Helen Lee won the top prize for her work entitled KowTow. courtesy: bullseye glass

Tuesday January 31, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

OPENING: Bullseye Glass to unveil its “Emerge/Evolve 2016” exhibit at Pittsburgh Glass Center

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Exhibition, New Work, News, Opening

This Friday, February 3rd, the Pittsburgh Glass Center will present "Emerge/Evolve 2016," an annual juried exhibition of kiln-glass artists organized by the Bullseye Glass Company of Portland, Oregon. "Emerge 2016" will feature up-and- coming artists who participated and placed in Bullseye’s ninth biennial juried competition for kiln-glass. Of the 370 contenders, more than 40 artists—representing 16 different countries—were selected as finalists, and a total of seven prizes were awarded. The panel of jurors included Stefano Catalani, curator at the Bellevue Arts Museum; Kim Harty, assistant professor of crafts/glass, College for Creative Studies, Detroit; and Sue Taylor, professor of art history at Portland State University.

Martin Blank pictured with one of the two glass artworks that animate a city park in lower Manhattan.

Friday January 27, 2017 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Martin Blank on the installation of his NYC public-art project

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Architecture, New Work, News, Public Art

Martin Blank has called the concept of "flow" the unifying theme of the last 25 years of his career as an artist, and this is readily apparent in his latest public art commission. Set to be unveiled in Spring 2017 in the small city park next to the recently opened Four Seasons Hotel New York Downtown, Blank has created two working fountains in which the multiple glass elements mediate the falling water, and reference it in its cascading forms that appear like splashing water, or eddies. Contrasting with the restrained "New Classical" style of the building's architect, Robert A. M. Stern, Blank's exuberant work animates and enlivens the exterior space with its celebration of gravity and the shared fluidity of water and glass. The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet spoke to Blank after installation was complete, but before the water would be turned back on, about the project that he calls "the hardest installation he's done in his career."

Works by Ron Desmett and Kathleen Mulcahy to be displayed on January 26th at Alfstad& Contemporary. courtesy: alfstad& contemporary

Wednesday January 25, 2017 | by Awura Barnie-Duah

OPENING: Work by Kathleen Mulcahy and the late Ron Desmett featured at Florida glass art event

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Events, Exhibition, News

The late Ron Desmett (1948-2016) and his wife, Kathleen Mulcahy will both have their work featured at Alfstad& Contemporary, which will kick off the Third Annual Sarasota Art Glass Weekend on January 27th. A collaboration between Longboat Key Center for the Arts, a division of Ringling College, and Habatat Galleries of Michigan, the weekend event will include exhibitions, auctions, studio tours, talks by internationally-known artists, glass-blowing demonstrations, and private tours of the museum featuring glass. The event's opening reception will take place on Thursday, January 26th.

Dafna Kaffeman. Wolf 01, 2010. Glass, aluminum, and silicon. courtesy: the artist and lorch + seidel contemporary, berlin.

Tuesday January 24, 2017 | by Gabi Gimson

MassArt gallery unveils first glass exhibit in 30-year history as major Boston arts venue

FILED UNDER: Exhibition, Museums, New Work, News, Opening

On Monday evening, when the Bakalar & Paine Galleries at Massachusetts College of Art and Design unveiled its new exhibition, "VITREOUS BODIES: Assembled Visions in Glass," it marked the first time glass art was displayed at this prime visual arts venue in the Fenway-Kenmore area of Boston, a cultural destination. Bringing together works by 13 multidisciplinary artists including Dan Clayman, who had spent the Fall semester at MassArt as a visiting professor, the show also includes work by an international group made up of Kanik Chung, Petah Coyne, Mona Hatoum, Timothy Horn, Michael Joo, Dafna Kaffeman, Jacob Kassay, Maya Lin, Lucy and Jorge Orta, Arlene Shechet, Thaddeus Wolfe, and Rob Wynne. Also debuting on Monday, but at a different location on the MassArt campus was a second work by Clayman, his largest installation to date. (Disclosure: Clayman serves as an advisor for the Robert M. Minkoff Academic Symposium at UrbanGlass, which is organized by GLASS magazine.)

The full overview of the Rainfield work with a human figure to indicate the massive 60-foot-long scale of the work.

