Thursday December 21, 2023 | by Jahlil Rush

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Fully-funded MFA degree program at Tulane University is open for Fall 2024 candidates

Graduate student applications for Tulane University’s MFA program in Glass are now being accepted for the Fall 2024 semester. The successful student accepted into the two-year program will be granted a full tuition waiver as well as an "assistantship stipend". The tuition waivers will cover the full cost of tuition for both years of the MFA program. Any additional stipend will be divided up into 20 bimonthly payments during both years.

Architectural rendering of the expansion project done by Saunders + Crouse Architects

Wednesday December 20, 2023 | by Jana Elsayed

The Barry Art Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, will double in size thanks to longtime friendship between art-collecting families

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums

Richard and Carolyn Barry, the founders of the Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, are planning a major expansion, with the institution that bears their name doubling in size with the planned addition of the Waitzer Wing, named after their late art-collector mentors, philanthropists Richard and Leah Waitzer, who died in 2019 and 2021 respectively. The two couples not only shared a love of art, but the older pair were instrumental in inspiringthe Barrys to begin their collecting many years earlier. That the Weitzer collection would end up finding a home within the museum built to house much of the Barry collection is just the latest development in the intertwined histories of two art-collecting couples.

Curator Jabari Owens-Bailey

Tuesday December 19, 2023 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Curator Jabari Owens-Bailey on his exhibition "A Two-Way Mirror" at the Museum of Glass

Used in everything from surveillance windows to the infinity boxes of artist Josiah McElheny, a "two-way mirror" is defined by Merriam Webster as "a piece of glass that is a mirror on one side but that can be seen through like a window from the other side." For curator Jabari Owens-Bailey, who titled the exhibition he organized at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma "A Two-Way Mirror," the term is a reference to W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of "Double Consciousness," which refers to the Black experience in America. Specifically, it refers to the divided consciousness between how one sees oneself, and the simultaneous awareness of how one is being perceived by the world, something that develops from living in a racially divided American society. As Du Bois put it in his groundbreaking 1903 essay collection The Souls of Black Folk, it's "measuring oneself by the means of a nation that looked back in contempt."

Portrait photo of Marta Klonowska taken by Stephan Wieland

Thursday December 14, 2023 | by Jana Elsayed

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.

Glass: The UrbanGlass Quarterly, a glossy art magazine published four times a year by UrbanGlass has provided a critical context to the most important artwork being done in the medium of glass for more than 40 years.