Wednesday July 3, 2019 | by Gabriela Iacovano

Lambertville, New Jersey-based Rago Auctions, an important venue for secondary-market glass art, has merged with Wright Auctions

Rago Auctions in Lambertville, New Jersey, and Wright Auctions of Chicago and New York City have recently announced the merger of their business operations. Both houses will continue to operate under their individual names at their respective locations but will start sharing technology, expertise, and marketing efforts while also collaborating on co-branded projects. With a combined $65 million in annual sales and an expanded team of 75 employees, the two businesses hope that there's power in numbers. It remains to be seen how this impacts their respective pools of consignors and buyers.

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Tuesday July 2, 2019 | by Meghan Hayfield

EXHIBITION: With an augmented-reality app she developed, Ginny Ruffner empowers viewers to unleash their imaginations at the Renwick Gallery

Artist Ginny Ruffner's exhibition "Reforestation of the Imagination," which just opened at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, enlists cutting-edge technologies in the artist's ongoing quest to celebrate and explore the power of the imagination. Viewers who attend the exhibition, which is on view through January 5, 2020, are asked to download a unique augmented-reality app on their mobile devices. Ruffner developed it working with Seattle-based animator and media artist Grant Kirkpatrick. With the help of the app, the gallery's monochromatic landscape is transformed digitally, and the six glass tree stumps that stand as targets to aim mobile devices come to life with colorful organic growth. Without the use of technology, the space is desolate. With digital programming, the "trees" bloom spiraling branches and elaborate foliage referencing Ruffner's powerful reimagining of what may result in the near-future from climate change.

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Thursday June 27, 2019 | by Meghan Hayfield

EXHIBITION: "Collaborations with Queer Voices" celebrates identity and decodes language at Heller Gallery

Artists Matthew Day Perez and Kate Hush asked 10 artists to consider language, which can be especially charged for those in the LGBTQ community. Building on the success of their provocatively named business venture, FagSigns, Perez and Hush then fabricated the artists' ideas into working neon signs, which are debuting at an exhibition that opens this evening, June 27, 2019, at Heller Gallery in New York City. The show entitled "Collaborations with Queer Voices," which is timed to Pride month and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, continues FagSign's conversation about neon's role in electrifying the voices of marginalized individuals.

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Wednesday June 26, 2019 | by Gabriela Iacovano

Karl Unnasch's latest public-art project in Boston uses his extensive stained-glass expertise to illuminate discarded machinery

Artist Karl Unnasch, a Minnesota-based stained-glass window maker, has been gaining notice in the past few years for his large-scale installations that employ two-dimensional stained glass panels to bring new life to cast-off three-dimensional objects. The other-worldly results — pieces of industrial machinery outfitted with vibrant, pictorial windows that glow from within — reflect on the artist’s rural Midwestern upbringing. His piece Slumgullion (The Venerate Outpost), a log cabin outfitted with various types of art glass, was recently recognized by Americans for the Arts as one of 50 outstanding public art pieces created in 2018. In an ongoing Boston installation, Unnasch’s sculpture that brings together stained glass and an old dump truck explores the intersection of the natural landscape and the road construction process.

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Tuesday June 25, 2019 | by Meghan Hayfield

In Finland on a Fulbright Scholarship, artist Jonathan Capps found eager exchange and interest in an American approach to glass

As the economics of handmade glass production are battered by globalization, the centuries-old glass-making culture in Europe is increasingly opening up (see the 2018 Glass Art Society conference in Murano, or the upcoming 2020 conference at Kosta Boda) and looking internationally for ideas of how to reinvent their businesses. One example comes in the story of Jonathan Capps, who graduated from Ohio State with an MFA in glass in 2016. Last year, Capps applied for and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a year in Finland working with the Nuutajärvi Glass Village Cultural Foundation (NGVCF), which operates out of a shuttered historic glass factory and was set up to preserve and study traditions of Finnish glass art. Capps was driven by his interest in learning a Scandinavian approach to working with glass, but it quickly became clear that there was an equal interest in his uniquely American approach. The culmination of Capps’ year in Finland came with a group exhibition titled “Why Not? Finnish American Art Glass,” which is on view at the formerly thriving Nuutajärvi Glass Factory through September 1, 2019. Between his studio research and informal artist residency at Tavastia Vocational College (a local glass school) glass school, Capps soon became aware of a strong interest in his own way of doing things. Through his interactions with artists and teachers at Tavastia, and the welcoming embrace of local glass artists and designers, Capps became intimately involved with Nuutajärvi's search for a new type of glass identity.

