Tuesday June 6, 2017 | by Sarah Thaw

OPENING: Amy Lemaire’s “History of the Present Moment” documents life in the age of Twitter

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, Glass Quarterly, Opening

Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Amy Lemaire explores themes of history as a form of currency in her upcoming exhibit, "History of the Present Moment." The exhibition, which will include glass sculptures seeking to ignite thought and conversation around modern historical documentation, will be on display from June 7 to June 28 in the Window Gallery at UrbanGlass’ Agnes Varis Art Center. (Disclosure: The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet is published by UrbanGlass.)

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Wednesday May 31, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

CONVERSATION: Seeking a certain clarity, Ethan Stern explores the aesthetics of cut crystal

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, New Work, Opening

Seattle-based glass artist Ethan Stern, whose work will be on view at Traver Gallery tomorrow as a part of a new exhibition titled "Cut Clear," is perhaps most well-known for his used of saturated gem-tones in high-contrast, semi-opaque engraved sculptures. This exhibition, however, marks the end of a slow-drifting departure from the chromatic intensity of his previous work. The work in the "Cut Clear" series employs similar forms and textures of Stern’s past work, but without the color that was so aesthetically integral. The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet spoke with Stern by phone to discuss the artist’s evolution and his unlikely recent source of inspiration — stylistically dated and aesthetically overwrought cut-crystal.

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Tuesday May 30, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

CONVERSATION: Laura Kramer mines her archaeologist past in works unearthed from creative depths

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, New Work

On a deep-sea archaeological excavation in the Caribbean, designer and glass artist Laura Kramer discovered that she was perhaps too invested in the aesthetic form of each artifact. In the process of cleaning a find, Kramer labored assiduously over the excavated object almost as if each was an individual work of art rather than an objective relic of past civilizations. Her temptation to influence the aesthetic presentation of these pieces helped her decide not to continue her career as an archeologist.

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Tuesday May 9, 2017 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Dan Clayman takes his glass panel assemblages to new heights in sculpture park exhibit

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, Artist Interviews, New Work, News, Opening, Public Art

With a rainy VIP opening on Friday, May 5th, and the sun breaking through for a Saturday "Meet the Artist" afternoon event on May 6th, Dan Clayman unveiled Radiant Landscape, a monumental new project installed at the Grounds for Sculpture's Museum Building in Hamilton, New Jersey. This large-scale work that rises two stories is made up of thousands of 22-by-32-inch glass sheets rigged together in an intricate but elegant engineering solution which presents three fields of glass suspended vertically, at a steep pitch, and horizontally. The individual components are in shades of sunset gold, clear, and oceanic blue glass. The gold and clear are adjacent to one another and interact as they diffuse light that filters into the building's large windows, altering its hue and connecting to the landscape outside, and revealing several of Clayman's mapped-boulder sculptures (named for the geolocation where the natural boulder was found). The blue color field is suspended horizontally, and, bathed in its aquatic hues, one cannot escape the feeling of being under the surface of a large body of water.

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Thursday April 27, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

CONVERSATION: Pinaree Sanpitak on her newest public artwork that blends fiberglass and raw silk

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, New Work, News, Public Art

The Winter Garden at Brookfield Place (formerly the World Financial Center) is the site for a recently unveiled installation by renowned Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak. A leading artist from Thailand, and enjoying an international reputation, Sanpitak was already an established multidisciplinary artist when she became intrigued by glass on a 2008 trip to Murano, Italy, where she collaborated with Italian masters to create several glass sculptures, She continued to work with the material, including during a 2014 visiting artist residency at the Toledo Museum of Art. Her most recent achievement in glass is on display at one of the busiest public spaces in New York City. 

