Podcasts about studio glass

Stephanie Trenchard's multi-disciplinary creative process includes painting and poetry along with cast glass. With a focus on biographical stories of how women artists have navigated careers and partnerships, motherhood and making a living while still focusing on their creative practice, the work also discusses the price the art has to pay in this grand juggling act. The artist prioritizes the actual experience of the work, making and seeing it, over the classification of genre or ownership of an idea.  Says Trenchard: “I create my own visual vocabulary in storytelling. Using these totems, I tell stories about the artistic experience and the ensuing personal relationships usually based on true stories of artists from history. The subject of these narratives is often revealed in the title of the piece, but it is not necessary that the viewer be familiar with the subject in order to understand the concept because the metaphors are universal to the human condition.” Her work also involves using art as a way to communicate local activism as seen in her project About Sturgeon Bay. Born in Champaign, Illinois, in 1962, Trenchard earned her BFA in painting from Illinois State University in 1984. Subsequently, she and glass artist husband Jeremy Popelka relocated to San Francisco, California, where Trenchard designed textile patterns, licensed and sold under a private label. Upon returning to Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin in 1997, the couple built a hot shop and gallery that they share to this day. They assist each other with work as well as teaching projects, such as their recent classes in Thailand. As she assisted Popelka, Trenchard began to see glass casting as a means of translating textile patterns and other imagery to glass. The discovery of Paradise Paints allowed her to combine painting skills with glass art in the development of her award-winning body of work. Trenchard has developed a unique method of creating art using glass combined with paint. She first creates fully realized figures or objects in clear glass, which are then painted with high-fire enamels that are mixed and blended just as with oil or acrylic paints. Next, these three-dimensional objects or figures are submerged into molten glass encased in cubes and rectangles of clear sand cast glass. Each cube or rectangle is created so that they can be fitted tightly next to one another or on top, making a totem like structure. Coldworking is required to achieve the perfect fit. She states: “I have been following my own interests and curiosities concerning how these women have navigated their careers and artistic practices. I represent these ideas in glass through the details that speak to me, particularly the ephemera of material culture, furniture and clothing that encapsulate their era and class. I also rely on posture and facial expression to reveal the nature of the subject as I intuit it.” In addition to teaching in her studio, Trenchard has taught workshops at Pratt Fine Art Center, University of Wisconsin, The Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass, The Bergstrom Mahler Museum of Glass and others. She was a lecturer at the Glass Art Society Conference, Murano, Italy, and established the first hot glass school in Southeast Asia, at Bangkok Glass, Thailand. Recent exhibitions include: Beyond Giving, Inspiring Change, Singapore Art Week, Singapore; Matriarchs of Mastery, Habatat Gallery, Detroit, Michigan; A Creative Place, Trout Museum, Wisconsin; and Beyond the Ceiling – Women of Studio Glass, Sarasota, Florida, Habatat Invitational, Michigan. Awards include Trenchard's 2025 Featured Poet award, presented by After Hours Journal, Chicago; 2023, 2024 Prize Winner at Habatat International Exhibition; and the 2020 AACG Wisconsin Artist Series at Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass. Says Trenchard: “Telling stories is what cultures do to understand the history and identities of the people. The small details in my work open up a conversation about the personal experiences of women in the arts as interpreted through history.”  

self-described loner, Joel Philip Myers developed his skills in relative isolation from the Studio Glass movement. With works inspired by a vast array of topics ranging from his deep love of the Danish countryside to Dr. Zharkov, the artist avoided elaborate sculpture in favor of substantial vessels that are simple yet powerful. States Myers: “In 1964, on the occasion of an exhibition titled Designed for Production: The Craftsman's Approach, I wrote in an essay in Craft Horizons magazine: ‘My approach to glass, as it is to clay, is to allow the material an expression of its own. Press the material to the utmost, and it will suggest ideas and creative avenues to the responsive artist.' The statement was sincere and enthusiastic, but decidedly naïf. I never thought when I wrote it that it would be the one statement of mine that would continue to be repeatedly quoted, throughout my 46- year-long career, as my defining philosophy. I have no defining philosophy. I am a visual artist, not a philosopher. Thoughts and ideas and opinions do not constitute a philosophy, and my thoughts and ideas and opinions have evolved and matured and changed in the time that has passed since 1964.” He continues: “As an artist I like to think of myself as a visitor in a maze, trying to find a solution to a dizzying puzzle. As in a maze, I have, through blunders and exploration, arrived at solutions, and embraced the manifold possibilities that the material offers: plasticity, transparency, opacity, translucency. I am sensitive to the wonders of the visual world and inspired by the forms and colors of the natural world. My training as a designer has enabled me to understand and exploit organization and structure, adding a rational perspective to my intuitive, emotional self.” Myers earned his degree in advertising design from Parsons School of Design in 1954. He studied in Copenhagen, Denmark, before earning a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in the early 1960s. In 1963, he was hired as design director at Blenko Glass Company in Milton, West Virginia. Captivated by the drama of this thriving glass factory, he learned glassblowing through observation and practice.  In 1970, Myers established the nascent glass department at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, where he served as Distinguished Professor of Art for 30 years until he retired from teaching in 1997. He is an Honorary Lifetime Member, 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner and past President of the Glass Art Society, a Fellow of the American Crafts Council, and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work is represented in prominent museum collections around the world, including The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C; The Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague; Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Palais du Louvre, Paris, France; and Musee de Design et d'Arts Appliques Contemporains, Lausanne, Switzerland, amongst others. Of his sculpture, Myers states: “My work is concerned with drawing, painting, playing with color and imagery on glass. I work with simple forms and concentrate on the surface enrichment. I prefer the spherical, three-dimensional surface to a flat one, because as I paint and draw on the glass, the glass form receives the drawing, adapts to its shape, distorts and expands it as it clothes and envelops itself in my drawing. I feel a communication with the material, and a reciprocation from my subconscious, as I continually search for new insights into my unknown self.” Enjoy this enlightening conversation with Myers, who at 91 has a near photographic memory of the events and developments that spurred the Studio Glass movement forward in its early days, as well as the ideas and processes of his personal work in glass – some of the most successful and collected of its day.  

