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.

Monday April 29, 2024 | by Andrew Page

Amidst a wave of New York gallery closures, Douglas Heller will turn the lights off for good at his Tenth Avenue exhibition space to focus on online sales and art fairs

On the last day of May 2024, soon after the close of the Matthew Day Perez solo show "Accumulation" now on view, the lights will go off at the 10th Avenue gallery space that has been home to Heller Gallery since 2013. Doug Heller, who, over the past half-century has moved Heller Gallery from its origins on the Upper East Side to Soho, the Meat Packing District, and Chelsea, says the time has come to go virtual. Though the gallery's year-round exhibition space will close, he plans to continue representing artists through appearances at art fairs, online sales, private viewings, and pop-up exhibitions.

Monday April 22, 2024 | by Andrew Page

IN MEMORIAM: Gerry King (1945 - 2024)

The sudden passing of prolific artist and educator Gerry King, who died of a stroke on April 18, has sent shockwaves through the Australian and international glass communities who knew and cherished a true pioneer in contemporary glass. In addition to building an impressive art practice over the past four decades, as well as his work as a teacher and mentor, King was a past chair and president of the board of Ausglass, and an honorary lifetime member. With work in the collections of many prominent museums, he recently was celebrated in a retrospective 2022 exhibition entitled "Towards the Finishing Line" at the National Art Glass Gallery of the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in New South Wales, which was followed by a solo exhibition at Sabbia Gallery in Sydney that same year.

Installation shot of the SARAHCROWN Gallery exhibition "THE BUILDERS" photo: amy lemaire

Friday April 19, 2024 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: John Drury discusses curating his New York City gallery exhibition exploring contemporary approaches to glass

Through May 11, unusual glass constructions have taken over the white cube of SARAHCROWN Gallery, bringing new forms and rare coloration. Collaborations by Amy Lemaire & Nicolas Touron occupy the center of the gallery, while works by Michael Aschenbrenner, and Jennifer Crescuillo round out the experimental nature of the various objects arranged on plinths or along the wall. Some of the works are made with the mediation of technology, as in the Lemaire-Touron collaborations that merge flameworking with 3D-printed porcelain, a dialogue between two makers, but also between the machine-made and hand-worked processes. Aschenbrenner's meditations on mortality, shaped by his experiences during the Vietnam War, contrast man's capacity for brutality with literal and figurative healing. Crescuillo's intuitive hand-built vessels and sculptures remind us of why we are drawn to the handmade, objects that reflect intuition and encapsulate time in their subject matter and making. The Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet recently caught up with curator John Drury (who is also a contributing editor to the print publication Glass: The UrbanGlass Quarterly) to find out more about his choices and intentions in grouping these artists together in a single exhibition. The interview was conducted via email exchange.