An article in the New York Times examines the challenges of engineering a lighter champagne bottle that is cheaper to produce, takes up less space, and costs less to ship. The difficulty is not to compromise the strength of the glass so that it can still contain the extreme pressures that build up from fermentation, three times the pressure of a car tire. Read the full article here.
This bowl, as modified by an unnamed artist in a group exhibition of new and established artsts, is selling for £ 125 (US $195) to raise funds for North Lands Creative Glass in memory of Dan Klein.
To raise funds for North Lands Creative Glass in memory of Dan Klein (1938–2009), the ZeST Gallery in London will be offering a series of artist-personalized bowls for sale for £ 125 each (just under $200). The bowls will be sold alongside the “Blast! 2010″ exhibition that opens at ZeST on September 8th and features work by members of the Glass Cohesion Network, a government-subsidized business-support network for British glass artists. The bowls have been designed by the artists showing in the annual member showcase glass exhibition. Keep reading →
Ron Desmett, Lidded Trunk Vessel #22 (“The King”), 2009. H 28, W 19, D 19 in.
Artist and co-founder of the Pittsburgh Glass Center Ron Desmett has presented to the Corning Museum of Glass one of his striking black glass sculptures that stand in counterpoint to the shine and gloss one associates with glass art. The museum’s acquisition of Lidded Trunk Vessel #22 “The King” (2009) (pictured at left) is the first work by Desmett to be included in the museum’s collection.
The Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, is burnishing its reputation with membership in a respected museum association.
Editor’s Note:This article originally stated several major museums were not members of the American Association of Museums based on an unusually alphabetized list on the American Association of Museums website. This item has been adjusted to reflect more accurate information.
UPDATED 08/27/2010
In an announcement released today, the Museum of Glass presented its newly won membership as a significant step in its bid for respect as a serious museum. “The Museum of Glass has achieved accreditation from the American Association of Museums (AAM), the highest national recognition for a museum,” reads the announcement. “Accreditation signifies excellence to the museum community, to governments, funders, outside agencies, and to the museum-going public. “
Hiromi Takizawa, Shipping from California, 2009. Blown Glass, Neon, Wood.
Hiromi Takizawa’s mixed-media installations rely heavily on glass. With her work appearing in two group shows next month, Takizawa traces a thematic fixation of the artist: her cross-cultural experience as a Japanese woman in the U.S., separated by an ocean from her family and country, sifting through the kaleidoscope of West Coast American life. This personal narrative features prominently in the descriptions of her works — in titles such as Crossing the Pacific Ocean (2007), Shipping from California (2009), Parallel Lives (a reference to Takizawa’s twin sister in Japan) and in her method that Tazikawa calls “cultural self-portrait”: a work that attempts to give materiality to a moment or scene of cultural identity, cultural displacement. These cultural self-portraits are precarious, unstable, fragile, suggestive of a emptiness that is tenuously filled, but always retaining a constitutive lack. In her lighter moments there is also a dreamy playfulness. Keep reading →
Pino Signoretto's uncanny ability to hot sculpt glass into anything he chooses enthralled his assistants and students at Wheaton Arts last Tuesday. photo: deborah czeresko
This past Tuesday, all eyes were on Pino Signoretto in the hotshop of Wheaton Arts in Millville, New Jersey. His effortless, fluid movements at the bench were absolutely efficient. No energy was wasted. Everything had a purpose — and a breathtaking result. Recent foot surgery had left the maestro in pain, but there was no sign of it once he set to work conjuring out of molten glass a black bull and an elephant with gleaming white horns and tusks. Later that afternoon he crafted a gold-leaf-trimmed black high-heeled boot adorned with a pair of yellow lilies with a gold-leafed putto (baby angel) nested in between. The man can turn hot glass into anything, or so it seemed.
Scott Darlington, Genetically Modified Corn Hammer, 2010.