Housed in a 19th-century cheese factory, Audrey Handler's studio was founded in 1970 and is one of the oldest continually operating glassblowing facilities in the country. Through demonstrations she gave there and workshops she taught on the road at places such as Penland School of Craft and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, she helped spread the idea that glass could be used as a medium for personal artistic expression.  A pioneer of the Studio Glass Movement, Handler started working in glass in 1965 as one of Harvey Littleton's first female glass students. He and his students experimented and learned together, renting old glassblowing films from the Corning Museum of Glass and trying to emulate the techniques. “It was so exciting,” Handler recalls. “Every day was something new.”   As a glassblower, Handler creates fruit forms, glass platters, and vases but also sculptural environments that comment on universal experiences, usually domestic in nature. These sculptures reflect small worlds and landscape portraits with life-sized objects and tiny sterling silver or gold people that evoke a surrealistic time and place. In well-known series the artist calls Monuments in a Park, Pear in a Chair and Wedding Pair, glass, wood and precious metal combine to tell a story. These works are made in collaboration with her husband, John Martner, who fabricates the tiny wooden chairs and love seats.   Wrote James Auer, Art Critic, The Milwaukee Journal: “By combining pieces of hand-blown fruit, in particular apples and pears, with tiny, hand-cast silver figures, (Audrey Handler) creates bizarre, Lilliputian landscapes that evoke universal human emotions and experiences. …this universality – combined with a neat sense of humor – is Handler's principal strength. It permits her to invest her work with a cutting satirical edge, to the point where her miniaturized depictions of conventional household scenes and cliched gender role models become winning little exercises in small-town surrealism.” Handler was a board member of the Glass Art Society, an international organization she helped create in 1971. She holds a BFA from Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts and a MS and MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Department of Art. Her work was represented in the New Glass 1979 and New Glass Now 2019 exhibitions and published in the Corning Museum's survey of cutting edge-glass art, New Glass Review, in issues 5, 16 and 43. In 2014, Handler was awarded the Wisconsin Visual Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, joining fellow honorees Frank Lloyd Wright and Georgia O'Keeffe. The artist currently serves on the Glass Advisory Board of the Bergstrom Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah, Wisconsin. Handler's sculptures can be found in collections and museums worldwide. During 2023 and 2024, her work was exhibited at the Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin, in two separate group shows: Women in Glass and Wisconsin Artists: 1960 – 1990: A Survey. Her work is on view now at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, in 60 Years of Studio Glass, 2022 to present, and at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin, in Recent Acquisitions, 2021 to 2023, and an ongoing exhibit of her work from 1965 to present. Her latest endeavor involves creating new mixed media sculpture and painting with low-fire glass paints on tiles and glass, creating landscapes of the prairie seen from her studio window, areas around Wisconsin and visions of landscapes from her many travels. These glass paintings are an extension of her work with blown glass – an endeavor which spans more than 50 years – as well as a return to her roots as an oil painter.    

From their trademark blown vessel forms to more recent large castings, Hunting Studio of Princeton, Wisconsin, uses glass and its myriad mysteries to tell stories of unapologetic beauty and celebration of color. The work of this father-son team, Wes Sr. and Wesley Hunting, is on view now through February 4, 2024 in Directing the Flow: The Art of Wes Hunting, at the Bergstrom Mahler Museum of Glass (BMM) in Neenah, Wisconsin. The studio was awarded First Place and a solo show at the Museum following its 2022 Glass Arts Festival. States BMM Executive Director, Amy Moorefield: “The Huntings create blown and cast glass vessels and sculpture featuring colorful palettes and murrine inspired by past and present creations of artists working in Murano, Italy. Through the process of painting with colored glass and cold surface cutting, Hunting's newest creations invite the viewer to gaze inward into miniature worlds, paying homage to the aesthetics of overlay paperweights.” Hunting Sr. studied under glass artist Henry Halem while attending Kent State from 1975 to 1979. He served as an assistant to Richard Ritter and has taught at the University of Kansas, Tennessee College of Crafts, Florida Keys Community College, and the University of Wisconsin – Madison.  Hunting Studio's work can be found in museum collections internationally to include the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass, Neenah, Wisconsin; The White House, Washington D.C.; the Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph, Michigan; the Windhover Center for the Arts, Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin; the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona; the Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, Iowa; the Museum of American Glass, Millville, New Jersey; the Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, North Carolina; Cafesjian Museum of Art, Armenia; The Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington; and The Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi. Hunting corporate collections include Bank One, The Hyatt Corporation, The Standard Oil Company and The Quaker Oat Company, to name just a few. In the early 1980s, a trip to Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and travel through Italy set Wes Sr. on the path he continues on today. His studio visits with artists such as Mark Peiser, Billy Bernstein, Gary Beecham, Steve Edwards, Rob Levin, and Harvey Littleton and witnessing the millefiori process of the Italian masters helped refine his own goals in glass. Now as his son assumes increasingly more responsibilities at their studio, new ideas and bodies of work are fleshed out, investigated and introduced to their enthusiastic collectors. From their early Colorfield series, the artists have expanded into new aesthetic territory in the creation of their Optical series, Remnantseries and Castings. Says Wes Sr.: “We are always striving to take the work to a new level of intensity. It has developed into a way for me to express myself by painting with molten glass. There is no other material like glass. The colors are totally unique as they can be transparent or opalescent. The way light passes through colored glasses adds a third dimension that cannot be duplicated by any other material.”  

With her unique sculptural works, Ann Wolff holds a distinguished place as one of the world's leading artists working with glass. She applies her strongly personal approach to bronze, aluminum and concrete sculpture, as well as to drawing, pastel work and photography. From April through October 2022, Prince Eugen's Waldemarsudde, one of Sweden's most popular art museums, presented a solo exhibition of Wolff's work in several techniques and media from the year 2000 until the present day. VOGUE Scandinavia nominated the show as one of the 10 best fall exhibitions in Scandinavia. It was also the largest showing of her work presented in Sweden. Wolff states: “I have seen my works in painting, stone, bronze, concrete, and glass as equal in status. Sometimes I feel that my strongest works might be in paper, charcoal and pastels.”  She continues: “I feel as a human being out of time. The notion of self and hence identity, grips me, disturbs me and motivates me. Everything comes from that. My interest in the self includes the others. It is clear that in the way that one carries out one's work, something like a self expresses itself. And this self is guided by constantly developing insights. The insights can be very unclear but can still be the inspiration behind a work. I am testing out old questions of identity; be it inside-outside, symmetry, layers and core, number two and the double, the goat and the monkey. Moments of recognition are what my work needs, they propel me forward. Collected moments of clarity become knowledge.” Born in Germany in 1937, Wolff studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (University of Design and Art) in Ulm, Germany, then worked as a designer in Sweden. For many years, she designed for the Kosta Boda glassworks, during which time she also pursued an independent career as a studio artist. Currently living and working on the Baltic island of Gotland, Sweden, she is the recipient of several internationally prestigious distinctions including the Lifetime Achievement Award from Glass Art Society and the PRO EUROPA Foundation's European Culture Prize. She has been honored with numerous international awards, among them the renowned Coburger Glaspreis (1977), the Bayerischen Staatspreis (1988), the Jurypreis of the Toledo Museum of Art (2005), and the Award of Excellence of the Smithsonian Renwick Collection, Washington, DC (2008). The Swedish Royal family has acquired several of her works. As one of the founders of the international Studio Glass movement, Wolff was at the center of attention as early as end of the 1960s. Her initiation into the American Studio Glass movement came at the invitation of Marvin Liposfsky and Dale Chihuly. Early days at Pilchuck sharing ideas and techniques revealed to her a new reality – one in which she was respected as an artist not a designer.  Wolff States: “The Studio Glass movement from the United States burst in on my work – my isolation – in the mid 1960s. I was astonished and thrilled by the freedom with which glass was handled there. An immense curiosity about the unused potential and the broad possibilities of the new material for art: glass. It has to fit into the framework of art in general, though. For me, art is the deciding factor. The path I took shows that I intensely wanted to express my life in pictures, clarify things for myself. Of course, I could have started in a quite different medium – painting, sculpture, film – but it became glass.” In her 50-year career, Wolff repeatedly created works that made people think. With glass, she allowed the world to glance at her esthetic sentimentality, and she also created homogenous objects. Ever recurring themes predominant in her work are womanhood and habitation expressed through objects that are mostly monochrome, often in warm earthy tones. Dance-theater was a strong inspiration, and she was allowed to attend rehearsals with Pina Bausch, made views from what she saw there and then formed glass objects. Wolff brings out the special characteristics of glass: contours, surfaces, the relation between inside and outside. She makes inner landscapes visible. What lies behind the mask? The artist has asked herself this question again and again over the years. The psychology behind the facade is a regular theme of her works. Investigating further the subject of Wolff's blown and engraved bowls and cast sculptures, one finds that the relationships between women as friends, and as mothers and daughters, and the role of women in society deeply concern her. She writes: “It is natural to take oneself as one's starting point. The situation of women partly determines who I am and leads me to pose particular questions.”  

