3 Questions for ... Rui Sasaki

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, New Work

In 2010, I had the good fortune to be invited as a visiting critic to an especially strong RISD graduate show of glass MFAs, which that year included Charlotte Potter, Matthew Day Perez, and Rui Sasaki. I was impressed across the board, not only with the work, but the confidence with which all three artists worked with materials, embracing readymade and non-glass media in their respective thesis projects. Rui Sasaki presented a 4-hour video of her multi-day performance art piece that involved a block of ice made up of the same amount of water in the human body. A test of endurance and risking hypothermia, she curled her nude body around the block to hasten its melting, displaying a similar block of ice while the document of her marathon performance was screened. Since her graduation, she's taught glass and contemporary art at Worcester State University in the U.S., and Kyoto University of Art and Design as well as the Toyama City Institute of Glass Art in Japan. Working with "transparent materials," which includes ice and glass, she is building on her long-standing interest in the concepts of "home" and, by extension, "intimacy," something she felt the profound loss of when she left Japan to study in Rhode Island in 2007. Since her graduation, she's been traveling widely to residencies in the U.S., Sweden, Belgium, and Japan, as well as to exhibitions around Europe and Asia. As she writes in her artist statement: "Wandering is a part of my work to achieve the definition of intimacy in empty space and intimacy without space. Through my work, I document the intimacy and memory of the home." The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet recently caught up with Rui at her residency in Norway, where she answered some questions about her latest projects. —AP

Thursday May 5, 2016 | by Andrew Page

GALLERY EXHIBITION: Toots Zynsky artist reception tonight at Heller Gallery

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, New Work, News, Opening

Toots Zynsky's sensuous forms, made up of thousands of undulating glass fibers that have been fused into wide-throated vessels that reach skyward with sinuous lines and luminous colors, are on exhibit at Heller Gallery through May 28th. Tonight, the exhibition entitled "today tomorrow yesterday | oggi domani ieri," will celebrate the artist and her 40-year career with a reception at the Chelsea, New York gallery from 6 PM to 8 PM.

Tuesday May 3, 2016 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Glass lighting and sculpture installation at NYC apparel store

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Design, Opening

The duo of Romina Gonzales and Edison Zapata, whose collaborative design-make project is called Offcentre, will have an opening reception this evening for their installation at the clothing chain Peruvian Connection's Upper West Side store in New York City. Running from 6 PM to 8 PM at the apparel company's location at 341 Columbus Avenue, wine and light food will be served.

Thursday April 28, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Call for Submissions: The Glass Art Society looks to fund cutting-edge approaches to the material

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Call for Submissions, New Work

The Glass Art Society is currently accepting applications for the third iteration of its Technology Advancing Glass Grant, which is designed to support projects breaking new ground in material, technique, or method, to advance the practice of making art with glass. Up to $5,000 will be awarded to the top applications for the 2016-17 fiscal year. Last year, the glass-frit-and-paper experiments of Iranian artist Saman Kalantari took top honors, with runners-up Michal Czeisler, Jin Won Han, and a collaborative group from the Chrysler Museum of Art Glass Studio and the NASA Langley Research Center each receiving $2,000 for their projects. It appears the budget for the upcoming awards will be held to a total of $5,000 versus the $11,000 awarded in 2015.

Tuesday April 26, 2016 | by Andrew Page

3 Questions for ... Alli Hoag

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, New Work

Alli Hoag, who holds a BFA from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a 2012 MFA from Alfred, is obsessed with boundaries. If there's a line through the varied work she has produced both in her own practice and through international residencies at locations such as the Cite des Arts International in Paris, France and S12 Galleri og Verksted in Bergen, Norway, it is her interest in the possibilities and limitations of connection — interpersonal as well as between individuals and the world around them. Hoag's art-making is driven by this interest. As she writes in her online artist's statement: "The act of making becomes an action of physical wish fulfillment. The physical result becomes a proxy, a body without organs — it exposes our innate drive to connect yet reveals the deficiencies in our physical capabilities to do so." Despite being especially busy with her recent appointment to assistant professor of the glass area at the three-dimensional studies program at Bowling Green State University, Hoag took some time for an interview with the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet.

