Artists in Glass Today

Adams (1956 - ) works largely with cast glass to create images that lean toward the grotesque. His work has been widely exhibited and well received both in this country and abroad, especially in Japan.

Anderson (1952 - ) is one of a small group of American glass artists who have taken up the technique of pâte-de-verre, ground glass mixed with pigments and heated in a mold until they fuse. This method of fabrication was revived in France in the late nineteenth century, and Anderson has made use of both the process and, to a degree, the style of the French work. He sometimes employs living things in creating molds in which to cast elements of his pieces.

Aschenbrenner (1949 - ) was born in California and, after service in Vietnam, attended universities in California and Minneapolis. He is best known for sculptures that include representations in glass of damaged bones, subject matter said to have been inspired by his time in the army.

Although born in Brooklyn, New York, Ben Tré (1949-) has long been associated with Providence, first as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design and later as the locale of his studio. He is a sculptor who chooses glass as his medium, and casting is his technique for achieving basic forms. He creates detail and texture with sandblasting, cutting, and polishing, sometimes also adding metal and gilding.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Bernstein (1952 - ) received a degree from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1968. He has produced a wide variety of glass including laminated low reliefs. Painterly surface decoration almost always characterizes his work, and he frequently introduces a note of humor into his designs.

Blomdahl (1952 - ), who has worked in the Seattle area, makes symmetrical vessel forms with bands of variously colored glass as their only decoration. She says of her work, "I just want to make the most beautiful object I can." In almost every respect, her glass stands apart from that of her American contemporaries.

Brekke (1955 - ) attended Illinois State University and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1978. He makes vessels in which words perform both a visual and a cognitive function to reflect contemporary life. His pieces are blown and then engraved and acid etched.

Carlson (1952 - ), born in New York, has for most of his career been associated with the Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle where he studied with Flora C. Mace and Joey Kirkpatrick and Dan Dailey. Carlson works with blown or cast glass forms, many of which suggest figures or architecture. These shapes are then richly embellished with colored enamel decoration, often including symbols suggesting an esoteric mysticism.

An Ohio native, Carlson (1950 - ) studied at the Art Students' League in New York City, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Alfred University. He has wide experience with various glassmaking techniques, but the work for which he is best known combines laminated polished glass set into regularly shaped granite units joined to form rectilinear abstract sculptures.

A native of Detroit, Cash (1941 - ) is a graduate of Wayne State University in that city. He is best known for his carefully controlled slumped glass in which a wire armature has been used to regulate the pattern of the glass as it is partially melted and sags. Most recently he has also produced small sculptures employing found objects in mirrored boxes, creating spatial illusions.

Born in Havana, Chardiet (1956 - ) was trained in the United States, receiving an M.F.A. from Kent State University in 1983. He employs a wide variety of techniques in the production and decoration of vessels and sculptures, but casting seems his usual mode of achieving basic forms, and sandblasting is often at least a part of his decorative vocabulary.

After studying with Littleton at the University of Wisconsin in 1966, Chihuly (1941 - ) moved on to the Rhode Island School of Design where he received his M.F.A. in 1968. In that year he received a Fulbright Scholarship to refine his skills as a glassblower by working at the Venini factory in Venice. In the 1970s Chihuly began to explore the possibilities of glass sculptures and developed surface decoration techniques. That decade also saw the formation of Pilchuck, the school and glassmaking center near Seattle with which Chihuly has long been associated. The loss of an eye put an end to Chihuly's personal activities as a glassblower, but he has continued to head a very productive group of glassmakers.

Clayman (1957 - ) received a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1986. He produces symmetrical cast glass sculptures that suggest vessel shapes. The colors are muted, the surfaces matte, and metal is often used to vary surface color and texture.

Born in Narbonne, France, Cros (1840 - 1907) began his studies at thirteen in the Paris studio of genre painter Jules Valadon. Impressed by a bas-relief, Valadon encouraged Cros to continue his efforts in sculpture, which then led him to study with the academic sculptor Antoine Etex. Around 1870 Cros began to develop an interest in the nearly lost ancient medium of encaustic painting, in which pigment is blended and applied in hot wax. This pursuit probably led to experiments in colored wax reliefs that, in turn, led to his rediscovery of another neglected ancient technique--pâte-de-verre. In this medium ceramists' pigments are blended with powdered glass and fused in a kiln. In 1890 Cros was appointed to a post at the Sèvres porcelain factory, where he was able to expand the scale of his works in pâte-de-verre.