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Tuesday April 25, 2017 | by Hailey Clark

OPENING: Sibylle Peretti plumbs intricate relationships in nature with new body of work

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Artist Interviews, Exhibition, New Work, Opening

Sibylle Peretti a German-born artist who renders nature-inspired dreamscape will unveil a new body of work at her upcoming exhibition entitled "It Was Such a Beautiful Promise," where she explores a world of complex relationships and issues of survival. Exhibiting at Callan Contemporary in New Orleans from May 4 to June 25, 2017, Peretti’s glass panels are a continuation of her previous work, The Land Behind, where she explored the effects imagination has on creating space. Compared to her earlier work, which exhibits similar themes, the glass artist evolves her use of external symbols, (i.e., bees, vegetation, and crystals) to a different found object: pearls.

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Monday April 3, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

CONVERSATION: Checking in with Rui Sasaki on residencies, exhibits, and her new teaching post

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, News

Rui Sasaki is a Japanese conceptual glass artist and educator who, in recent years, has gained international notoriety for her ethereal and sometimes surrealistic work. She completed her MFA at Rhode Island School of Design in 2010 and has since been invited to participate in many artist-in-residence programs and exhibitions all over the world. Last month, Sasaki wrapped up a month-long residency in Stockholm funded by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, and she has three major exhibitions opening in the coming months: “Inervals between Nature and Artifact” curated by Koichi Yoshimura in Osaka, Japan, “The Poetics Of Weather” on view at a historical temple in Hoen-ji in Kanazawa, Japan, and “Young Glass 2017” at Glasmuseet Ebeltoft in Ebeltoft, Denmark. Beginning in April, Sasaki will work as a faculty-member at Kanazawa Utatsuyama Kogei Kobo in Kanazawa, Japan, the traditional craft epicenter of the eastern world. Recently, the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet had the opportunity to discuss Sasaki’s work and source of inspiration with the artist herself via an email conversation. 

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Wednesday March 22, 2017 | by Hailey Clark

3 Questions for ... Sarah Mizer

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Artist Interviews, Exhibition, New Work

Glass artist, Sarah Mizer, explores polarization, overindulgence, and nostalgia in her exhibition "Of Most Excellent Fancy," on view through April 1, 2017 at a project space in Laurel Park, North Carolina, that is the contemporary art component of a novel retail wine market called the Crate Project. Drawing inspiration from Vanitas Dutch still life imagery, and dialog from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mizer created three groups of art forms that reside on individual walls. Each set of works evoke a sense of conflicting ideas, such as life and death, like Vanitas imagery, while incorporating her own experiences from her time as an artist residence at the Penland School of Crafts. In these three questions, Mizer expands on how her botanical studies mesh with 17th-century sources of inspiration.

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Thursday March 2, 2017 | by Awura Barnie-Duah

EXHIBITION: James Mongrain celebrates the glory of Venetian glassblowing at the Museum of Glass

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, Museums, News

Towering, taut, and ornate, 130 exquisitely blown glass works are currently on view at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, where they will remain through October 15, 2017. These are the fruits of a four-year collaboration between master glassblower James Mongrain and patron and prominent collector George R. Stroemple. Organized into four groupings entitled the Adriatico, Atlantis, Poseidon, and Arcobaleno series, the works result from Mongrain's extremely disciplined approach to traditional Venetian glassblowing techniques, and represent his response to the more than one hundred 19th-century Venetian glass objects in Stroemple's collection, which are also displayed in the exhibition. This show is an homage to the traditions that inspired Mongrain to devote his career to mastery of the techniques and aesthetic rules of this historic high-water mark for glassblowing skill.

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Friday February 3, 2017 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Dan Clayman discusses his Rainfield public-art project at MassArt

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, New Work, Public Art

Last week, the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston unveiled a public artwork made up of more than 10,000 individual glass droplets. Installed in the atrium of the art college's Design and Media Center on campus, the project was the culmination of an innovative interdisciplinary course taught by independent artist and visiting professor Dan Clayman. A group of MassArt students worked alongside the Providence-based artist to realize this the work entitled Rainfield, which marks the single largest-scale installation realized by Clayman. In an exclusive interview with the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, the artist explains how the project came about and how it was realized.

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