Chrysler Museum of Art officially announced as site of 2017 Glass Art Society Conference

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Events, Museums, News

The Glass Art Society has announced that the Chrysler Museum of Art, the main building and neighboring glass studio, will host the 46th annual gathering of the glass art world. With the theme: "Reflections from the Edge: Glass, Art, and Performance," the 2017 conference will run from June 1st through 3rd, 2017, and will be co-chaired by Diane Wright, the glass curator at the Chrysler Museum; Charlotte Potter, manager and program director of the museum's glass studio; and community members Virginia Hitch and Colin McKinnon. Performance art using glass, a focus of the Chrysler Museum of Art Glass Studio under Potter's leadership, will be a central focus of the 2017 event, according to today's announcement. The event will follow the 2016 conference taking place in Corning, New York.

Wednesday September 16, 2015 | by Andrew Page

Full Program Released for the 2015 Robert M. Minkoff Foundation Academic Symposium at UrbanGlass

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Education, Events, News

The full schedule for the 2015 Robert M. Minkoff Foundation Academic Symposium at UrbanGlass — complete with times, dates, and maps — has just been released. Among the highlights of this year's symposium, which has the theme of "New Technologies in Practice," is a Chelsea gallery tour that includes stops at Andrea Rosen Gallery to discuss Josiah McElheny's latest work, Sean Kelly Gallery to hear about Idris Khan's recent work in glass, and Heller Gallery for a presentation of new work by April Surgent as well as a panel discussion on the challenges of taking over a glass program and inheriting its technology. Panelists include glass program heads Helen Lee (UWisconsin, Madison), Kim Harty (CCA, Detroit), Marc Petrovic (CIA, Cleveland), and Sharyn O'Mara (Tyler, Philadelphia). A reception at the loft of a downtown art collector will cap off the first day's activities.

Monday September 14, 2015 | by Annette Rose-Shapiro

In Memoriam: John Perreault (1937-2015)

FILED UNDER: In Memoriam, News, Print Edition

John Perreault, the former executive director of UrbanGlass, died on September 6, 2015. from complications of gastrointestinal surgery. He was 78 years old. From 1993 to 1995, Perreault served as artistic director of UrbanGlass, and was appointed executive director in 1995, a position which he maintained until 2002. He was also the curator of the Robert Lehman Gallery at UrbanGlass, as well as the editor of GLASS Quarterly magazine. Perreault was a poet and a painter, but was probably best known as the chief art critic for the Village Voice and SoHo Weekly News, as well as a regular contributor to ARTnews. He was also senior curator at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on State Island, as well as the Everson Museum and the American Craft Museum. Perreault championed many art movements from feminist art to realism, pattern and decoration movement art and performance art. An early translator of conceptual art, his reviews were legendary, and thankfully devoid of “art speak.”

Thursday September 3, 2015 | by Emily Ma-Luongo

OPENING: “Canberra + Berlin” celebrates the Australian-German glass art connection

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, Opening

"Canberra + Berlin," a collaborative exhibition between the nonprofit center Berlin Glas e.V. and the Australian National University, will open on September 18th in Berlin. The show features a variety of artists graduating from the Australian art school (ANU-SOA). Founded by Hamburg-born artist Klaus Moje in 1982, the glass program at ANU's School of Art was one of the first that was not limited to glassblowing, emphasizing instead kiln-forming, carving, and cold-working techniques. Moje's significant influence on Australia's glass movement came from his formative effect on the country's first university curriculum for glass as a fine art medium, which he created to stress technique as much as concept. Moje's own work has advanced the international Studio Glass movement through its aesthetic of glass fusing, through which rods, strips or canes are joined in an interplaying pattern which is then melted together. Moje's role in glass education is credited for a generation of artists using glass as a principal material, several of whom will be represented in the upcoming show.

The 3D molten glass printer developed by MIT can create a diverse range of objects by pouring a stream of hot glass.