A native of Philadelphia, Dailey (1947 - ) received his first professional training at the College of Art in that city, but next, and probably more significant for his role as a glass- maker, he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1970s, at a time when it was an important center of the nascent studio glass movement. Although he has frequently taught special courses, Dailey has essentially been an independent glass artist living in New England. His work is characterized by great technical variety, but almost always his productions include an element of humor.

Décorchemont (1880 - 1971) graduated from the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 1900. From 1901 to 1903 he began to work in ceramics but was soon discouraged by difficulties with the stoneware clay body he used, especially with the high firing temperatures it required. At his father's encouragement, he decided to try glass media, including pâte-de-verre, and in 1903 exhibited a well-received leaded-glass piece in the Salon des Artistes. Around 1907 - 8 he started to introduce powdered lead-crystal glass into the body of his pâte-de-verre, which increased its translucency. Soon after, he returned to his native Conches and conducted experiments using colored powdered-crystal glass as his base, molding it in the lost-wax technique normally associated with metalworking. In the 1930s Décorchemont made critically acclaimed leaded-glass windows in which each piece of glass was made by this method.

A native of Cleveland, Dreisbach (1941 - ) attended Hiram College and Oberlin. Later he received an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He works primarily with hot blown glass. In recent years he has been closely associated with Seattle glassmaking and the nearby Pilchuck Glass School.

Cleveland native Eckhardt (1907 - ) had enjoyed a long, successful career as a ceramist when in 1953 she began experiments in glassmaking. At first she made laminated glass panels decorated with gold leaf and enamels; she later turned to sculpture made of cast glass, sometimes combined with metal.

A native of Detroit, Glancy (1950 - ) attended schools in Denver and the Rhode Island School of Design. He is best known for glass with designs in deep relief combined with metal coatings covering part of the surface, the whole executed using irregular forms that suggest organic sources of inspiration.

Like so many glass artists, Grebe (1957 - ) first focused on ceramics, receiving a diploma in that field from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, in 1980. Later at the Tyler School of Art near Philadelphia, she added glass to her repertoire of media. Grebe is primarily a sculptor in glass, and most of her works in this material have at least the suggestion of figural representation.

Halem (1938 - ) has headed the glass studies department at Kent State University since 1969. He trained at, among other places, the Rhode Island School of Design. Over the years he has made a wide variety of glass vessels and sculpture, but more recently he has focused on low-relief wall panels with painting and other decorations.

Born in Wisconsin, Huchthausen (1951 - ) received his early training there, including a stint at the University of Wisconsin in the department headed by Littleton. Later he studied and then taught at Illinois State University with Joel Philip Myers. Huchthausen's earliest work was blown glass, but more recently he has made sculptures of laminated glass.

Ink (1944 - ) was born in Canton, and members of his family continue to live in northeastern Ohio. He studied at Kent State University and with Harvey Littleton at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s, but at the end of that decade he was an artist-in-residence at the firm of J. & L. Lobmeyr in Vienna, and since then has lived in central Europe. His specialty is richly colored glass, often iridescent, with occasional suggestions of landscape designs, generally incorporated into vessel forms. His work seems inspired by that of Tiffany and other turn-of-the-century glass artists.

A Texan by birth, Jensen (1953 - ) attended the University of Texas. She is essentially a painter who uses glass as her canvas, creating low reliefs of varied shape and with a smooth, hard surface of glass providing an appropriate support for highly imaginative, dreamlike subjects exe-cuted in vivid enamel colors.

Kallenberger (1950 - ) has centered his professional life at the University of Tulsa. He creates abstract glass sculptures using a wide variety of techniques with results that are at times rough-hewn, at others precisely finished and polished.

In his early work Kuhn (1949 - ) created glass suggesting the rough surfaces of uncut and unpolished stone. More recently, he has worked with optical glass built up by lamination from a small-scale core to a larger rectilinear form. These pieces rely for their effect on the brilliance of clear glass, though in some cases color has been added to the core construction.