Richard Royal, a native of the Northwest, has become recognized internationally as one of the most skilled and talented glassblowers in the Studio Glass movement. Bodies of work such as his early Diamond Cut series to the more recent Geometrics are the hallmarks of his successful career in glass. The artist began working as a glass sculptor in 1978 at the Pilchuck Glass School, located north of Seattle. After spending a number of years as a ceramist, the birth of a new artistic movement appealed to the young artist.  Working his way through the ranks, Royal became one of Dale Chihuly's main gaffers. This relationship lasted for a number of years and consequently led to Royal's emergence in the art market in the 1980s. He has since been an independent artist exhibiting work internationally in both solo and group exhibitions. Wrote gallerist, Ken Saunders: “When Royal joined the staff of Pilchuck it was ostensibly as a maintenance man. In those early days a guy hired to clean up and a guy hired to drive a truck – Royal and William Morris respectively – might easily find themselves assisting the world's greatest glassblowers as they worked the hot glass, in demonstrations for students and for themselves after hours and after the summer sessions had ended for the season. Though Royal was introduced to glass as a student at the Central Washington University he pursued an interest in ceramics and in 1972, he and fellow student Ben Moore built a studio in their hometown of Olympia, Washington. There they created a line of production objects made from clay. The young men worked compulsively and energetically but typically found themselves in bohemian circumstances. Royal made his rent money building high-end wood furniture and endeavored to keep the studio viable while Moore enrolled in the under-graduate program at the California College of Arts. At CCA Moore met Marvin Lipofsky, who was running the glass program, though Moore did not participate in glass at that time and went on to earn his undergrad degree in ceramics. For graduation, Moore's parents gifted him with a session at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington. There, Moore met Chihuly who liked his energy and encouraged the young artist to help out during the summer programs at Pilchuck and later to attend RISD to earn an MFA in glass. As the small staff of the school expanded to accommodate the explosion of interest in the programming, Moore reached out to his buddy Royal, inviting him to join the staff in 1978. Royal jumped at the chance to get out of Olympia where maintaining the ceramics studio had become a lonely enterprise. ‘I'd heard about what was going on at Pilchuck but I was just thinking about having a job and getting fed regularly. I had no idea what was going to happen…it changed my life.' After spending the summer of 1978 at Pilchuck, working maintenance and, on many occasions, assisting in the hot-shop during classes and after hours, Royal was invited to stay for the fall to assist Chihuly with his work. Chihuly was assembling a large team that he felt would allow him to create ambitious, large- scale sculptures and installations… Once winter descended on the Pacific Northwest the team was forced to abandon Pilchuck for the season. Chihuly filled his calendar with Visiting Artist Residencies at colleges and universities around the country and took members of the team with him. Royal recalls the excitement: ‘We'd take over the art department and during our demonstrations the hot shop would be standing room only,' the team putting on what amounted to a performance with Chihuly playing the master of ceremonies breathlessly directing the action. ‘We would hit the campus like rock stars.' While Chihuly developed a very specific vision of a large studio employing extremely gifted crafts people to handle very specific tasks in an effort to harness the best each had to offer to the process, most artists working in glass in those days worked in very small teams, basically a handful of artist/friends who took turns leading the creation of their own works with the assistance of the others. ‘We all had our own ideas. In fact, when it was your turn you were expected to have your own ideas for your own work.' And led by the example set by Dale, ‘everybody was completely supportive of the others and willing to lend a hand if need be.' Dale set the tone, ‘really supporting whatever each of us wanted to create.'  Royal continued working with Chihuly for nearly 30 years until 2006,. He simultaneously worked at Benjamin Moore Inc. beginning in 1984.  Wrote Saunders: “Royal's first series of blown objects to find commercial and critical success, the Diamond Cut and Shelter Series, were begun at this time… The most important technical characteristic of this early work was the overlay of color on the outside of the bubble – a strategy that turns the usual process of picking up color first on its head. Royal describes the process: ‘In the Diamond Cut Series I overlaid four or five different colors on the outside of a bubble, brought the blank down to room temperature and used a diamond band saw to cut through those layers…I wanted to create an object that would allow you to look at the outside and inside simultaneously…This was a personal metaphor for exploration, looking inside.” The Shelter Series extended this metaphor reflecting profound changes he was going through emotionally, financially and professionally.  In 1989 his engagement and subsequent marriage to Jana led to Royal's Relationship Series. The form consists of a top and a bottom of equal size that meet and entwine around a smaller vessel at the center of the sculpture. ‘The Relationship pieces…show two equal entities coming together around a single idea.' Central to these works was the artist's sense of scale. Royal committed early on to working in the largest scale that was technically feasible. Those early bodies of work especially reflect the profound influence Moore and Chihuly had on the artist's work. Moore's tight technical approach was itself influenced by Italian Design. Moore blew on-center and his work is often characterized by a restrained use of color. Chihuly, on the other hand, had an organic sensibility but his approach to the creative impulse was as much informed by Warhol as by nature. His pieces were gestural, gaudy and loud in color and in form. Royal thinks that his work has benefited from the influence of these two opposites. In Royal's latest body of work, the Geos, the artist has sought to capture the qualities of kiln cast glass in his blown glass constructions. He has emphasized simple and subtle coloration and given the individual pieces a sculptural presence by referencing organic forms as opposed to utilitarian objects. The artist is also reinventing his Diamond Cut series, creating fresh new objects (such as those seen at the top of this page). Royal's work can be found in such noteworthy museum collections as The Mint Museum of Art + Design, The High Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Tampa Museum of Art, and the Daiichi Museum (Japan). His artwork is also included in the SAFECO Collection, PricewaterhouseCoopers, IBM, and the Westinghouse Corporation. One of the first Artists-in-Residence at the Waterford Crystal Factory, Royal continues to teach as both a guest artist and faculty member at various universities and the Pilchuck Glass School. A past grant recipient from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has served as a visiting artist at the Corning Museum of Glass, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Ohio State University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  