Taking a first place award at the 92nd Toledo Area Artists Exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art (and on display through August 22nd), Scott Darlington’s Genetically Modified Corn Hammer (2010) may be one of the artist’s most compelling works to date. The hammer’s self-descriptive title and simple premise belie (or perhaps, in an ironic reversal, actually attest to) the inquisitive nature of its content. More than simple juxtaposition, the work plays with the somewhat hazy distinction between natural and man-made, expressing the complex status of the “tool” and its development in human civilization. Keep reading →
Jiyong Lee's three-dimensional Cubism includes this work entitled Leaf Cuboid (2010).
While the Northwest may be the epicenter for American glass art, and the East Coast a place where it often intersects with the wider contemporary art world, the space between isn’t well-known as a hotbed of new work in glass. But a new exhibition opening Saturday, August 21st, at the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Southern Indiana, may change those perceptions as it will showcase work by emerging artists Jiyong Lee (pictured above), Carmen Lozar, Amy Rueffert, and Matt Urban. Keep reading →
Calling all artists. The Corning Museum of Glass has two opportunities for artists using glass to have their efforts recognized. Both have deadlines in October, offering the luxury of time to prepare the most compelling applications. Keep reading →
Sue Hawker, Too Much Is Never Enough, 2010. Pâte de verre. H 19 1/2, W 9 3/4 in. photo: ron hawker
Sue Hawker’s work Too Much Is Never Enough (2010) has beaten out 43 competing entries to win the 2010 Ranamok Prize for Contemporary Glass, Australia and New Zealand. The piece, a pâte-de-verre vessel composed of connected flower petals in vibrant colors, is accompanied by a short poem: “Too much gloom, too much doom./ Too much misery, too much!/ Enough!/ Drink of me,/ I am joy and vitality./ Now, too much is never enough.” Keep reading →
The street view of the new Gordon Huether Gallery at 1465 First Street in downtown Napa, California.
On August 21st, glass artist Gordon Huether, one of the most prolific public artists in any material, will open a second art gallery, this one in the very center of downtown Napa, California, to showcase his mixed-media artwork. Adjoining his working studios outside the center of Napa, Huether already operates the Hay Barn Gallery. The new gallery space will offer an additional 1,600 square feet of exhibition space with concrete floors, steel beams, high ceilings, and large display windows. Called simply the Gordon Huether Gallery, the new exhibition space sits opposite the AVIA Hotel and next-door to Oenotri restaurant on Napa’s First Street.
Heliotropis, a recently-completed work by Anthony Castronovo, is perhaps atypical even in the rather rarefied genre of ten-foot tall flower sculptures, given its LED technology, solar panels, sensors for monitoring temperature, humidity, wind speed, and ground vibrations, in addition to a sensor that tracks light, allowing for the flower’s glass petals to “bloom” in the morning and for an LED light-fixture to be activated in the evening. Take that, Balloon Flower! Keep reading →
Dante Marioni, Heliotrope with Red Standing Leaf, 2010. courtesy: traver gallery, seattle
This joint exhibition of new works by John Kiley and Dante Marioni (opening August 5th and on display through August 29th), provides an ideal chance to reflect on the outsize influence of the Italian master Lino Tagliapietra. It was, of course, Tagliapietra who brought Venetian glassblowing to the United States in the late 1970s, revolutionizing glassmaking practice through the introduction of centuries-old techniques to a younger generation. Both Kiley and Marioni worked closely with Tagliapietra, and (like Tagliapietra, himself) have taken traditional Venetian techniques and expanded on them by bringing their own artistic sensibilities. The results deftly illustrate two different ways one can pay homage to tradition while expanding the range of possibilities of the tradition itself. Keep reading →
Jay Musler at work in the studio.
GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet: What are you working on?
