Issue 181 | Winter
Editor's Letter
by Andrew Page
The Beatles knew they wanted a marching-band theme when they asked artist Peter Blake to design the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Blake added an audience looking on, cutting out pictures of historic figures to capture the mid-1960s cultural ferment. The Beatles chose most of the people in the collage, but Blake threw in two of his own, one being the artist Larry Bell, who he placed in a prime position between John Lennon and Ringo Starr. Blake didn’t know Bell personally, but clearly saw the young artist’s explorations using glass as game-changing for art. For Bell, discovering he was on one of the decade’s most significant albums was “surreal” but, like so many unexpected twists in his career, he embraced it.
Bell’s large-scale glass constructions are the topic of this issue’s cover article, in which the artist shared new details about his journey from discovering the material while working in a frame shop in late-1950s Los Angeles to becoming an internationally known pioneer of art that investigates perception and light. The tools for anybody doing anything, he said in an exclusive interview with Glass, are “improvisation, spontaneity, intuition, and trust."
“You have to trust yourself,” he added.
A belief in oneself is the through line connecting all the feature articles in this edition. When David Landau and his wife, Marie-Rose Kahane, moved to Venice, they wanted to immerse themselves in the culture that had produced their prized Venini collection. When instead they found the Venetian glass culture struggling to survive, they intervened to shore it up, helping to establish Le Stanze del Vetro to document and exhibit the glorious past, and, in launching Venice Glass Week, to celebrate and platform new generations of glass designers and makers. They wouldn’t have made such an impact if they hadn’t trusted their ability to do so.
In Ellye Sevier’s day-by-day chronicle of the seventh edition of Refract, Seattle’s celebration of itself as America’s Venice, we see a community rallying together to find a collective future in a field in flux due to a generational shift in how people collect and support glass as a medium for art. As the certainties of the past give way to an unknown future, Sevier finds the expanding festival is at its heart an experiment in tapping into the widespread interest and energy around glass to catalyze new models, and allowing new ways to sustain and grow the glass field to emerge.
Contributing editor William Ganis delves into the practice of Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez, whose poignant new work reaches across materials, poetry, and ancestry to explore her Iranian and Puerto Rican heritage. For her residency and exhibition at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, Ahmadizadeh Melendez trusted the wisdom and experience of her forebears, mining her childhood memories and historic poets to create works that speak across time and faith in neon-lit installations that seek to illuminate the universal.
Hourglass
Multiple glass artists lose studios, artwork, tools, and supplies in devastating Brooklyn fire; Corning Museum of Glass taps Cornell University art museum director to become its next executive director and president; Alexander Rosenberg on his move from WheatonArts to the newly built Glass Center at the University of California, San Diego; in memoriam: Marge Levy (1943–2025).
Reviews
Bronson Shonk at Traver Gallery, Seattle; Monica Guggisberg and Philip Baldwin at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art; Marija Olšauskaitė at Abri Mars, New York; Marc Chagall at the Marc Chagall National Museum, Nice, France; Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Paul Klee at David Zwirner, New York
UrbanGlass News
Announcing the 2026 Visiting Artist and Designer Fellowship and Studio Residency Awards, which offer time, space, and resources for the recipients to dive deep into the material and their work.
Reflection
by By Jessica Jane Julius and Erica Rosenfeld, with the Burnt Asphalt Family
Remembrance of a Performance Past: Food as Framework for Making, Performing, and Thinking
Features
Bell's Curve
by Andrew Page
Freed from the white-box gallery setting, Larry Bell’s monumental glass constructions take on new life amidst the unruly outdoors of a New York City park—an “epiphany” for artist and viewers alike.
Crystal Ball
by Ellye Sevier
In four hectic days, one reporter tries to capture the essence of a sprawling Refract 2025, which just might be a glimpse of the future of glass art.
Light Keepers
by Emma Park
David Landau and his wife, Marie-Rose Kahane, moved to Venice, drawn by its glittering glass legacy, but their shock at what they found fueled their mission to save it.
Light Enters Through the Wound
by William V. Ganis
Through her assemblages of neon, glass, and poetry, Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez builds emotionally poignant works that were created and displayed thanks to a new exhibition and residency opportunity at the Speed Art Museum.
The 2026 Annual Glass Quarterly Directory
by Sahana Ramakrishnan
A comprehensive list of Glass Education Programs (both degree as well as non-degree granting) and Suppliers that has been updated and expanded for the upcoming year.