Born in Mirano, Italy, Emilio Santini comes from a family with centuries of tradition in glass. With skills in the areas of lampworking, glassblowing, casting and diamond point engraving, he has taught primarily torchworking at many of the major glass schools in the US including Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington, Penland School of Craft, Bakersville, North Carolina, and Pittsburgh Glass Center, as well as at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. Currently residing in Blacksburg, Virginia, Santini is dedicating more time to his first love – writing poetry and fiction, with a particular focus on the glass world, past and present. The product of over 500 years of glassblowing tradition, Santini's father was his first teacher. At the age of 11, Emilio was sent to work in Cenedese glass factory during the three-month summer break from school. His uncle, Giacinto Cadamuro, was his teacher during that year. For the next five years, the young Santini went back to work for three months in the same glass factory but with different masters, including “Petà” and “Mamaracio”. At 17, Emilio's father started teaching him lampworking, an activity that became the primary focus of his career as a glass educator.   Santini spent nearly 10 years refining his skills before — after four summers of persistent courtship during her studies in Venice — he married Theresa Johansson and moved to her family home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Without the close family and workshop connections that helped him so much in Murano, Santini struggled to sell his work. He failed to grasp the much more demanding and decentralized nature of the sprawling American art glass market, and the couple returned to Murano. In 1988, Santini moved with his wife to Williamsburg, Virginia, where he established a small lampworking studio. He made his third and final attempt to immigrate to the US when his wife was hired at William and Mary. During this period, the artist received a call from Peninsula Glass Guild co-founder Ali Rogan, who tracked him down after stumbling across one of his impressive works in a small York County craft shop. With her encouragement, Santini entered the Guild's annual juried show, where he not only won top prize, but so impressed the juror — a nationally prominent Washington, D.C.-area gallery owner — that she bought his piece and gave him a solo show. Also during this time, Santini received his first invitation to conduct a demonstration before an audience of collectors, gallery owners and other glass artists at Penland School of Craft. That's when he knocked on the door of internationally known Studio Glass pioneer, Harvey Littleton, who was so impressed with his unexpected guest from Murano that he invited him in for an eye-opening 3-hour conversation. Santini says: “Up until then, I really had no idea of what to do with glass beside production and fine design. I didn't know about making art objects.”  Over the past few years, Santini has concentrated primarily on sculpture and creating pieces that incorporate cast, blown and lampworked elements, along with metal and stone. These represent a major shift in his work, though many of these pieces had their genesis as sketches or models made throughout his creative life. Most recently, the artist has turned his focus to the written word, both prose and poetry, to which he dedicates considerable time and energy. Since venturing out on his own 34 years ago, Santini has combined his production and fine design work with one-of-kind art objects and sculpture to become widely recognized as one of the top lampworkers in the country. His work can be found in numerous private collections and museums such as the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York; The Ca' Pesaro Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Venice, Italy; the Sheffield Museum, England; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; and many others. He's blended his superlative technical expertise with his humor, imagination and friendliness to become a nationally known teacher at Virginia Commonwealth University as well as the workshop circuit. What has been the secret to Santini's success? He knows Venetian techniques so well, but instead of being secretive about them, he's generously shared his talents with students, collectors and glass lovers around the globe.   

“To have even a brief conversation with artist Michael E. Taylor is to dive headfirst into a deep pool of scientific and intellectual inquiry. Taylor has always been an extremely analytical artist, responding with equal fervor to his intellectual encounters with scientific ideas, art history, philosophy, or current events. Whether inspired by formal quality of geometry, the Higgs boson particle, or the moral implications of artificial intelligence, Taylor's work is ultimately about investigation.” – Museum of Glass, Tacoma, solo show, Traversing Parallels, 2017/2018. Widely-renowned for his cut and laminated glass works, geometric constructions, and fractal abstractions inspired by everything from subatomic particles to music, Michael E. Taylor first used glass while attending a workshop at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. He was struck by the material's heat and spontaneity, a dynamic opposite from the deliberate and extended processes for firing and shaping ceramics. Dedicated to art and education for over 49 years, the artist was born in Lewisberg, Tennessee, in 1944, where he initially studied ceramics while working towards a Bachelor of Science in Art Education from Tennessee State University. Studying ceramics honed his intuitive sense of form, color, and design; skills which would later be important to his glass career.  One of the first generation of artists to learn from the founders of the Studio Glass movement, Taylor experienced the early days of glass through interactions with Harvey Littleton, Fritz Dreisbach, and Marvin Lipofsky. As a young student, a Fulbright Hayes Grant to Scandinavia introduced him to the factories of Kosta-Boda Glasbruke and Johansfors Glasbruke, as well as artists of the region, including Anna Warff.  Taylor's artistic career has been intertwined with decades as a university professor, including a more than 20-year tenure as a professor in the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology, invited Professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciencias e Tecnologia, Campus da Caprica, Portugal, 2005 – 2013, and instructor at schools in the US such as Pilchuck, Penland, and the Corning Museum of Glass. His career in academia made it possible to experiment and explore new ideas through his sculpture instead of feeling pressure to repeat popular works for monetary sales. The academic setting also allowed Taylor to continue to explore scientific, philosophical, and artistic ideas. While at the College of Idaho and teaching the history of modern art, Taylor's directive led to political and visual expressions of the Russian revolution and artists of constructivism. The hard lines and acute angles of constructivism of the 1920s continued to scientific theory and theoretical physics. Using glass with scientific exactness and austerity resulted in further architectural form and shapes of accuracy. Readings of future science and cultural futurism led to issues of DNA and binary systems as they related to laminations in his work.  Taylor states: “Art reflects thought and ideals of the period in which it is made. It can relate to predictions for the future. My work speaks of the importance of science and technology and its eventual dominance through Artificial Intelligence.” Taylor's honors and awards are many and include the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Grant, 2009, 2011; Luso – American Foundation Grant, Portugal, 2002 -2007; Outstanding Visual Artist Award, Arts and Cultural Council of Greater Rochester, New York, 2001; College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, Research and Development Grant, RIT, 2000; Grand Prize, The International Exhibition of Glass, Kanazawa, Japan, 1988; National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artists Forums Grant, 1985-86 and Visual Artist Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 1984-85. Other educational awards and opportunities include a Lewis Comfort Tiffany Grant, Penland School Scholarship, and The American – Scandinavian Foundation Grant. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; the National Collection of American Art, Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington; Asheville Museum of Art, North Carolina; Racine Museum of Art, Racine, Wisconsin; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Glas Museum Ebeltoft, Ebeltoft, Denmark; Kanazawa City Museum, Kanazawa, Japan; and Tokyo Glass Art Institute, Kawasaki-Shi, Japan, to name only a few. Inviting viewers to utilize scientific-like observations to analyze the implications of a rapidly changing world, Taylor's sculpture is both triumphant and cautionary, simultaneously celebrating technological breakthroughs and worrying about their implications. By using glass to make these theoretical connections, the artist inspires contemplation of social and scientific issues and continues to take the material of glass into new expressive terrain. States Taylor: “The race is on in all technological advanced countries for the discovery of human consciousness for AI. I predict it will be the last frontier of human intellect. I have constructed a laminated slab of color blocks which represent the codes for the human consciousness. I see it as a kind of Rosetta Stone of translation from one language to another – binary to English. The RS interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics to Greek language allowed us to make the intellectual and cultural jump. “I see Codes as containing the information for making the final leap from human consciousness to that of machines. This will be a discovery of epic proportions. This would be the beginning of a new world of solutions to puzzles such as eternal life, interplanetary travel, and the discovery of philosophic truth for each individual human.”   