Wednesday September 2, 2015 | by Lindsay von Hagn

3-D Glass Printing Heats Up

FILED UNDER: Design, News

Glass, one of the most useful materials at our disposal but one of the hardest to handle, has been a final frontier of sorts in the world of 3-D printing. Even as approaches to printing materials like plastics, polymers, wax, ceramics, and metals, have been increasingly refined, glass has been mostly relegated to crude attempts to form with digital printers that approximate a glass effect. That may be about to change. Driven by the transformative potential that 3-D printed glass could have in art, architecture, medicine, aerospace, communications, safety and security, and more, researchers and engineers, are making progress in overcoming the inherent obstacles to 3-D glass printing (3DGP). Years' worth of experimentation and invention has led to the groundbreaking innovations we have seen this summer - Micron3DP, an Israeli company that designs and manufactures 3-D printer parts, announced a prototype of a new high-temperature extruder printe in June, and MIT recently announced the 3-D hot glass printer developed by the Mediated Matter Group in collaboration with MIT's Department of Mechnical Engineering and MIT's Glass Lab.

Thursday August 27, 2015 | by Andrew Page

Hot Off the Presses: GLASS #140, Fall 2015

FILED UNDER: Announcements, New Work, News, Print Edition

The Fall 2015 edition of GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly (#140) is hitting newsstands and subscriber mailboxes over the next few days. On the cover is a work by French installation artist Baptiste Debombourg, a room with massive windows collapsing inward. For her article, contributing editor Victoria Josslin presents a mediation on Debombourg’s grand catastrophe in Aerial (a 2012 site-specific installation at the Brauweiler Abbey near Cologne, Germany), considering the scene as a frozen moment just after the impact of some cataclysmic explosion outside.

Tuesday August 25, 2015 | by Andrew Page

HELP WANTED: Toledo Museum of Art Glass Studio seeks Assistant Manager

FILED UNDER: Help Wanted

The Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio, is seeking an assistant manager who will work with the Glass Studio manager in the daily operations of the multi-use, state-of-the-art facility that is a major site for the museum's programming, education, and special events. The successful applicant will be responsible for leading the technical staff in maintaining studio operations, which include hot glass, flame working, kiln forming and stained glass studios as well as a mold-making and cold-working shop. "The position will be lead on all maintenance related activity and assist in planning long-term projects taking place in the Glass Studio," reads the official job announcement.

Tuesday August 25, 2015 | by Lindsay von Hagn

Doug and Mike Starn create site-specific glass public artwork for Princeton University

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, New Work, News, Public Art

A large-scale sculpture by identical twins Doug and Mike Starn, the duo's second-ever work in glass, will be installed in mid-September on the lawn of the Princeton University Art Museum. The site-specific sculpture, titled (Any) Body Oddly Propped (2015), features steel, cast bronze trees and six 18-foot tall colored glass panels. According to the official announcement, the sculpture “continues the artists' exploration of organic energy systems through root and branch forms that here also respond to the arboretum-like character of the Princeton campus.” An attempt to evoke the complex experience of light filtering through trees, the sculpture will play off the contrast between the permanence of the structure and the ephemerality by interaction between natural light conditions and the colored glass.

Wednesday August 19, 2015 | by Emily Ma-Luongo

EXHIBITION: Alison Lowry’s “Captive” at S12 gallery in Norway

FILED UNDER: Exhibition, New Work, News

Alison Lowry's "Captive," a series on the brain as construct and constraint, just opened at S12, the artist-run workshop and gallery space in Bergen, Norway. Lowry's work is an ever-developing exploration of memory, and her series follows up on "A place for Everything/Everything in its place," her solo show at the Ebeltoft Museum in January. The artist's previous series will also be on display with her new works, as she continues a conversation about what the past does for us, how it carries us and vice-versa. The focus in her sculptures and installations is the body's varying ways of remembering, including the emotional and physical, the personal and collective.

Wednesday August 12, 2015 | by Emily Ma-Luongo

EXHIBITION: “Chihuly’s Venetians” on view at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma

FILED UNDER: Museums, News

On view through January 4, 2016, the "Chihuly's Venetians" exhibition at The Museum of Glass focuses on a recreation of Venetian Art Deco glass, an elaborate reimagining of the era's peculiar aesthetics and forms. To realize this series which ran from 1989 to 1997, Chihuly collaborated with Pino Signoretto and Lino Tagliapietra. Chihuly was inspired by an affecting encounter with original 1920s-30s pieces in Venice in 1999, and the artist worked with the two masters to yield intensely colorful and subversive glass pieces, classical Italian forms with a vibrant twist.

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.