OPENING: Annual tea pot exhibition in Pittsburgh set to debut Friday

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, Opening

For the tenth year running, Morgan Contemporary Glass Gallery will host its annual teapot invitational exhibition, an event celebrating the timeless form as interpreted by contemporary artists working in craft media including glass. Opening this Friday, April 1st, and running through May 28th, the "teapots!" exhibit will feature more than 60 artists working in ceramics, fiber, metal, wood, and glass. For those who follow the show, many glass artists reappear with further meditations on the form.

Thursday March 24, 2016 | by Andrew Page

EXHIBITION: Recent RISD MFA grad has solo exhibition in New York City embassy

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, New Work

Phillippines-born artist Christina "Goldie" Poblador is currently exhibiting a multi-media interactive installation at the Phillippine Center Gallery, her first solo exhibition in New York City. Running through April 15, 2016, the exhibition entitled "Venus Freed" uses interactive blown glass objects, flowers, and found materials to examine the Philippine myth of the ylang ylang, a distinctly shaped and scented flower used in many perfume formulations but rarely identified or sourced from the Phillippines. Earning her MFA in glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015 Poblador finds rich metaphoric associations in the complex Colonial history of her native country, and employ the unique scent and shape of this distinctive and mythic flower as an object specific resonance for the exploitation of Phillippine women.

Preston Singletary, Journey Across the Fire, 2016. H 28 in. courtesy: traver gallery

Monday March 21, 2016 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Preston Singletary to debut new work at “Journey across the fire” exhibition

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, New Work, Opening

Opening April 7th, and running through the end of the month at Traver Gallery in Seattle, a new exhibition by Preston Singletary will unveil new forms that marry traditional Northwest Coast Native American imagery with new glass shapes. Entited "Journey Through the Fire (and in to the World)," the exhibition's work employs Modernist vessel forms as three-dimensional canvases for the artist's ongoing study of Native American iconography — specifically Tlingit Formline art.

Tuesday March 15, 2016 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Corning to exhibit the lesser-known invertebrate sculptures by the Blaschkas

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, Museums, News

The father-and-son team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, famous for their lampworked glass flowers that make up the Ware Collection at Harvard, were better known in their day for their models of sea creatures. While their flowers are what gives them the most contemporary attention, such as the recent "Lifeforms" exhibition of realistic work at Pittsburgh Glass Center in which the German model-makers are cited as inspiration for a juried show, a new exhibition opening in May at The Corning Museum of Glass will put the focus on their models of sea creatures. More than 70 Blaschka invertebrate sea creatures, drawn mostly from the collection of the Cornell University Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, will be on view, as well as numerous drawings and instruments used to craft these finely detailed objects.

Thursday March 10, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Silvia Levenson solo show opens at the Murano Glass Museum in Venice

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, New Work, News

Argentinian-born artist Silvia Levenson's traveling exhibition "Identidad Desaparecidos ('Missing Identity' in English)" has been on view in Buenos Aires, Spain, France, Latvia, and at the Katzen Center at American University in the Washington D.C. area. An examination of the lingering trauma experienced by Argentine society under brutal dictatorship that Levenson and her young family fled will open in her adopted country of Italy on March 12th (Levenson has been living here since 1980). On Saturday, the Murano Glass Museum will open Levenson's first solo exhibition in Venice, and it will include a unique site-specific work that will circle the gallery area with 119 kiln-cast baby clothes represting the number of the children taken from their mothers who, thanks to the ongoing efforts of the "Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo" have been able to learn their biological identity through DNA testing.

Sunday March 6, 2016 | by Andrew Page

International Flameworking Conference to feature Eusheen Goines

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Events

Eusheen Goines, the headline artist at the 16th annual International Flameworking Conference, has adapted furnace glassblowing techinques, such as canework and gathering molten glass, to use at the torch, taking borosilicate glass into new terrain. He's also known for working with marble-makers as well as his own approach to intense patterning. The featured artist at the conference that will run March 18th through 20th at Salem Community College in Carney's Point, New Jersey, Goines is representative of the rich cross-fertilization the borosilicate world is experiencing as innovation and collaboration have expanded the range of expression in functional and nonfunctional works to realize larger and more complex and richly adorned objects. Credit technical advances in borosilicate as well as the destigmification of pipe-making as marijuana laws are rapidly liberalizing around the U.S.