Labino (1910 - 1987) had an extended, highly successful career as scientist and engineer. He was vice president and director of research at the Johns-Manville Fiber Glass Corporation. In the 1950s Labino participated in evening craft classes at the Toledo Museum of Art School of Design and at that time met Harvey Littleton. When the Toledo workshops were organized in 1962, Labino contributed his technical expertise and suggested to Littleton and others materials and equipment that made studio glassmaking possible. In 1965 Labino took early retirement and set up his own glassmaking establishment in Grand Rapids, Ohio, near Toledo. He continued to share his knowledge of glass technology with many American glass artists.

Lewis (1942 - ) received his training in glassmaking at the University of California, Berkeley, in the department founded by Marvin Lipofsky. Lewis's early work focused on blown glass vessel forms, but more recently he has created large-scale abstract sculptures of cast glass.

Lipofsky (1938 - ) had already obtained a degree in industrial design when, in 1964, he became one of Littleton's first students of glassmaking at the University of Wisconsin. That same year Lipofsky began a teaching career in the Bay Area, at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California College of Arts and Crafts. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lipofsky has maintained his early interest in hot blown glass, and using that medium, he has produced abstract glass sculpture of rounded organic forms.

Littleton (1922 - ) is perhaps the single most important figure in the American studio glass movement. Because his father was director of research for Corning Glass Works, from an early age he had access to glassmaking activities. From 1949 to 1951 Littleton was a ceramics instructor at the Toledo Museum of Art School of Design where he met Dominick Labino, who was destined to supply much of the technical knowledge for early studio glassmakers. In the latter year Littleton earned an M.F.A. in ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit and began teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Littleton's interest in glass persisted, but it was not until the Toledo workshops of 1962 that studio glassmaking became more than experimentation for him. Shortly thereafter he established a glassmaking program at Madison in which many future artists in the medium participated. He also became a major artist working with glass.

Mace (1949 - ) and Kirkpatrick (1952 - ) enjoy a long-standing partnership that has resulted in the production of diverse pieces, some of them sculptures that combine wood and glass, others made entirely of glass. While their work is technically varied, its expressive intensity of emotion makes it unique. Mace and Kirkpatrick live in the Seattle area and have on occasion participated in Dale Chihuly's glass productions.

Although Marinot (1882 - 1960) enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in 1901, he received most of his education outside the classroom. He exhibited with his former classmate André Derain and others in the ground-breaking Salon d'Automne of 1905, where they earned the name Les Fauves. His interest in glassmaking started upon visiting the Viard glassworks in 1911; he began by designing pieces to be executed there. However, his growing interest in the qualities of glass led him to learn glassblowing from his friends the Viard brothers. Marinot began to experiment with impure glass usually rejected for its bubbly consistency. Later he colored the glass with metallic oxides blown between layers and etched thick forms with repeated acid baths. His innovative style was well received in the 1920s and would later influence others, especially in France.

The son of a glass artist, Marioni (1964 - ) began blowing glass at an early age. His repertoire of forms is limited and decoration is confined to bands of glass of contrasting color. Within these limitations, however, he strives for perfectly formed glass vessels, sometimes of monumental proportions.

Markovitz (1947 - ) creates beaded sculptures, sometimes developing clearly recognizable images such as animals and, at other times, abstract shapes. She strings the beads and then sews or glues them to the desired form.

Marquis (1945 - ) received his education at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s, and from 1977 to 1983 he taught at U.C.L.A. Since then he has continued to make southern California the locus of his glass- making activities. Marquis often creates sculptures that appear to be at least in part functional vessels but, in fact, are not. He incorporates found material in his compositions, but he also makes use of slices of glass canes of his own manufacture to create objects in the tradition of Venetian mille fleur glass.

A ceramist by training, McCutchen (1918 - 1985) taught for many years in the art department of the University of Georgia. Rather late in his career he began experimenting with glass, especially with laminating and slumping sheets of glass and decorating them with enamels and metal inclusions.

McKinney (1958 - ) was born in Ravenna, Ohio, and received his education as a glassmaker largely at Bowling Green State University. He has worked with a variety of glass techniques and has expressed an interest in the optical qualities of thick glass.

Morris (1957-) received his training as one of Dale Chihuly's team of assistants. In the 1980s Morris began producing independently and has created several series of glass sculptures: the early "Stones" and, later, the Egyptian-inspired canopic jars and objects suggesting archaeological and ethnographic artifacts. Technically accomplished, he frequently combines cast and blown glass in pieces with complex surface ornament.

