CONVERSATION: Marta Klonowska, on childhood memories, discarded beauty, and her major exhibition at the Finnish Glass Museum

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Exhibition, Museums

Once upon a time, a little girl in Poland picked up a piece of glass, placed it up against the sky, and marveled at how it altered the light hitting her eye. As children do, Marta Klonowska then dug a small hole in the ground and filled it with leaves and pieces of a drawing she had torn up. Covering her creation with the piece of glass, she knelt down and looked down at her artwork transformed by the shadows and unusual cast of light. This childhood game wasn't forgotten many years later, when Klonowska was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland, and came across shards of broken glass in her studio. Though she was studying ceramics and sculpture, something about the glass rekindled her interest, and she began creating sculptural assemblages of glass shards to create figurative objects imbued with the beauty and symbolic power of a shattered material.Klonowska's aesthetic approach of finding beauty in discarded items rescued and remade may hearken back to her childhood years, but there's something very grown-up about the way she takes what others may overlook, or dismiss as garbage, to not only use but to create beautiful things. At the Finnish Glass Museum, where Klonowska's latest exhibition "Movements" is currently on view, creatures are brought from the obscure corners of paintings and take center stage in three dimensions, bristling with the alluring sparkling edges of the shards from which they were constructed.

Thursday December 7, 2023 | by Jahlil Rush

Chihuly's first botanical garden installation in Australia set to open in 2024

Artists have exhibited their artwork in botanical gardens since at least the late 19th century, when botanical illustrations were shown at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and it was at these London, England, gardens where Auguste Rodin's sculptures were first exhibited in the United Kingdom in 1902. Almost exactly a century later, Dale Chihuly unveiled his "Garden Cycle" installation at Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory, which became an immediate sensation, more than tripling attendance in its run from 2001 to 2002.

Tuesday December 5, 2023 | by Kinshasa Peterson

SPECIAL OFFER: A gift-wrapped bundle of the best work done in glass in 2023, followed by a full 2024 subscription

The problem with getting a magazine subscription as a gift? Besides an announcement card, you don't get much until the first issue arrives. But we've found the solution! Sign your friend or loved one up for our specially-priced holiday offer, and we will rush them a beautifully wrapped bundle of all the amazing issues of Glass from 2023 -- including our Winter issue that comes shrink-wrapped with New Glass Review as well as our 2024 Guide to Glass Education and Suppliers. The magazines will arrive with a hand-addressed card announcing your generosity.

Tuesday November 21, 2023 | by Andrew Page

The Winter 2023 edition of Glass (#173), with a major glass-art project at Apple HQ on the cover, is overflowing with extras

The upcoming Winter 2023 edition of Glass (#173), will arrive bundled with Corning's New Glass Review #43. It will also include our fully updated 2024 guide to glass education and suppliers to the field. These bonuses are included at no extra charge to subscribers, though there will be a slightly higher cover price if purchased on the newsstand.

Friday November 10, 2023 | by Jahlil Rush

Stephen Rolfe Powell’s legacy lives on in new glass museum seeking national prominence

With a name as grand as its ambitions, a Kentucky art center seeks a national profile for its glass collections, built upon a major gift of Stephen Rolfe Powell’s work. The Art Center of the Bluegrass in Danville, Kentucky, opened a new museum building just next door on November 3, 2023. Its name? “GLASS National Art Museum.”

Wednesday November 8, 2023 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Contributing editor Samantha De Tillio on winning the 2023 Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing

Samantha De Tillio. a contributing editor to Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly and an independent curator, has been recognized for her outstanding article on glass performances of the late 20th and early 21st century, which was published in the Summer 2023 edition of Glass (#171). De Tillio was named a recipient of the 2023 Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing in an announcement that cited the original interviews and archival research she conducted for the article entitled “Live Glass at the Turn of the Millennium: The Performance Troupe."

Artist and designer Robert DuGrenier (second from right) has been honing his cooking on molten glass in anticipation of an unforgettable night of hot-shop cuisine at UrbanGlass for the winning bidder.

Tuesday October 10, 2023 | by Sponsored Content

The UrbanGlass 2023 Gala and Auction offers a chance to bid on a sizzling evening to remember in the hot shop

For its 2023 Gala and Auction taking place on October 11, UrbanGlass is putting a wide range of artworks up for bid as part of its annual fundraising event. At $9,000, the auction item with the highest minimum bid is for an unusual blend of performance art, glass blowing, and fine dining that will take place in the open-access art center's state-of-the-art hotshop. This unique experience will see the winning bidder and up to 11 guests meet up to celebrate the fusion of glass art and culinary ingenuity as glass artist, designer, progressive farmer and UrbanGlass board member Robert DuGrenier, working together with New York Times-starred chef Alex Sorenson of Blank Slate Kitchen, whip up an unforgettable feast for the senses.

Thursday October 5, 2023 | by Andrew Page

John Miller goes big for solo exhibition at a Florida Art Museum

When John Miller was in kindergarten, meals with his motorcycle-dealer Dad at a drive-in diner left a lasting imprint on him. Everything from the fast food served in generous portions to the automobile culture of the era, where people came as much to eat as to show off their gas-guzzling 1970s cars, imprinted themselves in Miller's mind. Years later, as an undergraduate student of glass art at Southern Connecticut State University, he found himself sketching crinkle-cut french fries in sculpture class no matter the assignment. Bubbling up was inspiration in his memories of a by-gone era of indulgence. He's far from the first to revel in turning everyday objects into monumental pop-art sculptures, but to Miller, these seemingly whimsical objects are freighted with meaning.

Thursday September 28, 2023 | by Andrew Page

Paper and resin artist Dolores Furtado creates timeless, ethereal glass works on view in New York

Artist residencies can be welcome opportunities for an artist to pursue their lifelong passions for a material, or they can be game-changing experiences of seeing their ideas jump from one media to another. In the case of Dolores Furtado, it is the latter phenomenon as her richly textured colored forms made from sculpted paper pulp take on a new dimension of live-ness in the light-refracting material of glass which turns her ideas from stolidly opaque to translucent and something else altogether.

Tuesday September 12, 2023 | by Andrew Page

Pilchuck announces the departure of executive director Christopher Taylor after five years

In a brief announcement issued in the late afternoon on Monday, September 11th, the board of the Pilchuck Glass School announced the departure of its executive director, Christopher R. Taylor, after five-and-a-half years at the helm. Pilchuck's deputy director Donna Davies was named as interim executive director, effective immediately.