Three artists pictured left to right: Kim Harty, Matthew Szosz, and Amber Cowan have been chosen to participate in the Toledo Workshop Revisited artist residency that will take place at the Toledo Museum of Art.
The Toledo Museum of Art in conjunction with the Robert M. Minkoff Foundation, has announced the three artists chosen to participate in the unique Toledo Workshop Revisited artist residency commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Studio Glass movement. Kim Harty, Matthew Szosz and Amber Cowan will have the chance to complete their own contemporary projects using a similar type of furnace to the one used by Harvey Littleton in a garage at the Toledo Museum of Art in March of 1962—a date considered by many to be the start of Studio Glass in the United States. These three artists were picked for their forward-looking approaches to glass as established in their proposals.
Kim Harty is earning her MFA in Art and Technology from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an artist, writer and glassblowing instructor. In 2007, she was a CGCA (Creative Glass Center of America) Fellow at Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center in Millville, New Jersey. (Disclosure: Kim was the managing editor of GLASS Quarterly until August 2011). Harty’s proposal “Mapping Motion in Glass” is centered around the struggle of the artist when attempting to capture “liveness.” Glass is particularly compelling for the way it freezes in motion but appears as if fluid. The goal of her “artistic research project” is to innovate new forms and ways to further the development and use of glass as an expressive material. She will do this by studying motion in glass through hotshop and video projection techniques. Harty is going to explore dropping a stringer of dripping hot glass into water. With this technique, she will map the motion of the glass and create a library of glass forms created this way. She will project light into the finished glass in order to reveal patterns in the cross-section of glass undetectable by the human eye.
Matthew Szosz has an MFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design. Recently he has received a Stein Fund Grant and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship. Szosz’s proposal “The Art Practitioner Versus the Industrial Engineer” is based on the relationship between the two. His project is open-ended as it is an experimentation of art dictated by the material.
Szosz felt upon contemplation that a revisiting of the first Toledo workshop should involve a project that had at least a passing reference to the joining of the artists’ needs and the artists individuality. He believes the process of creating glass art should not be executed with the goals of “specificity and perfection of a single form,” but rather foster “imperfection and variance in the hopes of evolution.” Szosz’s project is going to explore the tube draw process, shying away from straight, even tubes used to make sheet glass and exploring different types of tubes such as rippled, curved and conjoined. He is also going to attempt to construct a “tube forest” from these irregular tubes.
Amber Cowan has an MFA in Glass from the Tyler School of Art Temple University in Philadelphia. She is going to be a Stephen Proctor Fellow of the Glass Workshop of Australia National University. Cowan ‘s proposal “To Honor the Marble—and the Forgotten Flame” will ponder glass over the last 50 years and its role as a relatively new art form. According to Cowan, glass has not reached its artistic maturity yet. Cowan’s project will pay tribute to the Johns Manville #475 Marble—which was used in the 1962 workshops — as a catalyst to the start of the studio glass movement, as glass marbles were an essential element to the very first batch of glass created at the first Toledo Workshop. The series would progress from compositions in which the marble pushes through the skin of the blown bubble, to conglomerations of marble genomes in cell formations, and eventually lead to marble helix structures. Nils Carlson was a lampworker who taught alongside Littleton in the June 1962 glass workshop. Cowan referred to him as “the forgotten hero of the studio glass movement.” As a tribute to Carlson, Cowan also aims to incorporate flameworking into the blown pieces she creates at the Toledo Workshop as the marble helix structures will have blown cores subtly referencing contemporary controversies over stem cell research.
The “Toledo Workshop Revisited” artist residency will take place at the Toledo Museum of Art from March 22nd through March 31st. There will be a free public lecture at the museum on Friday, March 30th, in which the artist residents will share the results and their experiences of the residency.
—Suzann Caputo
(Editor’s note: Andrew Page, editor of the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, is the director of the Robert M. Minkoff Foundation, which is a co-sponsor of the event.)