A chance meeting between a chef apprentice and a leading American glassblower became a unique creative partnership that's evolved over decades from apprentice to assistant to full artistic collaborator. Both John Kiley and Dante Marioni are among the most-skilled American practitioners of traditional Italian glassblowing and acolytes of legendary Italian maestro Lino Tagliapietra. But each is advancing his uniquely contemporary approach to the time-honored process — Kiley in cutting away and exploding form, Marioni in taking vessels to new levels of scale and complexity of surface patterning. An opportunity to join forces in an aesthetic adventure came when they won a week-long residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, which went ahead even as the Covid-19 pandemic first took root in Washington state last March. They were the last residency to be completed before a state-wide shutdown that remains in effect.
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