Artist Talk: Josefina Muñoz, Leo Tecosky & Simon Klenell

Join 2016 Studio Resident Josefina Muñoz and Spring 2017 University Visiting Artists Leo Tecosky & Simon Klenell for a talk on their work. Josefina will speak on and discuss her new projects undertaken in the UrbanGlass studios. Leo and Simon will discuss their collaborative work as it relates to the university classes they are teaching.

Josefina Muñoz (RISD MFA’13) is a multidisciplinary artist from Santiago, Chile. Muñoz shows her work, lectures and develops independent research internationally. Her most recent projects involve extreme filed investigation, including living with the Turkana nomads in East Africa and experiencing complete isolation in an uninhabited island.

Josefina often works itinerantly, creating pieces in and about environments she encounters. Her seemingly disparate projects focusing on space, architecture, and place come together in an overarching impulse to answer questions of global concern.

Muñoz has been awarded artist residencies around the world, including USA, Tanzania, Kenya, Germany, and Scotland. Since 2007 Josefina has been commissioned to work on diverse public art projects.

Leo Tecosky’s work is a mashup of art X craft X design. Combining traditional glassblowing techniques, graffiti, stylized typography and Islamic geometric motifs, he creates new objects that do not conform to any one discipline. With a  BA in Fine Art from Alfred University and an MFA from The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, Tecosky teaches at studios and universities both nationally and internationally. Leo lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, blowing glass and maintaining a studio practice.

Simon Klenell is an artist working primarily in blown glass, based in Stockholm, Sweden. His practice is based on investigating themes around making, material culture and other phenomenons connected to the craft of making things.

His body of work usually departs from aesthetic themes or design historical elements. By making and setting them in new situations, contexts or forms he aims to create new viewpoints on our relationship to the material world and its manifestations. Materially as well as culturally and narratively.