Viewing articles by Jana Elsayed

Hilltop Artists staff and students during a residency at Pilchuck Glass School, September 2023. Image courtesy of Hilltop Artists

Tuesday April 9, 2024 | by Jana Elsayed

At 30, Hilltop Artists takes stock of its decades of impact not only by empowering Tacoma youth, but inspiring others to follow its innovative approach

Hilltop Artists was founded in the heart of Tacoma, Washington thirty years ago with a mission to provide young people an artistic haven from the drugs and gang violence that were impacting the city in the 1990s. The initiative began modestly in 1994, repurposing materials like Snapple bottles to offer an avenue for self-expression through glass art. The initiative was led by gallery owner Kathy Kaperick and glass artist Dale Chihuly, and from this humble beginning, they proved the concept that glassmaking held special power to reach young people. Hilltop Artists would not only endure for three decades, but it showed the way for many similar initiatives around the United States, impacting generations of young people over the years.

Giuseppe Barovier for Salviati. Granzioli Dragon Compote, ca. 1877–1914, Blown and applied glass. gift: marjorie reed gordon. courtesy: chrysler museum of art

Tuesday March 26, 2024 | by Jana Elsayed

With glorious glass goblets as the focus, Chrysler exhibition traces the triumphant rebirth of Venetian glass in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

In the secretive culture of Venetian glassmaking, craftsmanship became a whispered tale, a dance of techniques kept from prying eyes and kept alive against others determined to steal the techniques, or, later, against onerous taxation that practically destroyed the centuries-old industry. As you step into an exhibition showcasing 50 masterpieces from The Chrysler Museum of Art's collection, fine glassware festooned with imaginary creatures that might have surfaced from the depths of the Venetian lagoon, the fanciful figures could be seen as representations of the powerful techniques emerging from hiding places in and around Murano, the Venetian island where glass remains the focus. These imaginative embellishments of the glassmakers reached their heights among glassmakers laboring to reclaim the glory of Venetian glass in the 19th century as Venice was freed from the yoke of the oppression of the Hapsburg Empire. Knowing the history, these creatures unfurl like the secrets of a captivating story, weaving through the intricate threads of Venetian glass history.

Ros Lemoh residency in the studio [1.11.23] from Canberra Glassworks

Tuesday March 26, 2024 | by Jana Elsayed

Rosalind Lemoh showcases the untold stories of Australia's capital city in works that expand the historical narrative

Australia's capital city, Canberra, was established in 1913 as the former British colonies on the continent created a federation and began to establish a national identity of their own. The site itself was chosen to settle fierce competition between the cities of Sydney and Melbourne, both of which were vying for the honor. Located between the two large cities, Canberra would be built on a site that had been continuously inhabited by indigenous people for more than 20,000 years. The first public building constructed in the nascent capital was the Kingston Powerhouse, so named because it generated electricity as this city grew up around it, boasting a current population of nearly half a million.

Bill Gudenrath Instructing Winter 2024 Studio Class at CMoG

Photo credit: The Corning Museum of Glass. Photography by
Emily Smith.

Tuesday March 19, 2024 | by Jana Elsayed

Corning's Bill Gudenrath shares his discoveries of ancient glass process in new e-book "The Techniques of Roman-Period Glassblowing"

Even for those who've never set foot in The Corning Museum of Glass, their website is a treasure trove of information. Thanks to an ambitious digitization project that included the museum hiring a digital asset manager and strategist in 2016, you can learn about the "most comprehensive glass collection in the world" at cmog.org through text and images supplemented by a wide range of videos linked to the museum's extensive YouTube channel. Click on the "Learning and Research" tab from the main Corning landing page, and you can also select "Museum Publications," where you can order exhibition catalogs or copies of the annual exhibition-in-print New Glass Review. However, most prominently displayed is the latest e-book by Corning's own Bill Gudenrath, the renowned glassblower, scholar, and Resident Advisor at The Studio of The Corning Museum of Glass, who has been exploring how historic glass might have been made using his impressive arsenal of glass techniques honed over his decades spent at the glassblowing furnace.

Friday February 23, 2024 | by Jana Elsayed

CONVERSATION: Michiko Sakano debuts "Droplets," her sculptural lighting series at New York City's Heller Gallery

Michiko Sakano, a Brooklyn-based glassblower known for her technical precision and originality, steps into the limelight with her first solo exhibition, "Droplets," at Heller Gallery in New York. This collection represents a radical departure from contemporary trends in lighting design, introducing sculptural, molten forms that are not suspended but sit on a tabletop, as they were displayed at the gallery, glowing in hues of pink, yellow, and white. The exhibition is testament to Sakano's commitment to embrace the spontaneous, and present glass in a fluid form independent of the rigid engineering that defines much of lighting popular today.