Monday January 23, 2017 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Dan Clayman’s largest installation to date debuts at MassArt

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Etsy-find, New Work, News, Public Art

More than 10,000 individual glass droplets have been strung up in the atrium of the Design and Media Center at Boston's MassArt, the culmination of a project by the college's visiting professor Dan Clayman that is being unveiled this evening. The work is entitled Rainfield, and was constructed during "Structured Light," an interdisciplinary course with 18 MassArt students who worked alongside the Providence-based artist to realize this piece that measures 60-feet long. The completed project represents the largest-scale work Clayman has completed, the latest in his assemblage works that aggregate multiple glass elements to create a massive structure, as he did in his 2014 work Dispersion at Brown University. The installation will remain on view through summer,

Jutta-Annette Page

Tuesday January 17, 2017 | by Andrew Page

CONVERSATION: Curator Jutta-Annette Page on leaving Toledo to lead new museum in Virginia

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Museums, News

Jutta-Annette Page, the senior curator of glass and decorative arts at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio since 2003, will be leaving her position of 13 years for a new job as director of the Barry Art Museum, a brand-new institution to be built at Old Dominion University in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Page will be moving to Virginia in March 2017 to begin the hard work of getting a new art museum off the ground. The building itself is yet-to-be-completed but there is no shortage of tasks, including hiring a full- and part-time staff, developing the museum's systems and protocols, and planning its inaugural exhibition of its namesake's collection. Last summer, Richard and Carolyn Barry announced a $35-million gift to Old Dominion, where they both have professional and personal connections (his father was a professor and he himself served as rector, while she taught there for a time as an adjunct). When it opens in 2018, the Barry Art Museum permanent collection will include more than 200 works of art, with over 100 works from the Studio Glass era. In an extended telephone interview, the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet discussed Page's tenure in Toledo, what interested her about the new opportunity, and some of her early plans.

Anna Boothe, Amber Sentient

Tuesday January 10, 2017 | by Andrew Page

OPENING: Anna Boothe’s perfume bottles in group exhibition about scent

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Design, Exhibition, Opening

Practically across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, the Tambaran Gallery will show work by a painter, perfumer, and glass artist in a collaborative project exploring the power of scent through history. Painter Frances Middendorf, perfumer Leonardo Opali, and glass artist Anna Boothe have been working together on "The Scent Project," which has seen four exhibitions of their evolving bodies of work — two in Connecticut, and two in Venice.

Monday January 2, 2017 | by Malcolm Morano

North Lands Creative Glass announces first summer program under artistic director Jeffrey Sarmiento

FILED UNDER: Announcements, Events, News

North Lands Creative Glass has announced its 2017 summer program, its first under recently appointed artistic director Jeffrey Sarmiento. The program of classes and a conference will be centered around the theme of faith. The program, titled "Leap of Faith," is billed as exploring the relationships between glass and belief in its varied forms — religious belief, social dogmas, and artistic conviction. Master-classes will be headed by artists Anne Vibeke Mou, Annie Cattrell, Beth Lipman, and the duo of Michael Schunke and Josie Gluck. The one-day conference, "Taking a Leap: Concept, Conservation and Innovation in Architectural Glass," is organized in collaboration with Bullseye Glass Company, and will take place on July 16th, 2017, in the county of Caithness in the northern reaches of Scotland.

The opaque steel walls of the flameworking studio at the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion include a wide picture window that allows the public to view its activities through the exterior walls. photo: © floto + warner studio

Friday December 23, 2016 | by Andrew Page

BOOK REPORT: Toledo Museum of Art celebrates 10-year mark for iconic Glass Pavilion with new tome

FILED UNDER: Book Report, Museums

With an unusual curved corner that echoes the rounded-glass-wall architecture of its subject, a new hardcover book entitled simply The Glass Pavilion ($44.95) is a 144-page love letter to the The Toledo Museum of Art's eye-catching annex designed by the Prizker Prize-winning Japanese architecture firm SANAA. Featured on the cover of GLASS magazine when it opened in 2006, the Glass Pavilion added 76,000 square feet of ethereal exhibition space and a state-of-the-art working glass studio to the 100-year-old museum. The museum wanted to make sure the new building devoted to art would be architecturally significant as would befit a facility dedicated to the same material on which museum founder Edward Drummond Libbey built his industrial empire. It was also at the Toledo Museum that Harvey Littleton held his famous 1962 workshop that many consider the birth of Studio Glass.

Thursday December 22, 2016 | by Andrew Page

BOOK REPORT: A conversation with artist and author Paul Stankard on the publication of his 3rd book

FILED UNDER: Artist Interviews, Book Report

GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet: You've already published an autobiography, No Green Berries and Leaves (McDonald & Woodward, 2007), and a manual for artists entitled Spark the Creative Flame (McDonald & Woodward, 2013). What inspired you to come out with Studio Craft as Career (Schiffer, 2016) and how does it differ from your first two books? Paul Stankard: Well, my first book was a memoir, and the second one was a guide to finding and renewing motivation. But I decided to write this book because I was hearing so many people trying to make it as artists who believed it was all about who you knew. I wrote this book to say 'Wait a minute, it's not who you know, it's all about the work.' I wanted to give people a way to educate themselves about what excellence is, and to hand over tools for self-directed learning. People who read this book will hopefully think about how they need to see themselves in competition, not only with the best work in the contemporary realm, but also the best work that has come before. It's about studying the best work that's been done in your field and engaging in a dialog with it — to understand it, and to respond to that work in your own unique way.

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.