Viewing: Artist Interviews

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.

Friday March 27, 2020 | by Farah Rose Smith

INTERVIEW: David King discusses his postponed exhibition "Reduced to Uncertainty," which explores transience and loss

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Artist Interviews, Events, Exhibition, News, Opening

Because of the ongoing temporary closure of UrbanGlass and its Window Gallery due to COVID-19, David King's exhibition "Reduced to Uncertainty" will have to wait until at least April 30th to be featured in this area of the nonprofit's Agnes Varis Art Center that presents exhibitions, performances and other community-engagement programs of work by emerging artists in its ground-level Rockwell Street windows. (Glass Quarterly is a program of UrbanGlass.) The exhibition is part of a 2019-20 series curated by Yael Ebon of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery. While you may have to wait to see the work in person, the Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet is sharing an in-depth conversation with David King about the highly personal work in the exhibition.

2020 Studio Air Working Portrait 2 Peretti Sibylle 0

Sibylle Peretti at work in her New Orleans studio.

Thursday March 19, 2020 | by Farah Rose Smith

INTERVIEW: A conversation with Sibylle Peretti, whose upcoming Heller Gallery exhibition has been moved online

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Events, Exhibition, New Work, News, Opening, Public Art

"Backwaters," an exhibition at the Heller Gallery of nine new major works by German-born glass artist Sibylle Peretti, will shift to an online exhibition in light of the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis. The in-person gallery event has been indefinitely postponed, with the hope that improving conditions will allow the gallery to reopen. (Heller has temporarily closed its 10th Avenue gallery in the Chelsea art district of New York City, but can be reached via email or phone.) The online exhibition will open on April 2nd, 2020.

The artist in her studio. photo courtesy: james schnepf and the american craft council.

Wednesday March 4, 2020 | by Farah Rose Smith

CONVERSATION: Shayna Leib talks flow, glass, and movement

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, Image Gallery

Shayna Leib, whose artwork ranges from undulating undersea plant life to glistening, hyper-realistic French pastries, has appeared in 75 exhibitions since graduating from University of Wisconsin, Madison, with an MFA in glass in 2003. Her "Pâtisserie" series is currently on view in a group exhibition titled "Céramiques Gourmandes" at the Bernardaud Fondation in Limoges, France. While her impeccable desserts realized in glass and ceramic are the product of her intense precision and technical mastery, Leib's sea-inspired work is more spontaneous and flowing, inspired by her love of diving and attraction to the aquatic world. Her "Deep Aquarium" series was acquired for the permanent collection of The Deep aquarium in Hull, England.

Dan Dailey, Dubious from the series Individuals, 2011. Blown, sandblasted, and acid-polished glass; metal. photo: bill truslow. © dan dailey

Thursday February 20, 2020 | by Farah Rose Smith

OPENING: Dan Dailey's portraiture explored in "Character Sketch" exhibition at Chrysler Museum

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Artist Interviews, Events, Exhibition, Museums

"Dan Dailey: Character Sketch," an exhibition focusing on figurative work of prolific glass artist Dan Dailey, opens this Friday. The work will be on view at The Chrysler Museum from February 21 to May 31, 2020. The Chrysler-curated show will feature 33 artworks and span the artist’s 40-year career. The museum's Carolyn and Richard Barry Curator of Glass Carolyn Swan Needell has written a catalog to accompany the exhibition. Subjective and narrative in nature, Dailey’s work is “inspired by the human character and based upon his direct observation of the world,” reads the exhibition announcement. The artist "articulates his perceptions and thoughts about humanity through the medium of glass, pushing the material to new frontiers in order to tell stories about human nature," the announcement continues. Dailey is known as one of the most unique voices within the field of contemporary glass, and the exhibition will include blown and hot-worked glass vases and sculpture, glass cane murals, wall reliefs made from Vitrolite, industrial colored glass, as well as his original drawings.

Jennifer Caldwell and Jason Chakravarty, Small Octopus/Purple. Lampworked glass. H 3 1/2, W 8, D 3 1/2 in.