Sunday February 21, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Hot Off the Presses: GLASS #142, Spring 2016

FILED UNDER: Announcements, News, Print Edition

The Spring 2016 edition of GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly (#142) is hitting newsstands and subscriber mailboxes at a moment when virtual reality is poised to go mainstream. Devices that turn your cell phone into a headset are already shipping to curious consumers, the Sundance Film Festival highlighted interactive experiences in an exhbition called "New Frontiers," and even an organization as august as The New York Times has been releasing online reports designed to envelop users in a digital experience. More complex headsets and interactive accessories are getting ready to ship. All of the buzz about virtual reality inspired us to remind the world of the rich terrain already mined by visual artists, who've used installations, architecture, and sculpture that create new realities through repeat reflectivity, partially mirrored glass surfaces, and cultivated perceptual shifts that play with optics to alter our relationship to the world around us, and force us to reconsider our place in it.

Thursday February 18, 2016 | by Andrew Page

The Corning Museum of Glass appoints Susie Silbert curator of modern and contemporary glass

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, News

When curator, author, and frequent lecturer Tina Oldknow retired in September 2015, the glass world was rife with speculation about who the museum might tap to fill her outsized shoes. Today, The Corning Museum announced that it has selected independent curator and writer Susie Silbert to succeed Oldknow as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Glass. Silbert (who has contributed to GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly) "will be responsible for the acquisition, exhibition, cataloguing, and research of the Museum’s modern and contemporary collection," which the museum identifies as the period that starts in 1900 and runs to the present day. In her new role, Silbert will oversee the exhibitions and programming of the 26,000-square-foot Contemporary Art + Design Galleries, which opened in March 2015 to great fanfare.

Sunday February 7, 2016 | by Andrew Page

In Memoriam: Jim Norton (1957 - 2016)

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Education, In Memoriam, News

James "Jim" Norton, who died unexpectedly on January 28, 2016, at the age of 58, was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, where he studied art and glassblowing, and where he built his career as a glassblower and educator. After studying at the Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) in Calgary, and the Pilchuk Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, he worked as a glassblowing instructor at ACAD ifrom 1986 until 2014. Norton also led summer workshops at Red Deer College from 1986 until 2005. When not teaching, he could usually be found working in the studio. He assisted in developing Skookum Glass in the 1980s, and opened the Double Struggle Studio in 1985 with Marty Kaufman and continued running the studio with Barry Fairbairn.

A rhino by Kelly O'Dell greeted visitors to the opening of "Lifeforms 2016"

Saturday February 6, 2016 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Scenes from the kick-off reception for “Lifeforms 2016” at Pittsburgh Glass Center

FILED UNDER: Exhibition, New Work, News, Opening

More than 500 people attended last night's opening of the second "Lifeforms" exhibition at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, some drawn by the nonprofit's 15th anniversary celebration. But the main event was the exhibition of 55 life-like "biological glass models" inspired by the highly realistic plant and invertebrate models made by the now-legendary father and son team of Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka. Spurred by the interest generated by the first "Lifeforms" exhibition in 2013, the 2016 jurors — artist Amber Cowan, PGC executive diretor Heather McElwee, artist Robert Mickelsen, artist Kait Rhoads, and art administrator David Francis — sorted through 177 submissions from around the world, including some from as far away as China, Argentina, and Russia. Though an homage to the Blaschka's lampworked forms, the exhibition was open to artists working with any technique to manipulate glass. According to the Website dedicated to the application process for the show, entries were judged for "accuracy in representing the organism, aesthetic beauty, presentation, and originality." You can view all the submissions here.

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.