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Tuesday June 25, 2019 | by Meghan Hayfield

Where most fellowships aim at emerging artists, two new $20,000 opportunities at the Center for Crafts are aimed squarely at mid-career

The Center for Crafts, the non-profit arts organization based in Asheville, North Carolina, that advances the field of art from craft media, has announced two new $20,000 Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowships targeting mid-career artists. While the Craft Research Fund has been providing fellowships since 2005, most are limited to emerging artists or recent graduates. Following a July 2018 meeting with national leaders of the art, craft, and philanthropy fields at the Center for Craft, a new fellowship program was designed for artists of any age throughout their career.

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Friday June 21, 2019 | by Gabriela Iacovano

Glass reality show Blown Away to premiere July 12th on Netflix, Corning Museum of Glass sets up exhibition of show artifacts

The Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG) in Corning, New York, has intensified its involvement with Blown Away, an upcoming glass-art reality television program, by displaying pieces made during taping of the show. The exhibit is set up in the museum’s Ampitheater Hot Shop, and not the main exhibition spaces. The reality show, which premiered on Canada’s newly launched Makeful satellite channel in February, is scheduled to debut in the U.S. on Netflix on July 12, 2019. Perhaps sensing the show's potential to introduce new audiences to the beauty of glassblowing, the Corning team, which had joined the production as evaluators and offered hands-on assistance to the glass artists during Blown Away's final rounds, is upping its involvement in the reality television program with the exhibition as well as planned appearances at the museum by the show's as-yet-unreleased victorious contestant. The winner of the competition will visit the museum for two working sessions this summer and a “Blown Away Residency” is planned in October, where the artist will perform demos for museum visitors.

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Thursday June 20, 2019 | by Meghan Hayfield

EXHIBITION: New larger-scale work by Richard Royal on view at Schantz Gallery

On view through the summer at Schantz Galleries in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is an exhibition of new work from Richard Royal, one of the pioneers of the Studio Glass movement. Three years in development, Royal’s latest body of work is a geometric series that achieves a larger scale and features a commanding palette of primary colors. After 11 years of developing a process and system, Royal’s geometric series is playful but structurally complex, with titles offering homages to famous figures in art and architecture.

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Saturday June 15, 2019 | by Gabriela Iacovano

EXHIBITION: Recent Alfred University grads in group neon exhibition in New York City

Today, June 15, 2019, neon works from eight recent graduates from Alfred University’s School of Art and Design in Alfred, New York, will be shown in an exhibition on New York City’s Governors Island. Curated by assistant professor of glass Sarah Blood, the exhibition, titled “Language of Light,” includes the work of BFA graduates Carissa Grace, Astrid Hunter, Bryanna King, Caroline LaCava, Natalie Schults, Olivia Piazza, Adam Taylor and Gil Travers, whose undergraduate study with Blood focused on light.

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Thursday June 13, 2019 | by Gabriela Iacovano

An artist and critic's life partnership explored in a Chicago exhibition

On view through August 25, 2019, at the Ed Paschke Art Center (EPAC) in Chicago, the exhibition “Lorraine Peltz: This Must Be the Place” investigates the multi-layered relationship between painter Lorraine Peltz and her late art-history professor husband (and prolific Glass magazine contributing editor). James Yood, who died suddenly in 2018, was a longstanding champion of Chicago artists working in many different media, and a prominent figure in the glass-art community, penning essays for numerous books in addition to his writings for this publication. He was also a charismatic professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught for many years.

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