Viewing: Exhibition

Helen Lee won the top prize for her work entitled KowTow. courtesy: bullseye glass

Tuesday January 31, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

OPENING: Bullseye Glass to unveil its “Emerge/Evolve 2016” exhibit at Pittsburgh Glass Center

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, New Work, News, Opening

This Friday, February 3rd, the Pittsburgh Glass Center will present "Emerge/Evolve 2016," an annual juried exhibition of kiln-glass artists organized by the Bullseye Glass Company of Portland, Oregon. "Emerge 2016" will feature up-and- coming artists who participated and placed in Bullseye’s ninth biennial juried competition for kiln-glass. Of the 370 contenders, more than 40 artists—representing 16 different countries—were selected as finalists, and a total of seven prizes were awarded. The panel of jurors included Stefano Catalani, curator at the Bellevue Arts Museum; Kim Harty, assistant professor of crafts/glass, College for Creative Studies, Detroit; and Sue Taylor, professor of art history at Portland State University.

Works by Ron Desmett and Kathleen Mulcahy to be displayed on January 26th at Alfstad& Contemporary. courtesy: alfstad& contemporary

Wednesday January 25, 2017 | by Awura Barnie-Duah

OPENING: Work by Kathleen Mulcahy and the late Ron Desmett featured at Florida glass art event

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Events, Exhibition, News

The late Ron Desmett (1948-2016) and his wife, Kathleen Mulcahy will both have their work featured at Alfstad& Contemporary, which will kick off the Third Annual Sarasota Art Glass Weekend on January 27th. A collaboration between Longboat Key Center for the Arts, a division of Ringling College, and Habatat Galleries of Michigan, the weekend event will include exhibitions, auctions, studio tours, talks by internationally-known artists, glass-blowing demonstrations, and private tours of the museum featuring glass. The event's opening reception will take place on Thursday, January 26th.

Dafna Kaffeman. Wolf 01, 2010. Glass, aluminum, and silicon. courtesy: the artist and lorch + seidel contemporary, berlin.

Tuesday January 24, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

MassArt gallery unveils first glass exhibit in 30-year history as major Boston arts venue

FILED UNDER: Exhibition, Museums, New Work, News, Opening

On Monday evening, when the Bakalar & Paine Galleries at Massachusetts College of Art and Design unveiled its new exhibition, "VITREOUS BODIES: Assembled Visions in Glass," it marked the first time glass art was displayed at this prime visual arts venue in the Fenway-Kenmore area of Boston, a cultural destination. Bringing together works by 13 multidisciplinary artists including Dan Clayman, who had spent the Fall semester at MassArt as a visiting professor, the show also includes work by an international group made up of Kanik Chung, Petah Coyne, Mona Hatoum, Timothy Horn, Michael Joo, Dafna Kaffeman, Jacob Kassay, Maya Lin, Lucy and Jorge Orta, Arlene Shechet, Thaddeus Wolfe, and Rob Wynne. Also debuting on Monday, but at a different location on the MassArt campus was a second work by Clayman, his largest installation to date. (Disclosure: Clayman serves as an advisor for the Robert M. Minkoff Academic Symposium at UrbanGlass, which is organized by GLASS magazine.)

Anna Boothe, Amber Sentient

Tuesday January 10, 2017 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Anna Boothe’s perfume bottles in group exhibition about scent

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Design, Exhibition, Opening

Practically across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, the Tambaran Gallery will show work by a painter, perfumer, and glass artist in a collaborative project exploring the power of scent through history. Painter Frances Middendorf, perfumer Leonardo Opali, and glass artist Anna Boothe have been working together on "The Scent Project," which has seen four exhibitions of their evolving bodies of work — two in Connecticut, and two in Venice.

Sydney Cash Broadway Windows1987 Daytime View

Original image of Sydney Cash's Broadway Windows Gallery installation of 1987. courtesy: heller gallery.

Thursday December 15, 2016 | by Malcolm Morano

OPENING: NYC Sydney Cash retrospective uses optical properties of glass to engage passersby

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, Opening

The unique optical qualities of glass — its translucency, transparency, reflection, and refraction — have served as rich terrain for artist Sydney Cash, who developed a lifelong relationship with the material after working with curved mirrors. Opening tonight, a retrospective exhibition of Cash's kinetic sculptures at Heller Gallery will showcase the artist's evolving visual vocabulary from the 1980s through the present, and will include a reprise of the now-legendary glass window installations from Cash's seminal Broadway Windows Gallery exhibition in 1987. Activated by passersby on the street, the three windows will make the city street part of the exhibition entitled "Pre-Net," and will likely have viewers moving back and forth before the gallery's large windows on 10th Avenue in the Chelsea area of Manhattan.

Jacob Fishman, It Is What It Is. Neon. courtesy: bergstrom mahler museum of glass.

Wednesday December 7, 2016 | by Malcolm Morano

The Bergstrom-Mahler’s neon exhibition taps into the special allure of sculpture that glows

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, Museums

There's something magnetic about neon. An object emitting light attracts the eye, no doubt the main reason neon has been so popular for so long as a medium for commercial signs. Executive director of Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass Jan Smith thinks this provides a special opportunity for neon art. "A sense of familiarity with its history in signage gives people an entry point," she told the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, "and the journey into the sculptural realm takes them into a surprisingly new dimension." The museum hopes to guide visitors on that journey with "Bending Brilliance," a neon and plasma group exhibition currently on display through February 19th, 2017.