Musler (1949 - ), a native of northern California, studied with Marvin Lipofsky at the California College of Arts and Crafts. In his glassmaking Musler has focused attention on surface decoration to create pieces with a particular emotional resonance. He often uses commercial glass blanks that he modifies by cutting and slumping and then decorates with oil paint and sandblasting.

After working as a graphic and industrial designer in the 1950s, Myers (1934 - ) graduated from Alfred University in New York in 1963 with a degree in ceramics. He had some exposure to glassblowing at Alfred. The year he graduated he went to work for the Blenko Glass Company in West Virginia, where he was allowed to experiment with glass and eventually became a skilled glassblower. In 1970 he established a program in glass at Illinois State University.

Navarre (1885 - 1971) entered the École Bernard Palissy in 1903 to study sculpture. He was then apprenticed to a silversmith before studying mosaic and leaded glass- making at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris. In 1924 his interest in glassmaking was confirmed after designing a leaded-glass window for the offices of the paper l'Intransigeant. His use of massive, roughly etched glass in several windows indicates strongly the influence of Maurice Marinot, as do many of Navarre's later pieces of blown glass.

Palusky (1942 - ) mastered a number of glassmaking techniques, as have many glass artists trained in the 1960s. His mature work consists of sculptures often employing glass made in several ways and sometimes combined with other materials, particularly stone.

A Massachusetts native, Patti (1943 - ) received his training at the Pratt Institute in New York City. He specializes in small but monumental sculptures made by fusing glass.

Born in Prague, Pavlik (1941 - ) received his earliest training there. After coming to the United States, he worked at the Penland School of Crafts. He produces abstract glass sculptures unusually composed of linked elements of simple geometric forms with highly polished surfaces. At least some color is included in most of his pieces.

Peiser (1938 - ) has long been associated with the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, where in 1967 he was the first hot glass artist-in-residence. In recent times he has turned to cast, cut, and polished glass sculptures of subtle design and color.

Powell (1951 - ) trained as a ceramist, a path many glassmakers have followed. Only within the last decade has glass become his medium of choice. As a glass artist Powell has devoted himself to free blown decorative vessels, often of large scale.

In the 1970s Ries (1952 - ) studied with Littleton at the University of Wisconsin, focusing on glassblowing. More recently, he has usually employed colorless optical glass he cuts and polishes to create sculptures that, viewed in their entirety, are generally simple abstract shapes. When seen at close range and from various angles, the refraction or reflection of light within the body of the work creates internal designs.

Born in Detroit, Ritter (1940 - ) has been associated with the Penland School of Crafts for most of his life. His glassmaking is particularly identified with blown glass vessels incorporating as at least part of their decoration slices from canes of glass he makes for that purpose.

Rogers (1960 - ) received an M.F.A. from Kent State University in 1989 and subsequently has been associated with the Penland School of Crafts. She has tried her hand at several glassmaking techniques, but recently she has been working with cast pâte-de-verre combined with steel elements.

Rothenfeld (1953 - ) studied first at the Rhode Island School of Design, receiving a B.F.A. in 1977. Later he earned a master's degree at Kent State University. He has devised a personal mode of creating glass sculpture in which roughly shaped horizontal sheets of glass are stacked vertically to suggest forms, usually the human figure.

A native of Georgia, Ruffner (1952 - ) studied painting at the University of Georgia. Not surprisingly, even though she now makes lamp-work glass compositions of complex form, painting remains important in that her glass pieces customarily have painted surfaces, often with detailed, realistic scenes. The imagination with which she endows the subject matter of her pieces has made Ruffner's reputation as a glass artist.

Although glassmakers Russell-Pool (1967 - ) and Petrovic (1967 - ) sometimes work independently, their efforts are more often cooperative. Russell-Pool constructs cages or arborlike structures with lamp work -- melted and blown glass manipulated in small quantities using a limited source of heat. Petrovic supplies blown glass elements, often birds. On an expressive level the results are unique to these artists.

Of Italian birth, Scanga (1932 - ) graduated from Michigan State University and has taught at the University of California, San Diego. Glass has long been one of his technical resources, but he customarily makes use of other materials as well in the creation of his sculptures.

