The Winter 2020 edition of Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly (#161) is hitting newsstands and subscriber mailboxes. On the cover is a work as voluptuous as it is complex by the late Michael Glancy (2050 - 2020), who passed away in August due to complications of lung cancer. The 2014 work is titled Shimmer, and features a repeating plus-sign pattern that forms a type of metal armor which is not uniformly protective but is broached several places by clear sections where the pattern on the opposing blown-vessel wall is visible from beneath. The work hints at complexities that lie beneath surfaces, revealing an inner dimension that can never be fully understood given the restricted vantage points. Viewed from our current perspective of political and pandemic turmoil, the plus signs might be seen as voting marks or positive Covid-19 test results, neither on Glancy's mind when he created it, but which speaks to the timelessness of his sculptural expressions.
As a tribute to this important artist, who died in August, we present a meditative feature article by Glass regular contributor Alexander Castro, who visited the artist and studied his work not realizing he would ultimately be writing a piece that memorialized the 70-year-old innovator and alchemist who passed away on August 29th from complications of lung cancer.
Beth Lipman, who is enjoying not only a midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Arts and Design but also a contemporaneous Chelsea gallery exhibition at Nohra Haime, is the subject of a feature by Glass contributing editor John Drury, who tracks the recurring themes of mortality and impermanence at her major solo museum show.
Our European contributor Emma Park looks at the spark that traveled between Murano and America, the subject of a major exhibition at Le Stanze del Vetro in Venice, Italy. “Studio Glass in Venice” explores the cultural encounter between pioneering American glass artists seeking to peek behind the closed doors of the centuries-old glasshouses to understand their closely guarded technical secrets, and those that allowed them access. The fact that the exhibit is taking place in Venice is a significant advance, and, in showing Italian and American work side by side, an acknowledgement of the importance of that exchange for both sides of the equation.
Our final feature article assesses the educational world’s efforts to adapt to the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. By looking at the improvised solutions to the abrupt lockdown in the spring of 2020, and how the Fall semester offered a chance to hone new technologies and methods over the summer months, the article investigates the ways educators are reconsidering glass pedagogy, shifts that have multiple implications for the future of how glass art is taught at academic and non-academic institutions.
And finally, we present our fully updated and comprehensive guide to glass educational programs and suppliers to the field. The exhaustive listings, the product of months of research, is the most up-to-date resource for a changing world.
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