Thursday April 21, 2016 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Corning exhibition celebrates the enlightenment brought by early glass microscopes

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, Museums

Opening this Saturday, April 23, 2016, and running through March 18, 2017, a new exhibition at The Corning Museum of Glass entitled "Revealing the Invisible: The History of Glass and the Microscope" will examine the 17th century figure of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch dealer in fabric who intitally was looking for a way to examine in greater detail the threads in of the cloth he was selling. His interest in lensmaking led him to develop very fine glass spheres that, when installed in a simple handheld device, could reach magnification levels of 275 times. Van Leeuwenhoek would go on to keenly observe and describe for the first time blood cells, bacteria, and sperm, advancing the fields of biology and medicine. Through his regular correspondence with the Royal Society in London, he eventually won their endorsement and his continuing discovery made him a celebrity in his time, even winning an invitiation to visit with the Tsar of Russia. Among the highlights of the Corning exhibition will be an extremely rare original 300-year-old van Leeuwenhoek microscope. Less than 12 are known to have survived, and none have ever been exhibited in the United States.

Wednesday April 20, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Groundbreaking for the Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion at the Ringling Museum

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, Museums, News

This morning, Florida State University president John Thrasher, Ringling Museum executive director Steven High, and the chair of The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art Foundation Michael Urette spoke at a morning ceremony to mark the groundbreaking of a new glass art pavilion at the Sarasota, Florida, art museum. Named in honor of donors Nancy and Philip Kotler and Margot and Warren Coville, the 5,500-square-foot addition will open in the fall of next year as an exhibition area to display objects from the museum's growing collection of American and European Studio Glass. The primary donors were present for the ceremony and reportedly used special ceremonial shovels to move sand in a symbolic launch of the construction project.

Thursday April 14, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Juried exhibition of stained glass set to open in June in Chicago — Washington D.C. in July

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, Opening

“American Glass Now: 2016, ” a juried contemporary stained glass exhibition organized by the American Glass Guild will take place in two venues this summer. From June 17th to July 11th, the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago will host the fifth annual survey show, which will then move to the Washington National Cathedral, where it will be on view from July 17th through September 28th. A reception for the artists will be held in Chicago on Friday, July 8th, from 7 PM to 9 PM, with the date and time of a similar Washington D.C. reception yet to be determined.

Thursday April 14, 2016 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Tacoma youth share personal stories through glass works inspired by Bangladeshi textiles

FILED UNDER: Exhibition, New Work, Opening

"Common Threads: A Glass Exploration of Kantha Embroidery" is the title of a new installation by Hilltop Artists students. An opening reception will take place at the W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory in Tacoma’s Wright Park tomorrow evening, April 15th. Kantha embroidery is a textile artform from South Asia that Hilltop Artists students learned about when Cathy Stevulak and Leonard Hill, co-producers of the documentary film Threads, visited the program to discuss their film, which profiles a self-taught artist who trained poor women in Bangladesh to translate their life experiences into Kantha. The Hilltop Artists students were encourage to translate what they learned into allegorical works of glass art.

Wednesday April 6, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Rethinking the Littleton myth, Koen Vanderstukken explores alternate glass-art histories in new book

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Book Report, News

The head of the glass studio at Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada, Koen Vanderstukken was driven by curiosity to delve deeper into the evolution of glass as an art medium than the concise story that Harvey Littleton was singlehandedly responsible. This inquiry, which he undertook in 2008, led him to ponder the intrinsic complexity of the material of glass that drew artists such as Larry Bell and Robert Smithson who had little connection to the Studio Glass movement as led by Littleton, and evolved into a book project. (Disclosure: GLASS is planning to run an excerpt from Vanderstukken's new book in the Fall 2016 edition. Also, editor Andrew Page is the author of an essay that appeared in a Black Dog Publishing book.) Taking notes, researching, and writing, on his own time, he has completed the manuscript and sourced images to illustrate his points. The 288-page book is scheduled to be published in September 2016 in partnership with U.K.-based Black Dog Publishing but Vanderstukken needs to finance half the printing costs, and has turned to crowd-sourcing, where in less than 24 hours, he's raised 20-percent of his goal of $15,000 US. The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet spoke with Vanderstukken about the book project and his fundraising initiative. Excerpts from our telephone interview below:

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.