One would be hard-pressed to think of any other artist working with glass whose work reflects as many varied and compelling styles as Dan Dailey's. From vessel forms to his Individuals to lamps, sconces and chandeliers, these beautiful, sometimes humorous pieces dazzle through a combination of colored glass and intricate metal work. No matter the format, Dailey's work expresses humanity, historical reference, and reverence for the natural world.  Dailey credits his successful career to his education in the arts. Born in Philadelphia in 1947, he attended Philadelphia College of Art, where he encountered glass through ceramic teacher, Roland Jahn, and discovered a mentor in William P. Daley, who taught basic design and color to his freshman class. Dailey, who completed graduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) as Dale Chihuly's first graduate student, says: “Under Chihuly's influence, I focused totally on glass. That was a breakthrough for me. It was a lucky time for me to be there.'' Following graduate school, with the support of a Fulbright fellowship, Dailey moved to Italy and worked in Murano's famed Venini Factory during 1972 and 1973 as an independent artist/designer. He later worked with other established glass companies such as Critsallerie Daum in Nancy, France, and Steuben Glass Works, in Corning, New York. In 1973, Dailey returned to the US and established the glass program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, which he headed until 1985. Now Professor Emeritus, he transitioned into a new relationship with MassArt, creating a lecture series titled Materialism, in collaboration with Joe Rapone, a professor of design at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Dailey continues his role as independent designer at both Venini and Daum, and serves on the National Advisory Board for The University of the Arts.  Among his many awards, Dailey received a Fulbright Hayes Fellowship, Venice, Italy, 1972-1973 and a Fellowship at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1975-1983. He was elected a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 1998, honored in 2000 with the Libensky Award, and in 2001 with the Masters of the Medium Award by the James Renwick Alliance. Shown in over 300 exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Renwick Gallery, his work is included in more than 50 museum and public collections internationally, and currently represented by Schantz Galleries, Stockbridge, Massachusetts; Hawk Galleries, Columbus, Ohio; Habatat Galleries, Royal Oak, Michigan; and Sandra Ainsley Gallery, Toronto, Canada.  Dailey's process for transforming glass into compelling and unexpected forms is almost as interesting on paper as it is in three dimensions. Drawings and watercolors are used to refine ideas, but also to direct his team, which can include glassblowers in Seattle; acid polishing in West Virginia; waterjet cutters in local machine shops; and cutting, grinding, metal working, and assembling assistants at his New Hampshire studio. Working from his titles forward, the artist keeps a list of thoughts and key phrases, illustrating words with the objects he makes.  He states: “I emphasized drawing as a teacher for many years, because it would help me to help somebody realize their own ideas. It doesn't have to be a beautiful drawing. It just needs to include information. However, in my own work, I make accurate drawings that really represent the piece.” Focusing part of his time on producing sculptural lighting and large installations for residences and public buildings, Dailey says being diversified has kept him continuously busy, though he notes, not everyone makes a connection between all of his work. “Someone interviewed me at an exhibition in Chicago and did not realize that I made all of the work on exhibit. She thought it was three different artists. It was the first time I considered that perhaps my work wasn't clearly all mine, even though to me it all looked like it belonged. If you look through my sketchbooks and see the black-and-white ink on paper drawings, you can see that as different as the finished work can be, it is all connected by my stylistic approach.” Emerging from the Studio Glass movement initiated by Harvey Littleton, Dailey's work goes beyond its historical glass roots to combine with metal in a variety of formats, all of which communicate a subjective, narrative message. A vast array of forms has always been required to express the multitudes of ideas generated by Dailey's mind, and style is the common thread that binds them.  

Studio Glass pioneer Sidney Hutter creates three-dimensional sculptural objects in which the intersection of form, glass, color and light unite to create works of art with an amazing and ever-changing spectrum of color, reflection, and refraction. Transformed from industrial plate glass into beautiful objects, Hutter's iconic non-functional vessel sculptures read more like “three-dimensional paintings.”  Hutter states: “As a glass sculptor, my interest is in the effects of light reflecting and refracting off and through glass. By laminating layers of glass, I am able to emphasize and manipulate the effects of light using color, shape and surface treatments.” After a fire temporarily closed the glassblowing studio during his second year in the graduate glass program at the Massachusetts College of Art, Hutter developed his layered and coldworked vessels. In the late 1970s, he was in the unique position of creating art uninhibited by financial pressures. The artist immersed himself in the idea of making large-scale glass sculptures based on historical glass research and influenced by his interest in architecture and work by his hero, David Smith. He focused on the creation of his Plate Glass Vase series, with which he entered the gallery world.  Hutter says: “Now, 40 years later, it is inspiring to look back at the complex and unique pieces created during that time of freedom and ultimate creativity.” Post-graduation, Hutter became an instructor at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston University and in Boston Public Schools. In 1980, he founded Sidney Hutter Glass & Light in Boston and later moved his studio to its current location in Newton, Massachusetts. There, he continues to create sculptures which combine fine art and glass craft with commercial processes used in architectural glass, adhesive and pigment industries.  During the heyday of Studio Glass, Hutter's art and process became increasingly more technical. In response, he co-designed and fabricated machines to help make his work more efficient.  His interests in glass, ultraviolet light and adhesive technology, and pigment applications have taken him around the country – attending conferences and researching the latest advancements in those fields. Through conversations with industry leaders, he has been able to adapt commercial processes to his studio practice and create landscapes of color between layers of glass.   Hutter's work is represented by the country's finest galleries and included in numerous private and public collections as well as major museums in the US, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Art and Design in New York and the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC.  In 1993, White House Vase #1 became part of the White House Craft Collection. The artist has created commercial projects for the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Hong Kong, the Hyatt on Collins in Melbourne, Australia, as well as for the Pittsburgh Gateway Hilton and the Righa Royal Hotel in Osaka, Japan, to name just a few.   With a career spanning more than four decades, Hutter has been an eyewitness to the changes in Studio Glass. In this conversation, he contemplates a shift in focus to include more lighting projects in his studio practice and reflects on advancing technology, economic highs and lows, and the ever-shifting interests of collectors and galleries.  Throughout the years, Hutter has developed a unique design style – influenced and cultivated from his passion for art and architecture and melded with his interest in the commercial glass and adhesive technology industries.  He adapted information, materials, and equipment into a unique studio practice, which contributed greatly to the glass art movement. His work will be on view in a spectacular collaborative show, Masters of Modern Glass, at Shaw Gallery, in Naples, Florida, with Richard Royal, Toland Sand, Rick Eggert, Tom Marosz, and Alex Bernstein. It opens March 3, 2022.  

