IN MEMORIAM: Ginny Ruffner (1952 - 2025)

Ginny Ruffner, whose exuberant embrace of art, technology, and the power of imagination defined a life of overcoming obstacles and expanding the possibilities of expression through glass art, died at the age of 72 at her Seattle home earlier this week. Ruffner studied drawing and painting at both the undergraduate and graduate level at the University of Georgia (BFA 1974, MFA 1975), where she became intrigued by glass as an art medium after encountering Marcel Duchamp's paint-on-glass work Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (2015) in an art history class.

Friday January 17, 2025 | by Andrew Page

IN MEMORIAM: Zora Palová (1947-2025)

Leading Slovakian glass artist Zora Palová died on January 11, 2025, at the age of 77. Born in Bratislava when it was part of Czechoslovakia, Palová studied with Václav Cigler in the architectural glass program he led at the Academy of Fine Arts. There she would meet her husband, fellow student Štěpán Pala, with whom she had three sons.

Jacob Patrick, the founder of Amalgamation Pictures in Los Angeles, served as director, producer, and cinematographer of SONO LINO. photo: ivan lizarde

Friday October 18, 2024 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: The director and producer of "SONO LINO" shares his fresh take on Maestro Tagaliapietra

The New York premiere of SONO LINO ("I am Lino") is scheduled for this coming Sunday, October 20th, as part of the Chelsea Film Festival, and, if you think it's one more love letter to the genius of the maestro, you might be surprised. The filmmaker, Jacob Patrick, is not a veteran documentary maker about glass, but instead is a wide-ranging producer, director, and cinematographer, who brings a fresh perspective to his subject. Sono Lino is not another compendium of luscious shots of colorful sculpted forms emerging from the smoke and fire of the hot shop, though there are plenty of artful compositions of Lino in action. But at its heart, the film is a character study, an investigation into who Lino is, and engages how he has impacted so many lives around him. Of course, any film about someone as skilled and visionary as Lino would have to explore his level of finesse and skill, and there are plenty of gorgeously composed shots at the bench, but it's the interplay of personalities that most interested Patrick. The Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet caught up with the filmmaker to discuss this project a couple of days before its New York debut.

Thursday August 22, 2024 | by Andrew Page

HOT OFF THE PRESSES: The Fall 2024 Issue of Glass (#176)

The Fall edition of Glass (#176), bundled with New Glass Review (#44) and adorned by a striking work by Layo Bright on its cover, is on its way to subscriber mailboxes and select retail outlets. A native of Nigeria, Bright left her career as a laywer behind when she moved to the U.S. to study fine art at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City. It was here she discovered glass through a class she took at UrbanGlass (the arts nonprofit that publishes Glass), and she had found a key material to work with in her multi-media art practice, which curator and critic Jabari Owens-Bailey explores in an in-depth feature.

Tanja Pak, center, surrounded by the other prize winners and high guests of the Toyama International Glass Exhibition at the award ceremony.

Tuesday July 30, 2024 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Tanja Pak on winning the grand prize in the 2024 Toyama International Glass Exhibition

Since its launch in 2018, the Toyama Museum of Glass in Toyama, Japan, has been holding its International Glass Exhibition every three years. For its third iteration, the triennial received 785 entries from artists in 50 countries. The submissions were considered by a panel of judges made up of Corning Studio director Amy Schwartz, Neues Glas publisher and editor Uta Klotz, Shanghai Museum of Glass founder and director Zhang Lin, Japan's National Museum of Art director Tsuchida Ruriko, and Toyama Glass Art Museum director Nohagi Naka. The jury chose Slovenia's Tanja Pak, and her work Rêveries, for the grand prize, which comes with an award of ¥3,000,000 ($20,500 USD). Lithuania's Daila Truskaite won the gold prize for her work, Forgotten, which is accompanied by an award of ¥1,000,000 ($6,800 USD). Two silver prizes, with awards of ¥300,000 (USD $2,000) each, were presented to Japan's Michiko Sakuta for The ebb and flow of the light, and Estonia's Birgit Pahlapiju for Riot of flies.