Danny Perkins & Richard Royal standing in front of their new joint exhibition, Parallel

Friday February 9, 2024 | by Jana Elsayed

Danny Perkins and Richard Royal celebrate a friendship and share an exhibition space at the Patricia Rovzar Gallery in Seattle

Light, be it through layers of resin over abstract color fields on canvas, or embedded in glass sculptural objects, is the theme of a dual exhibition running through the end of February. Danny Perkins and Richard Royal are exhibiting together at the Patricia Rovzar Gallery. The two-person exhibition entitled "Parallel" celebrates an enduring friendship between two artists who first crossed paths during the early years of the Pilchuck Glass School. Each individually delve into and extend the inherent attributes of their chosen mediums in works that share a preoccupation around the transformative influence of light on color.

RIT residents gain access to round-the-clock access to the hotshop.

Thursday February 8, 2024 | by Jana Elsayed

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: RIT Glass Studio Residency offers 24-hour access to glass facilities during Fall 2024 - Spring 25 academic year

There's still time to apply for a unique opportunity to advance glass-related research while actively participating in the vibrant creative community of RIT's Glass program within the university's College of Art and Design. The RIT Glass Studio Residency comes with a dedicated personal studio space and round-the-clock access to all glass facilities, including a hot shop, flame shop, mold-making studio, various kilns, and a coldworking studio. Essential studio materials, such as hot glass, plaster, silica, wax, etc., are provided.

The Corning Museum of Glass's 2024 residents (top to bottom from top left): Ali Hoag, Fatma Çiftçi, Peadar Lamb, Debbie Dawson, Catie Newell, Ross Delano, Percy Echols II, Runa Kosogawa, Jason McDonald, Brie Ruais, Birgit Maixner, Joe Stadolnik.

Thursday February 1, 2024 | by Jana Elsayed

The Studio at The Corning Museum of Glass announces 2024 residencies

FILED UNDER: Announcements

Not long after announcing the completion of phase one of their expansion and renovation, The Studio at The Corning Museum of Glass announced its 2024 roster of residencies. The artists and scholars chosen for 2024 will fill 12 residencies that include the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Residency; the Instructor Collaborative Residency; the Burke Residency; the David Whitehouse Research Residency for Artists; and the David Whitehouse Research Residency for Scholars.

Architectural rendering of the expansion project done by Saunders + Crouse Architects

Wednesday December 20, 2023 | by Jana Elsayed

The Barry Art Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, will double in size thanks to longtime friendship between art-collecting families

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums

Richard and Carolyn Barry, the founders of the Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, are planning a major expansion, with the institution that bears their name doubling in size with the planned addition of the Waitzer Wing, named after their late art-collector mentors, philanthropists Richard and Leah Waitzer, who died in 2019 and 2021 respectively. The two couples not only shared a love of art, but the older pair were instrumental in inspiringthe Barrys to begin their collecting many years earlier. That the Weitzer collection would end up finding a home within the museum built to house much of the Barry collection is just the latest development in the intertwined histories of two art-collecting couples.

Portrait photo of Marta Klonowska taken by Stephan Wieland

Thursday December 14, 2023 | by Jana Elsayed

CONVERSATION: Marta Klonowska, on childhood memories, discarded beauty, and her major exhibition at the Finnish Glass Museum

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, Museums

Once upon a time, a little girl in Poland picked up a piece of glass, placed it up against the sky, and marveled at how it altered the light hitting her eye. As children do, Marta Klonowska then dug a small hole in the ground and filled it with leaves and pieces of a drawing she had torn up. Covering her creation with the piece of glass, she knelt down and looked down at her artwork transformed by the shadows and unusual cast of light. This childhood game wasn't forgotten many years later, when Klonowska was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland, and came across shards of broken glass in her studio. Though she was studying ceramics and sculpture, something about the glass rekindled her interest, and she began creating sculptural assemblages of glass shards to create figurative objects imbued with the beauty and symbolic power of a shattered material.Klonowska's aesthetic approach of finding beauty in discarded items rescued and remade may hearken back to her childhood years, but there's something very grown-up about the way she takes what others may overlook, or dismiss as garbage, to not only use but to create beautiful things. At the Finnish Glass Museum, where Klonowska's latest exhibition "Movements" is currently on view, creatures are brought from the obscure corners of paintings and take center stage in three dimensions, bristling with the alluring sparkling edges of the shards from which they were constructed.

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.