Irene Frolic: Personal History, Memory, and the Interdependence of Beauty and Decay   In 1948 at the age of 7, Irene Frolic arrived in Canada after almost three years in a United Nations refugee camp in Salzburg, Austria. A Jewish child, who had miraculously survived the grimmest of Grimm Fairy tales in the dark heart of Europe, arrived not knowing a word of English into a new world. Trying to make sense of these mysteries remains at the heart of her work in cast glass to this day.  The little Canadian girl grew into a well-educated young woman. Frolic married, travelled the world, had children, and held a good job before discovering glass in her early 40s, inspiring a sea change witnessed in her evolution to becoming an artist. Almost 40 years later, Frolic continues to infuse her cast glass with knowledge, feelings, history and heritage.  Working from her Toronto studio, Frolic has been involved in the international Studio Glass movement, helping to develop the art of kiln cast glass as a material for artistic expression by teaching workshops, lecturing and exhibiting world-wide. Past president of the Glass Art Association of Canada (GAAC), which honored her with a Lifetime Achievement award, she is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art (RCA). Her work is exhibited internationally and found in many public and private collections, including those of the Museum of Decorative Art, Lausanne, Switzerland, Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Museo del Vidreo, Monterrey, Mexico, and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Waterloo, Ontario. Glass, which surrounds us in our modern urban landscape, is one of the most ancient, seductive and mysterious of materials. The quest to find a way to use it beyond its easy allure has propelled Frolic and has sustained her 40-year art career. By developing and exploring the emotive qualities of glass as a medium, she has explored her personal history, commented on memory, and mused on the interdependence of beauty and decay. As the Covid pandemic continues, new sculpture is underway at Frolic’s studio. Her latest work, She Loves Us Still: Earth, addresses humanity’s treatment of our planet and each other. She says: “It goes back to my beginnings and how close I came to be extinguished. On October 13, 1941, in my hometown, Stanislawow, at nine weeks of age I was held in my 18-year-old mother’s arms, at the edge of an enormous hastily dug pit at the Jewish cemetery. I understand it was bitterly cold. The thousands of people herded there were all naked. The shooting continued all day – 12,000 Jewish citizens met their deaths that day. The reason I am still here, approaching my 80th year, is that it got dark…too dark to kill. I am full of anguish about the way we treat each other today. If strangers live among you, love the stranger as yourself and do him no harm. Love the stranger, both within and without.”

William Warmus and Tim Tate: Founders of 21st Century Glass – Conversations and Images/ Glass Secessionism Facebook Group Glass Secessionism does not mark the death of Studio Glass. It makes it stronger…In many ways, Glass Secessionism is putting glass back on the path it should have followed. It encourages those areas of glass that had progressed over time and builds heavily upon them. It reveres those artists who advance the medium, taking chances with new directions. In other words, we are not destroying the past, we are constructing a future. An exchange on a tour bus between artist and art historian inspired the formation of 21st Century Glass – Conversations and Images/ Glass Secessionism. This Facebook group, founded and moderated by Tim Tate and William Warmus, underscores and celebrates glass sculptural art in the 21st century and illustrates the differences and strengths compared to late 20th-century, technique-driven glass.  Warmus is a Fellow and former curator at The Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG). The son of a glassblower at Corning Incorporated, he studied with art critic Harold Rosenberg and philosopher Paul Ricoeur while at the University of Chicago. As curator of modern glass at CMoG in 1978, Warmus curated three landmark exhibitions: New Glass, which was also shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Louvre; Tiffany’s Tiffany, which focused on the masterpieces Tiffany had in his home and studios; and the first major exhibition in North America of Emile Gallé’s work. He is the founding editor of New Glass Review and has served as editor of Glass Quarterly Magazine, faculty member and visiting artist at the Pilchuck School of Glass, executive secretary of the Glass Art Society, and board member at UrbanGlass. The recipient of the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass award for outstanding contributions to contemporary glass, Warmus lives near Ithaca, New York. A Washington, D.C. native, Tate has been working with sculpture now for 30 years. Co-founder of the Washington Glass School, his artwork is part of the permanent collections of a number of museums, including the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and the Mint Museum. He participated in 2019’s Glasstress show with Ai Wei Wei and Vic Muniz during the Venice Biennale. Tate has received numerous awards and honors including the 2010 Virginia Groot Foundation award for sculpture; a Fulbright Award from Sunderland University, England, in 2012; second place in the 2017 London Contemporary Art Prize; and the 2018 James Renwick Alliance Distinguished Artist Award. His involvement at Penland School of Craft includes teaching, serving as featured artist for the 2018 annual auction, and acting as the Development Chair for the Penland Board of Trustees from 2014 to 2018.  Modeled after Alfred Stieglitz and the redefinition of photography by Photo Secessionists, Glass Secessionism is similar in that both mediums were born of science and industry, and both had similar paths of evolution as a result. Photography and glass art emerged from the lab or factory with inherent technical barriers, and genius was required to make something from the materials. Thus, early pioneers had a vested interest in keeping secrets and making adaptation by other artists difficult. “We respect good technique, and understand its importance in creating great art from glass. However, we believe that great art should be driven primarily by artistic vision, and technique should facilitate the vision. For too long, technique has driven the majority of Studio Glass. As Secessionists we do not seek to isolate ourselves from other artists working in glass, but to enhance the field as a whole,” says Warmus. Another motivation for Glass Secessionism, fine art galleries were not showing enough 21 century glass, and glass galleries were not showing emerging glass sculptors. Tate and Warmus believe, “Only by seceding would we succeed.” A primary drive of their Facebook group is to attract and support younger artists working with glass. In this conversation, Tate and Warmus discuss their Facebook group, how Studio Glass will move forward in the 21stcentury, and how glass artists and galleries can survive the effects of the current Covid 19 global pandemic.  

