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.

Rachel Owens, "Smile Always" exhibition at Zieher Smith & Horton in 2015.

Saturday August 8, 2015 | by Andrew Page

On Tuesday, artist Rachel Owens to lecture about her glass-and-resin work that critiques consumerism

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Artist Interviews, Events, News

On the evening of August 11th, internationally-exhibiting artist Rachel Owens will speak about her work and process during an evening lecture at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn (UrbanGlass publishes the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet). The artist, whose work graced the cover of the Summer 2015 edition of GLASS (#139), explores the corrosive effects of consumer culture driven to unsustainable levels of desire by retail mercandising and marketing. Ownes makes sculptures of molded broken glass and resin, which she employs for its seductive and repulsive push-puil.

Thursday August 6, 2015 | by Susanne Frantz

In Memoriam: Yoriko Mizuta (1956 – 2015)

FILED UNDER: In Memoriam, Museums, News

The glass world lost an exceptional scholar and advocate with the passing of Yoriko Mizuta who succumbed to cancer on August 3, 2015. She was 59 years old. As a long-time curator at the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in Sapporo, Mrs. Mizuta was a key organizer of the triennial series of exhibitions “World Glass Now” which ran from 1982 to 1994. Those international overviews helped garner early attention to the contemporary glass art of Japan. Instead of indefinitely continuing those broad surveys, in 1997 she partnered with the Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf and The Corning Museum of Glass to present 20 artists from nine countries in an exhibition entitled “The Glass Skin.” The premise was to focus on glass as a literal and metaphorical surface, barrier, and crossing point. In addition to exploring the skin theme the show’s three co-curators hoped to encourage more exhibitions united first and foremost by an idea rather than simply a common material.

Nicholas Africano, Untitled (bust with grapes), 2013, Cast glass. H 17 1/2, W 9, D 13 in. (Abmeyer + Wood Fine Art)

Sunday August 2, 2015 | by Victoria Josslin

Glass well-represented at the first Seattle Art Fair

FILED UNDER: Art Market, Events, Exhibition, News

Seattle is basking in its inaugural art fair this weekend, enjoying good press, good crowds, good weather, and an encouraging number of red dots. The glass art shown at the 2015 Seattle Art Fair, which opened on July 30 and ended today, represents a wide range of invention and ideas.

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.