OPENING: On Saturday, Lino Tagliapietra to attend Boston exhibition of new aventurine work

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, New Work, Opening

On May 14th, Lino Tagliapietra will make a personal appearance at a pop-up exhibition in Boston for an afternoon reception hosted by Schantz Galleries. Titled "A Golden Age of Glass," the Schantz exhibit will feature a new series of work by the maestro in "avventurine" glass. Also known as "Goldstone glass," this is a unique type of glittering glass studded with bits of copper or gold mineral that shares its name with a variety of quartz with mineral inclusions. Aventurine glass dates back to at least 17th-century (Corning says 15th-century) Venice, and requires low-oxygen conditions during melting, as well as a strategic lowering of temperature at a key phase of the process for the metal inclusions to properly form. It is one of the hardest types of glass to work with from the furnace, with failure a constant risk given the complexity of the precise temperature changes required. Annealing is another hazardous aspect of this unforgiving material.

Wednesday May 11, 2016 | by Andrew Page

CALL FOR ENTRIES: Design competition offers $10,000 award for OLED “Lighting without a Bulb” contest

FILED UNDER: Award, Call for Submissions, Design

Lesser known than their more commercially developed LED counterparts, OLEDs generate broad-spectrum light that is far closer to the light cast by incandescent light bulbs than the harsh whiteness associated with LEDs. An OLED is a sandwich made up of an organic material layered between two electrodes, and these layers are deposited (they can be printed with an ink-ket) onto a transparent substrate. The many advantages of OLED technology — better quality of light, potentially lower cost than LED if mass produced, cool temperatures, higher response times if used for displays versus backlit LCD screens — must be balanced against the comparatively shorter lifespan and changing color balance over time, problems that are being addressed by researchers. Advances in OLED engineering hold great potential for the technology not only for touch-screens (where they are already being used in some smartphones), but for ambient lighting as well. A new design competition co-sponsored by Corning Inc. and the OLEDWorks company, is seeking innovative lighting designs incorporating today's OLED technology, and is offering $10,000 cash awards as well as opportunities to develop prototypes for winning ideas.

1 Anne Siblings 2013 3`x 4`paper Salt Plastic Ink Vienna Gallery Hinterland Copy

Curator and artist Yuka Otani

Tuesday May 10, 2016 | by Andrew Page

A conversation with artist/curator Yuka Otani about her plans for the “Emancipation” of glass art

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Events, Exhibition, News

Yuka Otani wants to challenge the current classification and labelling of "glass art," and she is doing so with an independent exhibition entitled "Emancipation: how to make a work of glass that isn't glass" taking place during the upcoming Glass Art Society conference in Corning, New York (June 9 - 11, 2016). Otani, who holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2008) and a BFA from Tama Art University in Tokyo (2000), has organized provocative exhibitions before. In 2009, concurrent with an earlier GAS conference at Corning, she and co-curator Anjali Srinivasan organized a group exhibition entitled "How is This Glass" in multiple venues. In 2010, Otani and Srinivasan also put together a "Post-Glass Video Festival" that was screened at Heller Gallery and other venues. But her latest project is unique in its break with the material of glass itself — none of the work actually includes glass but Otani feels embraces it as a quality or metaphor. The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet recently had the opportunity to explore the ideas behind "Emancipation" in a conversation with Otani to better understand the concepts fueling the project. —AP

Tuesday May 10, 2016 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Amsterdam student and faculty exhibition a bid to claim glass as a conceptual art material

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, Opening

The glass department at a top European art academy is framing an upcoming exhibition as a bid to present glass art squarely in conceptual territory. Student and faculty of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie's glass department will show new work at an exhibition taking place at the Arti et Amicitae, a historic artists' society in Amsterdam. With an opening reception on Friday, May 20th, from 8 PM to 10 PM, the exhibition organized by department head Jens Pfeifer seeks to "discover and research the possibilities of both immaterial and conceptual attributes of glass within the realm of contemporary art."

Monday May 9, 2016 | by Andrew Page

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.

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.