Viewing articles by Andrew Page

Martin Blank pictured with one of the two glass artworks that animate a city park in lower Manhattan.

Friday January 27, 2017 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Martin Blank on the installation of his NYC public-art project

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, New Work, News, Public Art

Martin Blank has called the concept of "flow" the unifying theme of the last 25 years of his career as an artist, and this is readily apparent in his latest public art commission. Set to be unveiled in Spring 2017 in the small city park next to the recently opened Four Seasons Hotel New York Downtown, Blank has created two working fountains in which the multiple glass elements mediate the falling water, and reference it in its cascading forms that appear like splashing water, or eddies. Contrasting with the restrained "New Classical" style of the building's architect, Robert A. M. Stern, Blank's exuberant work animates and enlivens the exterior space with its celebration of gravity and the shared fluidity of water and glass. The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet spoke to Blank after installation was complete, but before the water would be turned back on, about the project that he calls "the hardest installation he's done in his career."

The full overview of the Rainfield work with a human figure to indicate the massive 60-foot-long scale of the work.

Monday January 23, 2017 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Dan Clayman’s largest installation to date debuts at MassArt

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Etsy-find, New Work, News, Public Art

More than 10,000 individual glass droplets have been strung up in the atrium of the Design and Media Center at Boston's MassArt, the culmination of a project by the college's visiting professor Dan Clayman that is being unveiled this evening. The work is entitled Rainfield, and was constructed during "Structured Light," an interdisciplinary course with 18 MassArt students who worked alongside the Providence-based artist to realize this piece that measures 60-feet long. The completed project represents the largest-scale work Clayman has completed, the latest in his assemblage works that aggregate multiple glass elements to create a massive structure, as he did in his 2014 work Dispersion at Brown University. The installation will remain on view through summer,

Jutta-Annette Page

Tuesday January 17, 2017 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Curator Jutta-Annette Page on leaving Toledo to lead new museum in Virginia

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, News

Jutta-Annette Page, the senior curator of glass and decorative arts at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio since 2003, will be leaving her position of 13 years for a new job as director of the Barry Art Museum, a brand-new institution to be built at Old Dominion University in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Page will be moving to Virginia in March 2017 to begin the hard work of getting a new art museum off the ground. The building itself is yet-to-be-completed but there is no shortage of tasks, including hiring a full- and part-time staff, developing the museum's systems and protocols, and planning its inaugural exhibition of its namesake's collection. Last summer, Richard and Carolyn Barry announced a $35-million gift to Old Dominion, where they both have professional and personal connections (his father was a professor and he himself served as rector, while she taught there for a time as an adjunct). When it opens in 2018, the Barry Art Museum permanent collection will include more than 200 works of art, with over 100 works from the Studio Glass era. In an extended telephone interview, the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet discussed Page's tenure in Toledo, what interested her about the new opportunity, and some of her early plans.

Anna Boothe, Amber Sentient

Tuesday January 10, 2017 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Anna Boothe’s perfume bottles in group exhibition about scent

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Design, Exhibition, Opening

Practically across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, the Tambaran Gallery will show work by a painter, perfumer, and glass artist in a collaborative project exploring the power of scent through history. Painter Frances Middendorf, perfumer Leonardo Opali, and glass artist Anna Boothe have been working together on "The Scent Project," which has seen four exhibitions of their evolving bodies of work — two in Connecticut, and two in Venice.

The opaque steel walls of the flameworking studio at the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion include a wide picture window that allows the public to view its activities through the exterior walls. photo: © floto + warner studio

Friday December 23, 2016 | by Andrew Page

BOOK REPORT: Toledo Museum of Art celebrates 10-year mark for iconic Glass Pavilion with new tome

FILED UNDER: Book Report, Museums

With an unusual curved corner that echoes the rounded-glass-wall architecture of its subject, a new hardcover book entitled simply The Glass Pavilion ($44.95) is a 144-page love letter to the The Toledo Museum of Art's eye-catching annex designed by the Prizker Prize-winning Japanese architecture firm SANAA. Featured on the cover of GLASS magazine when it opened in 2006, the Glass Pavilion added 76,000 square feet of ethereal exhibition space and a state-of-the-art working glass studio to the 100-year-old museum. The museum wanted to make sure the new building devoted to art would be architecturally significant as would befit a facility dedicated to the same material on which museum founder Edward Drummond Libbey built his industrial empire. It was also at the Toledo Museum that Harvey Littleton held his famous 1962 workshop that many consider the birth of Studio Glass.