Saturday July 6, 2024 | by Andrew Page

SEEN: Two glass exhibitions of note near Cape Cod are drawing new interest to the medium in an area that once had a thriving glass industry

Museums of glass are often located near industrial glass concerns because such firms are often the founders. Toledo Museum of Art has enjoyed the support of Edward Drummond Libbey, or his namesake glass company, Libbey, Inc., since its founding. The Corning Museum of Glass, which opened in 1951 in a building known as the Corning Glass Center where glass technology was showcased and viewers could watch Steuben artisans at work, has enjoyed the patronage of Corning, Inc. ever since. But the Sandwich Glass Museum in Sandwich, Massachusetts, never enjoyed a direct financial link to the Boston and Sandwich Glassworks, one of the first pressed-glass factories, and a major glass producer in the 19th century. While the local glassworks closed in 1888, years before the museum's 1907 founding as the Sandwich Historical Society. The Sandwich Glass Museum grew out of local efforts to preserve the history of the company in this Cape Cod town, and it now offers galleries of historic decorative glass from the Boston and Sandwich Glassworks, as well as a working hotshop, where demos are presented. In addition, there are exhibitions that focus on contemporary glass, connecting the past and the future.

Thursday May 30, 2024 | by Andrew Page

The Peabody-Essex Museum celebrates the debut of its Carl and Betty Pforzheimer Collection with special celebration this evening

The Peabody-Essex Museum, known by its initials "PEM", is one of the top ten art museums in the U.S. in terms of exhibition space, budget, and endowment. The Salem, Massachusetts, institution boasts one of the most important Asian art collections in the country, and its campus extends across more than 22 historic buildings. While the museum has continuously displayed a cut-glass English chandelier in one of its oldest galleries since 1804, and was gifted two dozen contemporary glass works in 2015, it had not boasted a major glass-art collection until Carl and Betty Pforzheimer announced their gift of over 260 works in 2022. This evening, in celebration of the installation of 46 of the works from the collection into the newly christened Pforzheimer Gallery, a crowd of 250 invited guests will lift a glass to honor the significance of the donation. PEM curator-at-large Sarah Chasse spoke with the Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet about what the collection will mean for one of the oldest art museums in America.

Thursday May 23, 2024 | by Andrew Page

HOT OFF THE PRESSES: The Summer 2024 edition of Glass (#175)

The Summer 2024 edition of Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly (#175) is hitting newsstands and subscriber mailboxes. On the cover is an unusual banquet table installed by brothers Jamex and Einar de la Torre, lifelong cultural travelers between Mexico and Southern California who collaborate in a multimedia art practice where glass plays a starring role. Their critique of conspicuous consumption is notable for its grotesque imagery, and of course, the overfilled banquet table is not a new concept in the glass art world. In her haunting and elegant monochromatic table installations, Beth Lipman pioneered this concept over two decades ago, as exemplified by her 2003 Bancketje (Banquet) installation in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. What Jamex and Einar do differently is to layer upon layer imagery, materials, and ideas. The result is a kind of visual overload that mimics the intensity of information contemporary life overwhelms with. And with the addition of taxidermy and gory details rendered in garish cartoon imagery, we are invited to contemplate our own attraction and revulsion at the concentration of wealth on display.

Laura de Santillana, Space II, 2002. Hand-blown, shaped, and compressed glass, metal leaf. H 17, W 14 5/8, D 1 3/8 in. photo: enrico fiorese

Wednesday May 15, 2024 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Laura de Santillana's glass homage to Japanese aesthetics will debut this evening in New York

This evening, the poetic and sensitive expressions in glass of the late Laura de Santillana (1955 - 2019) will inhabit the third-floor exhibition space at New York's Ippodo Gallery, where an exhibition of 25 of her works titled "Echoes of Her Gaze, Impressions of Tokyo and Kyoto in Glass," opens this evening. The assembled artwork was inspired by de Santillana's experience of Japan, where the contrasting influences of the intensity of Tokyo’s neon lights on the one hand, and the meditative aura of Kyoto’s aesthetics, inspired the artist's responses in sculpture. Aspects of Japanese culture such as the unique cinematography of director Yasujiro Ozu, or the dedication to craftsmanship in all aspects of the built environment are also explored in de Santillana's glass structures that are both translucent and opaque.

Petr Novotný pictured at the bench of his Novy Bor workshop.

Saturday May 4, 2024 | by Andrew Page

IN MEMORIAM: Petr Novotný (1952 - 2024), an ambassador, glass virtuoso, and innovator who helped sustain the historic glassmaking culture of Nový Bor, dies at 72

Petr Novotný, the owner of the Nový Bor glassworks, museum, and tool-making company, known as Novotný Glass, died on Friday, May 3rd, after a long illness. Renown as one of the most technically skilled glass masters from this Northern Bohemian town where glassmaking can be traced back to the 14th century, Novotný was a regular presence at international glass gatherings since the 1980s, and a force who single-handedly helped to sustain and advance the field in the centuries old glassmaking town just over an hour's drive north of Prague.

Glass: The UrbanGlass Quarterly, a glossy art magazine published four times a year by UrbanGlass has provided a critical context to the most important artwork being done in the medium of glass for more than 40 years.