Jay Musler: I just finished making new work for “Stuff Happens,” a solo show that just opened at Ken Saunders Gallery in Chicago. I made four wall pieces of multicolored layers. I call them “masks” because I was influenced by the masks that I first saw in Mexico. The masks I make today are abstract, more primitive, but they still have an eye and flameworked obects hidden among the layers. I sandblast the glass and then paint it. Keep reading →
With lightweight Chemcor side windows, this 1968 Barracuda was modified for drag racing by Hurst Performance and was listed at auction for $1.1 million.
A 1962 super-strong glass developed by Corning that languished for decades after a lukewarm reception by industry may be finally getting its due in a whole range of devices from smartphones to a new generation of thin television screens, according to an Associated Press article on the rebranded product, now called Gorilla Glass. Keep reading →
Over the past two decades, the late George Saxe and his wife, Dorothy, created one of the most significant collections of art from craft media.
Noted Palo Alto, California, real estate developer, art collector, and arts patron George B. Saxe died on Wednesday, July 28th, with Dorothy, his wife of more than six decades, at his side. He was 89 years old. Over the past 20 years, George and Dorothy Saxe built an impressive collection of art in ceramic, metal, wood, fiber, and especially glass. The Saxes also gave generously to institutions that supported the arts, including the de Young Museum, Pilchuck Glass School, and California College of the Arts. Keep reading →
In honor of the upcoming 2010 Oktoberfest, national craft brewer Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. headquartered in Chico, California, has initiated a search for an original glass beer stein design with the Sierra Nevada logo. The winning design will be sold in a limited-edition run at the brewery gift shop, and possibly via the brewing company’s online gift shop. Officially entitled the “Ein Stein Design Vendor Search,” the company is looking for a designer with the capacity to produce a limited edition of 200-300 glass steins. Keep reading →
Matt Eskuche, Agristocracy (detail), 2010. Plastic and incandescent light. photo: alex evans.
Flameworker Matt Eskuche has made a name for himself for his close study of plastic water bottles, milk cartons, and tin cans, all of which he reproduces with absolute accuracy in opaque white borosilicate installations that explore the excesses of our disposable culture. For his latest exhibition, opening next week in a set of exterior windows at the Racine Art Museum in Racine, Wisconsin, Eskuche has expanded his scale to fit the massive 10-foot-high by 16-foot-wide display spaces inside six windows. To take advantage of this large-scale opportunity, Eskuche worked big. Really big. He’s installing a lot of glass. And he’s also bringing plastic. Keep reading →
From its alliterative title, Medieval Glass for Popes, Princes, and Peasants, a new softcover exhibition catalog by Corning Museum of Glass executive director David Whitehouse, one might expect a book that tells the social history behind the treasure trove of rare historic glass assembled for the major ongoing exhibition (through January 2, 2011) at the museum. In the introduction, Whitehouse writes about the need to look more closely at the glass objects so often overshadowed by the glorious stained-glass windows of the same era. But the essays on the glass vessels (cups, beakers, bottles, and so on) in the book seem squarely targeted at the scholar rather than the general reader. While the book presents a catalog of practices and types of vessels, and chronicles the major developments in the history and development of glass vessels in the Middle Ages from the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. up until the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century, it has little to offer the non-specialist. While readers at any level will find a rich visual story in the excellent printed reproduction record of the exhibition, complete with all relevant details and presented in a clear layout, the text presents a challenge to all but the most dedicated scholar. Keep reading →
This mirror-walled tree house in the woods of Northern Sweden is envisioned as a hotel by one of Sweden's cutting-edge architecture firms Tham & Videgard.
The Swedish architecture duo knows as Tham & Videgard preach a less-is-more design ethos that has won wide attention in our post-Gehry period where simplicity trumps extravagance. T&V, as they call themselves, have been invited to participate at the 2010 Lisbon Architecture Trienniale in October 2010, and they have seen their work chosen for a special architecture exhibition at the Venice Bienale in November 2010. Featured in Architectural Record in 2009 was their Tree Hotel project in the forests around Harads, Sweden. Keep reading →
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