The Fall 2019 edition of Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly (#156) is hitting newsstands and subscriber mailboxes this week. On the cover is a glass tapestry by Amber Cowan, who creates elaborate three-dimensional wall works by flameworking fragments of discarded, machine-made pressed glass. As new contributing editor Samantha De Tillio writes: "The work demands slow observation and challenges preconceived stereotypes regarding ornamentation, femininity, and the dominance of modernism."
Professor Jack Wax, head of glass at Virginia Commonwealth University, takes a critical look at "New Glass Now," the survey exhibition of contemporary work at The Corning Museum of Glass. Spending two days in the museum's light-drenched Contemporary Art + Design Wing, he found much to praise once he got past the cramped and crowded installation of the 100 selected works. Wax, who was among the 1,400 people who applied to be in the exhibition, states that, as a critic, he was "consciously assuming a role that artists and curators must constantly cultivate in themselves: fostering the ability to exercise the authentic and voracious self-criticism that must reside at the core of the process in the studios and curatorial offices of those who make and seek to present the most significant outcomes of the art process."
Another professor, Mary Drach McInnes, who heads the art history department at Alfred University, helps us understand the visionary career of Fauvist painter Maurice Marinot, who in the early 20th century learned to blow glass in Murano in order to realize his thick-walled forms he used as three-dimensional canvases on which he experimented with vivid coloration, acid-etched textures, and deep cuts to create a body of work as expressive as it was pioneering. Marinot is the subject of an extraordinary exhibition at Le Stanze Del Vetro in Venice, and McInnes proves an exceptional guide to rediscovering a truly groundbreaking figure in the history of glass art.
And finally, we present an appreciation of Canadian artist Susan Edgerley by Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie, a research associate at the Met Museum in New York. Donefer-Hickie shares her reflections of growing up with Edgerley's work in her home thanks to her mother, artist Laura Donefer, a close friend of the artist's. In Edgerley's work opposites are reconciled, Donefer-Hickie writes, in a body of work that "deftly balances the realms of idea and technical expression and remains one of the richest in the field of contemporary glass today."
All this plus four reviews, a back-page essay on glassblowing's reality-television moment, and all the latest news from the field.
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