melville’s meditation on “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in Moby Dick. It’s an indefiniteness, writes Melville, that “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation.” Lipman also works in metal and clays. This exhibition, the first major scholarly assessment of Lipman’s career, includes pieces from the last decade. —L.J.