Tim Tate: Alternate Paths In 1989, Tim Tate received an HIV-positive diagnosis and was told he had one year to live. The terrible news inspired him to follow a dream he’d had since the age of 9 when he visited the Corning Museum of Glass. Driven to use the time he had left to become a glass artist, Tate travelled to Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina for the first in an intensive succession of classes. Penland and the artwork made during this time saved his life. A Washington, D.C. native, Tate has been working with sculpture now for 30 years. Co-Founder of the Washington Glass School, his artwork is part of the permanent collections of a number of museums, including the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and the Mint Museum. He participated in 2019’s Glasstress show with Ai Wei Wei and Vic Muniz during the Venice Biennale. Tate has received numerous awards and honors including the 2010 Virginia Groot Foundation award for sculpture; a Fulbright Award from Sunderland University, England, in 2012; second place in the 2017 London Contemporary Art Prize; and the 2018 James Renwick Alliance Distinguished Artist Award.  Along with William Warmus, Tate is the founder and moderator of the Facebook group 21st Century Glass – Images and Discussions. His involvement at Penland includes teaching, serving as featured artist for the 2018 annual auction, and acting as the Development Chair for the Penland Board of Trustees from 2014 to 2018.  In 2001, Tate helped establish the Washington Glass School to focus on sculptural glass made by kiln-casting and mixed media rather than traditional studio glassblowing techniques. Modeled after Penland and the Crucible in Oakland, the school has offered instruction to more than 4,000 students while providing a permanent studio in which Tate makes his work.  After 10 years of making bowls, between 1999 and 2005 Tate made 30 large blown glass hearts, an exercise which required him to work with a glassblowing team and revealed his preference to work solo. His Reliquary works created between 2004 and 2014 drew attention from journalists, galleries and critics, putting Tate on the map of the art world at large.  Never fully fitting into any one definition of Studio Glass, steampunk or video artist, Tate blends traditional craft with new media technology, the framework in which he fits his artistic narrative. Through moving images and endless mirrors his contemporary work possesses the aesthetic of Victorian techno-fetishism, which emerged from fascination with Jules Verne as a boy. Artwork and video, he believes, will be society’s relics of the future.  He says, “I like to reference many possible histories and will do so with video or mirrors to show our common artistic ancestry and illustrate alternate paths. Perhaps centuries from now my work will have the same presence as abandoned archaic machines from the Turn of the last Century, as people marvel over what could have possibly been its intent.”  

Susie J. Silbert, curator of Modern and Contemporary Glass at The Corning Museum of Glass, is trained in glass working and design history. Prior to joining the Museum in 2016, Silbert was an independent curator and writer motivated by the complex and intertwined histories of material, making, and makers. Silbert earned her MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center and taught History of Glass at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her most recent exhibition New Glass Now, is a groundbreaking survey of the landscape of contemporary glass.   The first exhibition of its kind organized by the Museum in 40 years, New Glass Now represents artists of 32 nationalities working in 25 countries ranging in ages from 23 to 84.  On view from May 12, 2019, through January 5, 2020, the show includes large-scale installations and delicate miniatures, video and experiments in glass chemistry, all of which demonstrate the vitality and versatility of this dynamic material.   New Glass Now is the third exhibition in a groundbreaking series organized by the Museum to survey contemporary glass on an international scale. Glass 1959 and New Glass: A Worldwide Survey, organized in 1959 and 1979, respectively, played an important role in creating and defining the field of contemporary glass. The 1959 exhibition helped lay the foundation for what became the Studio Glass Movement just a few years later in 1962, and the 1979 show spurred collecting by institutions and private individuals, new scholarly attention, and continued artistic innovation. The 1959 and 1979 exhibitions will be revisited in an exhibition, titled New Glass Now/ Context, in CMoG’s Rakow Library, which complements the exhibition of contemporary glass simultaneously on view.   Karol Wight, President and Executive Director of The Corning Museum of Glass, said: “New Glass Now continues a more than 60-year commitment to share the history of the medium over more than 35 centuries, including the contemporary development of art and design realized in glass. The exhibitions that CMoG curated in 1959 and 1979 defined the field of Studio Glass and brought critical attention to the work being done by glassmakers the world over. We hope that New Glass Now will continue this important tradition and reveal exciting new insights into work being made today across the globe.”   Coinciding with the opening of the exhibition, CMoG will publish the 40th anniversary issue of New Glass Review, its annual exhibition-in-print of contemporary glass. Published since 1979, New Glass Review has brought important critical and popular attention to the material and the artists and designers working with it. The 2019 edition will include the 100 artworks and design objects chosen for the contemporary survey New Glass Now as well as important contextual essays and information.

Glass Cases joined me in the studio last month to perform some new singles. Their combination of electronic and raw elements gave each song a sense of uniqueness. Between songs, we discussed the relevance “The Catcher in the Rye” has to the band and the backstories of the singles. The post Live In-Studio: Glass Cases appeared first on KCSU FM.

It’s not uncommon to read comparisons between Albert Einstein and Paul Marioni, artist and one of the founders of the Studio Glass movement, many based on their shared lifelong fascination with light. Known as an innovator in the glass world, Marioni has been pushing the limits of his medium for five decades, redefining what is possible not only in process but content. He says: “I work with glass for its distinct ability to capture and manipulate light. While my techniques are often inventive, they are only in service of the image.”    A surrealist whose work addresses issues of nature, identity, and emotion, Marioni relies upon dreams as well as political and social convictions to make statements, causing us to forget the unfair advantage that working with glass affords. Using material that is inherently beautiful, the artist inspires people to think rather than telling them what to think. Marioni’s work can be found in collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York; and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York.   Marioni, who graduated in 1967 from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, is a Fellow of the American Crafts Council and Glass Art Society Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. He has received three fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and has taught at schools worldwide including the Penland School of Crafts, Bakersville, North Carolina; Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington; the Glass Furnace, Istanbul, Turkey; and more recently at Soneva Art and Glass in the Maldives.   At 77, Marioni remains passionate about the “road show,” a grassroots effort started by artists like himself, Fritz Dreisbach, Dale Chihuly, and Richard Marquis, to spread knowledge and enthusiasm about glass to anyone who showed interest. “I’ve worked in glass all but three years of my life. What was I thinking to get into a field with no history, no books, no teaching? Obviously I wasn’t thinking. But we built the Studio Glass movement on cooperation, not competition, because there was no past. There was nothing for us to get. And we’ve barely scratched the surface of what can be done.”   In addition to gallery work, Marioni has produced over 100 public and private commissions in both cast glass and terrazzo. From his studio in Mexico, the artist currently works on the biggest commission of his career for the $52 million Bellevue, Washington, light rail station. Its train serves business powerhouses of the Pacific Northwest including Microsoft and Boeing. Selected as lead artist for the project through a national competition, Marioni is designing 3000+ square feet of art glass for the platforms as well as the terrazzo floors.   

PODCAST | Killer show featuring Wailing Blade's Joe Mulvey​! We break down the Spider-Man: Far From Home Trailer Featuring Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio. We preview the 2019 TV landscape and break it down to four shows: Game of Thrones, Punisher S2, Star Trek S2 and Stranger Things PLUS: We welcome Newsarama's Chris Arrant​Arrant as he gives [...]