Thursday February 20, 2020 | by Farah Rose Smith

EXHIBITION: "Fins, Whales, and Octopus Tales" gathers a diverse range of ocean-themed work in glass for Texas gallery show

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Artist Interviews, Events, Exhibition, News

"Fins, Whales, and Octopus Tales" is the title of a lively group exhibition of contemporary glass art concerned with depicting the undersea world. While all the work in the exhibition shares an association with the sea, Barbara Kittrell, curator and co-founder of the Kittrell/Riffkind Gallery in Dallas, Texas, didn't want to lock the artists into narrow parameters when she invited them to be in the show, which runs until March 1, 2020.

Albert Paley in collaboration with William Carlson, Arc, 2010. Formed and fabricated steel and stainless steel, cast glass. H 22 1/2, W 31, D 22 in. courtesy: the artist. photo: chuck lysen

Thursday August 31, 2017 | by Lindsay Hargrave

OPENING: Museum exhibit explores Albert Paley’s two-decade wrestling match between steel and glass

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, Museums, News, Opening

At the intersection of architecture, steel forging and glass casting lies the work of Albert Paley. This convergence is explored in an exhibition entitled "Complementary Contrasts: The Glass and Steel Sculptures of Albert Paley" opening at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, on September 9th, 2017. Running through September 2018, the year-long exhibit aims to view glass and its applications through the eyes of artists who may not work in the medium exclusively.

Landau (right) mingling with clientele during Glass Vessels and Tools of the Trade at Studio 211 at the Bemis Building during April 2017. courtesy: jessica landau photo: ian lewis

Tuesday August 22, 2017 | by Lindsay Hargrave

CONVERSATION: Jessica Landau, on team Chihuly, finds time for own work and promoting other artists

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, News

If Seattle’s Jessica Landau could be in two places at once, she would be. Her “alternative” gallery space in Seattle’ Bemis Building, Studio 211, just hosted an event displaying the works of Greg Owen, Amanda McDonald-Stern, Alix Cannon, Dan Friday, and Tony Sorgenfrei. She also teaches glassblowing two days a week at Wilson High School in Tacoma, and works as a glassblower for Chihuly Studio, full-time. Somehow, she still finds time to create whimsical flameworked artwork and jewelry, most notably her series of mustaches, and work toward a master’s degree in business administration.

Matthew Day Perez, Crush: Big Blue, 2017. Broken, fused, silvered, and coldworked glass. H 19 1/2 W 32 D 3/4 in. courtesy: bullseye projects website

Tuesday August 8, 2017 | by Lindsay Hargrave

OPENING: Matthew Day Perez’s material inquiry clearly on display in his first U.S. solo exhibition

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, Opening

“I think of my work as being dichotomous,” said Matthew Day Perez in an interview with GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet. And many opposing forces are indeed at work in Perez’s first U.S. solo exhibition, "Fractured": order and chaos, connectedness and brokenness, simplicity and detail. Fracture and repair are the backbone of Perez’s artistic concept. His wall pieces, historically gigantic but now of various dimensions as he explores scale feature broken sheets of glass either reassembled in a kiln to form scar lines where the fractures once were, or simply piled on to create a busier, more three-dimensional effect. “I’m interested in broken glass for the absurdity of breaking it and putting it back together,” he said.

Micah Evans' curtain of black threads burning at the beginning of his Third Thursday performance at the Chrysler Museum of Art Glass Studio. courtesy: chrysler museum of art.

Monday July 31, 2017 | by Sarah Thaw

CONVERSATION: Flameworker Micah Evans puts on show at Chrysler Museum

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Glass Quarterly, Museums

Washington State-native flameworker Micah Evans does not consider himself a performance artist, but he undoubtedly put on a show for the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, recently while working as a visiting artist from July 20th to 23rd. Evans grew up in Seattle, Washington in the 1990s, surrounded by a culture heavily saturated with marijuana and glass pipe-making. This environment presented Evans with a less-than-traditional gateway into glass art, as he got his start by making smoke pipes at a local flameworking studio. Evans’ work has since expanded to include traditional craft forms and personal sculptural work, which lead him to be recognized as the first flameworker to receive a residency at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, which he completed from 2012 until 2015.

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.