Thursday December 22, 2016 | by Andrew Page

BOOK REPORT: A conversation with artist and author Paul Stankard on the publication of his 3rd book

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Book Report

GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet: You've already published an autobiography, No Green Berries and Leaves (McDonald & Woodward, 2007), and a manual for artists entitled Spark the Creative Flame (McDonald & Woodward, 2013). What inspired you to come out with Studio Craft as Career (Schiffer, 2016) and how does it differ from your first two books? Paul Stankard: Well, my first book was a memoir, and the second one was a guide to finding and renewing motivation. But I decided to write this book because I was hearing so many people trying to make it as artists who believed it was all about who you knew. I wrote this book to say 'Wait a minute, it's not who you know, it's all about the work.' I wanted to give people a way to educate themselves about what excellence is, and to hand over tools for self-directed learning. People who read this book will hopefully think about how they need to see themselves in competition, not only with the best work in the contemporary realm, but also the best work that has come before. It's about studying the best work that's been done in your field and engaging in a dialog with it — to understand it, and to respond to that work in your own unique way.

The Toyama City Institute of Glass Art hot shop.

Tuesday December 6, 2016 | by Andrew Page

HELP WANTED: Toyama glass department seeks associate professor of hot working for 2-year contract

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Help Wanted

The Toyama City Institute of Glass Art in Toyama, Japan, is seeking a hot work professor or associate professor for a contract position. Applicants must have at least 10 years of experience, hold a degree in fine arts or glass, and either currently teach or work primarily as a practicing artist. The advertised position will run from September 1, 2017 to August 31, 2019, with the possibility of an additional two years.

Thursday December 1, 2016 | by Andrew Page

It’s Official: 2018 Glass Art Society Conference to be held in Murano, Italy

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Events, News

UPDATED 01/10/2017 For it's 47th annual conference, the Glass Art Society is going overseas for the first time since the 2005 Adelaide, Australia, conference sent intrepid artists on long-haul flights Down Under. The 2018 event is set to take place in Murano, Italy, from May 16th through 20th, a notably longer duration than recent conferences, which have been three-day affairs. Led by Lino Tagliapietra, the conference steering committee for 2018 includes Cesare Toffolo, Lucio Bubacco, Davide Salvadore, Marina Tagliapietra, Roberto Donà, Adriano Berengo, and the Consorzio Promovetro Murano, an association of craft and industrial businesses in Venice dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Murano’s artistic glass and centuries of history.

Wednesday November 30, 2016 | by Andrew Page

HOT OFF THE PRESSES: GLASS #145, Winter 2016-17

FILED UNDER: News, Print Edition

The Winter 2016-17 edition of GLASS (#145) is hitting newsstands and subscriber mailboxes this week. The four feature articles explore different aspects of the profound transition affecting glass art and design. Whether it's the aging of a loyal collector base that sustained its growth for decades; new technologies competing with, if not displacing, hot glass studios as the showpieces of college and university art departments; or the steady march of globalization finally encroaching on the price points at the high end of design, GLASS brings you unique insights into the changing dynamics of the field.

The Bousilles, or Whimseys in English, were a collection of factory worker experiments made in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Tuesday November 29, 2016 | by Andrew Page

MusVerre, a new glass museum in Northern France

FILED UNDER: Architecture, Museums, News, Opening

While the conversion of a former glass factory into a museum is not in itself unusual, the recently expanded MusVerre celebrates a peculiarly touching history. Beginning as a 1967 exhibition of curiosity pieces made by factory glassblowers in the 19th and early-20th centuries, the project of MusVerre reached new heights with its grand reopening in a new building designed by Raphaël Voinchet and W-Architectures earlier this month in Sars-Poteries, France. The inauguration is being celebrated with an exhibition by Ann Veronica Janssens, a Belgian artist whose “relevance, power and poetry... recurrent use of glass as a material and the very particular fit of the “wide-angle” space [of the new museum] to her work made this invitation an obvious choice,” for the museum’s curators.

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.