Brett Swenson, Standards of Measurement, 1 Liter (detail), 2016. Erlenmeyer flask, obsidian, heat, borosilicate glass shelf. H 10, W 10, D 9 inches. courtesy: norte maar.

Friday October 7, 2016 | by Malcolm Morano

SEEN: Independent exhibition in Brooklyn celebrates visions of glass worlds by a new generation

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, New Work, Seen

"Paracosm" is a technical term for an imaginary world. The most famous examples are literary, like J.R.R. Tolkein's Middle Earth or C.S. Lewis's Narnia; but in the visual arts, narrative works are often set in manufactured worlds. In an independently organized exhibition in Brooklyn, New York, the work of six experimental artists has been organized into “Paracosm: new worlds in glass,” which showcases the capacity of glass art to provide a transporting experience in a wide range of works, all with a conceptual foundation. Brooklyn’s Norte Maar, a nonprofit focused on “connecting emerging artistic communities and uniting cultural forces to foster artistic expression and raise the imaginative energy in us all,” is the setting for this fanciful exhibition, which runs through October 23, 2016.

Between Fragment and Whole: Ellipse, 2016. Glass. H 13 3/4, W 21 5/8, D 21 5/8 in. courtesy: heller gallery, new york

Tuesday October 4, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Speaking Volumes: A conversation with Jeannet Iskandar on her Heller opening tomorrow

FILED UNDER: Exhibition, New Work, Opening

Danish artist Jeannet Iskandar makes things complicated, but you wouldn't know that at first glance. From across the room, her ongoing series of deceptively simple spheres appear to be minimalist objects with perfect symmetry. But upon closer examination the cool exteriors give way to an internal world of engrossing intricacy, complex assemblages of individual blown glass elements deformed by gravity and glassblowing tools, and then further transformed by repeated heating in a kiln. Iskandar was once employed by fellow Dane Tobias Mohl, and his influence shows in her appreciation of patterning, which is formed in her work by the selection of individual elements and the jigsaw puzzle of putting them together. Splashes of subdued color — inky blues and somber blacks —punctuate her newest work, which brings new elliptical forms and a larger scale than Iskandar's earlier objects. On the eve of her solo exhibition at New York City's Heller Gallery, the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet spoke by phone with Iskandar from her studio in the seaside city of Ebeltoft, which is an outpost of international glass in Denmark.

Charlotte Potter, Bovidae Goat. Hand-sculpted glass, wood, metal, plastic, fabric. H 16, W 11, D 7 1/2 in. courtesy: walker contemporary.

Friday September 30, 2016 | by Malcolm Morano

Man and nature collide in Vermont contemporary gallery group show featuring Charlotte Potter

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, New Work

The complex relationship between the human and the natural worlds is rich territory for an art gallery set in the town of Waitsfield, Vermont, with its long history of forestry and agriculture. Through mid-October, art dealer Stephanie Walker has turned over her Walker Contemporary gallery space to an exhibition entitled “What Have We Done?”, which examines artists “grappling with the often precarious human versus nature relationship,” according to the gallery’s website. Among the five artists with work on display is the native-born Charlotte Potter, who grew up in Waitsfield before embarking on a notable career as a multi-media artist with a focus on glass. Holding a 2010 MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Potter is currently the studio manager/program director of the Chrysler Museum of Art’s Glass Studio, in Norfolk, Virginia, and her evolving artwork is represented by New York City's Heller Gallery. Potter's glass deer and elk antlers have actually been incubating in the artist’s mind and studio practice since 2008, and are recontextualized by showcasing them alongside paintings and drawings in which, as the gallery puts it, humans’ “meddling interference in the natural order of things…takes center stage”

Cappy Thompson, Dandelion, 2013. Blown and engraved glass. H 13 1/4, W 13 1/3, D 6 1/2 in. courtesy: traver gallery, seattle

Thursday September 22, 2016 | by Andrew Page

Drawing with Light: A conversation with Cappy Thompson on her new engraved work

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

Cappy Thompson, known for her folk-art-inspired reverse paintings on glass that explore contemporary themes, has been experimenting with engraving for the past few years. It's been a departure for Thompson, who is an expert grisaille painter, a process where a first-layer of enamel in gray tones is followed by second firing of brightly colored enamels, to create figurative works. Though grisaille involves the removal of an initial coat of gray color, most of Thompson's work was based on layering enamels onto glass to create densely colored surfaces. But etching into glass had been on Thompson's mind since a 1990 trip to then-Czechoslovakia, during which she was intrigued by acid etching using a resist. "It looked like ice that had been melted," Thompson remembers. The dangers of working with highly corrosive and toxic etching acids kept her from ever pursuing this technique at home. However, while she was teaching at Corning in 2012 with master engraver Max Erlacher, she became entranced by the possibilities of wheel-cutting glass. Her friend and fellow artist Charlie Parriott helped her acquire a lathe from the Czech Republic, and she was able to learn from April Surgent and two Czech master engravers during a Pilchuck residency. The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet recently caught up with Thompson for a telephone interview as she prepared an artist's talk at Traver Gallery scheduled for this evening to talk about this bold new direction for the work in her current exhibition "Bright Blue Light."

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.