Four artists who work primarily in glass have won prestigious art awards. In January, the United States Artist Fellowship named the winners of their $50,000, no-strings-attached award. The two glass artists included this year, Anjali Srinivasan and Jocelyne Prince, provide beautifully different approaches to glass that set an exciting tone for 2025.
Srinivasan, an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, creates interactive glass works that embody a ‘practical’ purpose, one recognizable as a usable object, as well as the uncanny reminder that glass is an unusual sight in these practical moments, and that we are viewing something carefully shaped into its form. Some of her notable creations include a wearable glove made of glass, a mirror-reflective drape, and a miniature glass garden that can be cultivated by human hands. While she has a number of prestigious awards already under her belt, including the 2016 Swarovski Designer of the Future Award and the Andy Warhol Foundation Grant for Art Writers, the USA Fellowship is no small feat. 'I feel very sparkly,' Srinivasan laughs in a phone interview with Glass. 'Jocelyne (Prince) sent me an email when the list was released. We were excited to see each other!'
Prince, for her part, also takes an interest in the collaborative relationship of the human and the glass, but rather than create ‘purposeful’ objects, her delicate sculptures and staged events come together to explore the influence of glassworking action on the material itself, and how that influence can be preserved and viewed in various ways. Her ‘wall’ art includes an assemblage of stacked windows containing the lights and colors of other universes, and referred to by Prince as hypothetical light spaces. Another work, a performance art piece sending sound vibrations through molten glass, reveals a curiosity about change in all the forms we can perceive and how to care for it. The Fellowship’s webpage records her journey towards glass, culminating with a full-time professorship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and with this award we can hope to see more works to come.
It’s not just the USAF that released its winning list this month. The Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Grant, courtesy of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, announced 20 recipients of the award, an unrestricted check for $20,000. Even though the pool of chosen artists is smaller, two glass artists made the list, namely Kim Harty and Jes Fan, both well-known and commended for their contributions to the glass field.
Harty is a performance artist, who puts significant time not just into the glass works she creates but into the presentation and understanding of it. Her works are socially conscious and given life within the political context of the present day, defying the separation of art and world. Previous works and exhibitions have touched on feminist and queer themes, the former especially evident in Harty’s most recent creations, a series of glossy, bisected female reproductive organs, including a pelvis and a uterus lying on their sides. Upon receiving the Tiffany Award, Harty told Glass that it was “an incredible honor, to be recognized with the award that has supported so many artists I admire.” The ability to create freely, on top of her current work as an Associate Professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, is an opportunity any artist would envy.
While Fan also incorporates biology into their work and involves queer and feminist themes, they take a more abstracted approach. Samples of Fan’s work show discolored partial torsos stacked on top of one another, spotted cross-sections of leg muscles, and a series of organs strung out on a rack of PPE pipes in a piece titled Visible Woman. Glass often appears in mixed-media works, overlying another object in the form of a magnifying bubble that can clarify or distort the subject, depending on the intent. Their art has been previously exhibited at several distinguished exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial 2024, and is currently on display in their newest solo installation known as Sites of Wounding, based in the state of New York where they live and work.