On this episode of SPx, Ashley and Joe welcome Joanna Sikes to the studio. Sikes is the Executive Director of the Imagine Museum, which opened in St. Pete in January 2018. Sikes boasts a long career in art curation and deep involvement in the American Studio Glass movement. The Imagine Museum is her fourth museum endeavor. Sikes spent 30 years working with visionary glass artist Dale Chihuly and now acts as a consultant on projects of many genres. Most recently, she helped launch a marine wildlife rescue with billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen.

  Lino Tagliapietra’s visit to Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, in the late 1970s was a game-changer. His willingness to share glassblowing techniques regarded as Muranese secrets with American artists hungry for knowledge was one of the most important seeds of the Studio Glass movement’s growth. For Tagliapietra, the Americans planted a seed also, one that would encourage him to leave his career working in Italian glass factories and transform himself into an independent glassblower and artist. Since 1990, the Maestro has created some of the world’s most recognizable blown glass, represented by prestigious museums including the De Young Museum, San Francisco, California; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; the Metropolitan Museum, New York, New York, as well as by numerous galleries and private collections. Tagliapietra’s awards and honors are innumerable and include his 2006 Distinguished Educator Award presented by the James Renwick Alliance of Washington D.C. In 2011, the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti in Venice held an exhibition Lino Tagliapietra from Murano to Studio Glass, and in 2015 bestowed upon him the coveted Career Award. Tagliapietra holds two honorary degrees and the title PhD of Fine Arts from Ohio State University. In 2012 the Maestro was chosen for the renowned Phoenix Award. In 2014 he was presented with the Visionary Award at Art Palm Beach, Florida, followed by the Best Glass Work Award, Masterpiece exhibition, London, UK. Tagliapietra is widely revered as the Maestro of glassblowing, an inspiring teacher, and the elder statesman linking the glass centers of Venice, Italy, and the Pacific Northwest. Vessels, installations, panels, and Avventurina comprise his current body of work. His 2017 exhibition schedule includes Sandra Ainsley Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, from May 13 through August 6; and Lino Tagliapietra, Master of a Glass Renaissance, Morris Museum, Morristown, now through June 18. The New Jersey exhibition will showcase approximately 30 Tagliapietra masterpieces in collaboration with Schantz Galleries.

TO WATCH WITH IMAGES, VISIT MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL https://youtu.be/PiIBtKII_zE   Equal parts artist, scientist, and historian, Fritz Dreisbach has spent the last five decades teaching and demonstrating glassblowing around the world. This Johnny Appleseed of Glass has himself played a vital role in the history of the American Studio Glass movement that he now strives to preserve and share with the next generation of artists. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Dreisbach grew up in Akron as part of a family of educators. His father, a college chemistry professor, and mother, a high school music and literature teacher, created in their son what is referred to as conciatore - a marriage of art and science. Fritz holds two bachelor degrees, one in art and one in math. This duality is reflected in both his technical consulting for glass factories such as the Glass Eye Studio, Spectrum Glass, Kugler Colors, and Seattle Batch as well as his continuing personal journey to express using hot glass. Dreisbach studied painting and sculpture at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, earning his MA. Planning to eventually teach painting, his advisor instructed him to study a broad range of artistic subjects. A two-credit course in glassblowing was part of the curriculum, and serendipitously his love affair with glass began. Dreisbach continued his studies at the University of Wisconsin where he earned an MFA and was inspired by three pioneers of the Studio Glass movement: Harvey Littleton, Dominick Labino, and Erwin Eisch. His education includes a hefty dose of art history including Ancient, Renaissance, and 20th-century painting and sculpture. His background in painting and classical intaglio printmaking provides the basis for practical color theory. When the excitement of working with hot glass spread from the University of Wisconsin, no one traveled farther or more frequently than Dreisbach to proselytize about glassblowing. The artist visited the first summer session held at Pilchuck Glass School in 1971 and has been active with the school as teacher, advisor, and trustee for 39 years. He also helped found the Glass Art Society, which presented him with a lifetime achievement award in 2002.

Libby Purves meets retail guru Mary Portas; opera singer Noah Stewart; glass artist Peter Layton and florist Rosemary Hughes. Peter Layton is an artist and glassmaker known as the grandmaster of glass. His new exhibition, Young Masters, showcases work by some of Britain's best young glass artists working today. Peter began his career in ceramics but was drawn to the immediacy and spontaneity of glassmaking in the Sixties. In 1976 Peter opened London Glassblowing and today it is one of Europe's first and leading hot-glass studios. Young Masters - Rising Stars of Studio Glass is at London Glassblowing. Noah Stewart is an opera singer. For his new tour, So in Love, the tenor will perform some of opera's best loved arias and the music that inspired him as a young boy. Born in Harlem, he won a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School and has gone on to sing on some of the world's greatest stages including the Bolshoi Theatre and the Royal Opera House. So In Love is touring the UK. Noah is appearing with English National Opera in the Indian Queen and is playing BF Pinkerton in Madame Butterfly at the Royal Opera House. Mary Portas, aka Mary Queen of Shops, is a retail guru. Her autobiography, Shop Girl, tells how she started life in hand-me-down clothes and rose to become one of the UK's foremost authorities in retail. She began her career as a window dresser at Harvey Nichols, becoming its creative director and a member of the board. She delivered her report on the future of our High Streets to the prime minister in December 2011. The Portas Review outlined 28 recommendations to rescue failing High Streets. Shop Girl A Memoir is published by Doubleday. Rosemary Hughes has been a florist for over 40 years and will be supplying floral arrangements for the reburial of Richard III. She was granted a Royal Warrant in 2008, after becoming supplier of nosegays to the Queen in 2002. King Richard III will be reburied at Leicester Cathedral in March 2015. Producer: Paula McGinley.

Witness the birth of the Studio Glass Movement through the eyes of Marvin Lipofsky. As one of the students that participated in Harvey Littleton's first glassblowing class, he was present from the beginning. His work as a glass artist has taken him all over the world, where he was often the first American artist to collaborate with local factory workers. From the Czech Republic to Russia, Japan, Finland and Yugoslavia, this international glass master has seen it all. You'll also hear about the events leading to the formation of the Glass Art Society. We would like to thank Glasscraft, Inc. for sponsoring this podcast. Find out more about them at: www.glasscraftinc.com. And remember to tell them you heard about them on Glasscaster! Printed excerpts of this podcast can be seen in the Summer, 2010 issue of The Flow Magazine.

One of the grand artists and philosophers of our time! Gianni Toso participated in the early Studio Glass movement, flourished in the US and abroad with his narrative flameworking scenes, and has added his creative and spiritual spin to everything he touches. An inspiring interview! Find out about his controversial chess sets and his homemade wine! You’ll love listening to this entertaining and uplifting journey through his life. Enjoy!