Schaechter (1961 - ) was in her second year at the Rhode Island School of Design when she first tried her hand at making stained glass under the tutelage of Ursula Huth. It proved to be a medium that suited her aesthetic and expressive aims perfectly and has continued to dominate her artistic production. The subject matter of Schaechter's stained-glass compositions tends to be painful and psychologically intense.

With a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art in her native Baltimore, Scott (1948 - ) earned an M.F.A. from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel Allende, Mexico. In addition to jewelry made of glass beads, she also has created fiber art and mixed-media objects, often with specific subject matter of a contentious nature.

Seide (1949 - ), a New Yorker by birth, was trained at the Egani Neon Glassblowing School in that city and then studied at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he received a degree in fine arts in 1974. His sculptures, which are varied in form, often employ activated gases, the basic principle of neon lighting.

Like a number of artists concerned with glass as a medium of expression, Shaffer (1947 - ) studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work customarily involves slumped glass and metal in the creation of large-scale sculptures.

Simoni (1955 - ) attended the Cleveland Institute of Art and Kent State University and lives in the Cleveland area. Her pieces are made of laminated glass, with their surfaces sandblasted. She operates her own glassmaking facility.

Trained as a scientific glassblower, Stankard (1943 - ) employs the comparatively rare technique of lamp work to create the flowers and animals used as the central motifs in his small sculptures. He has developed an extraordinary dexterity in the production of realistic subjects that he sometimes combines with tiny representations of nude figures. He is widely recognized for his technical accomplishment in his chosen mode of work. Rick Ayotte (1944 - ), a maker of paperweights who resides in New Hampshire, made the turtle Stankard incorporated into Environmental with Turtle.

Statom (1953 - ) makes use of glass, but its physical properties do not dominate his work. He is a sculptor, insofar as he creates three-dimensional forms resembling such structures as chairs and ladders. His surfaces are frequently freely painted, and the found objects he uses make many of his pieces three-dimensional collages. Although difficult to classify, Statom's work seems to have an authentic originality.

A native of Dover, Ohio, Sudduth (1960 - ) has focused his glassmaking activities on Cleveland, first as a student of Brent Kee Young at the Cleveland Institute of Art and, more recently, as an independent artist and sometime teacher. He is well equipped technically and produces both blown and cast glass.

Tobin (1957 - ) graduated from Tulane University, New Orleans, in 1979 with a major in mathematics, but by that year he was already an accomplished glass artist. He has produced significant pieces employing both cast and blown glass. Recently, he has executed some large constructions that include glass but go well beyond the usual definition of glass sculpture since other materials are involved and the results are only partially beholden to the specific characteristics of glass.

In her work Trinkley (1956 - ) combines several traditions to produce pieces of originality and distinction. First there is the material, pâte-de-verre, which was used by the first French studio glassmaker, Henri Cros. Ground glass and pigments are mixed together and then fired in a mold. Second, like certain late works of Frederick Carder, her cast glass is based in form on an ancient Roman carved cage vessel, a diatretum. The results are both attractive and technically accomplished.

Cleveland native Vance (1947 - ) was a student at Bowling Green State University during the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time he studied glassblowing with Dominick Labino. From 1974 to 1978 he operated Vance Glassworks in Peninsula, Ohio.

Born in Poland, Walentynowicz (1956 - ) studied first in Denmark and later at Illinois State University with Joel Philip Myers. Walentynowicz creates sculptures chiefly of glass but sometimes with other materials as well. The human figure or parts thereof are usually included in his compositions.

Initially Weinberg (1954 - ) trained as a ceramist at Alfred University. He then went to the Rhode Island School of Design where he took up glassmaking. He is a sculptor in glass who produces his basic forms through casting and then alters and enriches them with a variety of techniques including sandblasting, grinding, and cutting. Many of his works are inspired by architecture. Cubic in shape, they include elements that suggest columns, parapets, staircases, and other architectural elements.

Born in Los Angeles, Young (1946 - ) studied at Alfred (New York) and San Jose State (California) universities. For many years he has headed the glass department of the Cleveland Institute of Art. He is perhaps best known for glass of simple cylindrical forms with inclusions that suggest fossilized animals.

Zynsky (1951 - ) was born in Boston and educated at the Rhode Island School of Design. Although trained in a wide variety of glassmaking techniques, the works for which she is best known are bowl-shaped vessels made of fused glass threads. Recently much of her time has been spent abroad.

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