Bill Sievert closes the gap with an article about glass in Louisville. I've never been to Louisville; the only time I was in Kentucky I was underground, in a cave. Next year Louisville will host the 2010 Glass Art Society conference probably above ground. There's a thread running through this blog of cities adopting glass as their theme or their specialty, Louisville is one as this article points out. This probably helps the market for glass and improves glass artist's standard of living. Could it hurt, though? Academically I could come up with a reason why it's diluting the perception and standard of talented glass art, but for god's sake, it's better than my hometown being known for RVs.
Seattle has been a glass destination as long as I've been alive due to the great number of glassblower's studios located here and Pilchuck's school upstate. No that's not right, we don't use that term here in Washington. It's not 'upstate,' it's 'north of Seattle.' Tacoma successfully used glass art to improve their downtown with the Musem of Glass and Hotel Murano. (If only glass gave off a pleasant smell, the Tacoma upgrade would be complete.) How many more places are going to do this?
1998 Bill Sievert:
"Until very recently, if you inquired about the city of Louisville's contributions to the world of collectible glass, most people probably would mention the colorful Kentucky Derby mint-julep tumblers issued each year during the spring racing season at Churchill Downs. Now, however, the popular perception is changing, as this city on the Falls of the Ohio River achieves critical mass as a major center of art-glass design, display and education.
Like the Seattle area in the Northwest, Louisville is afire with art glass, culminating in the current four-month-long "A Celebration of Glass 2003" at museums, galleries, studios and restaurants throughout the city. The Celebration, which began in April and continues through this month, is cosponsored by four major venues: the two-year old Louisville Glassworks complex, the brand new Kentucky Museum of Arts + Design, the prestigious Speed Art Museum, and the fast-growing Louisville Visual Art Association. Glass artists from throughout the nation and all over the world, including renowned glass blowers from Venice, Italy, have come to Louisville to show their work, conduct demonstrations, teach workshops and share in the growing public fervor for their fine craft.
"As a medium glass is so accessible," says Beverly Bromley, executive director of Glassworks, a permanent multi-faceted glass art center located in a former steel factory in the city's once decaying downtown area. "There is a beauty to glass artistry not often conveyed in other three-dimensional mediums. People love the way glass art captures light and many colors, and there are so many ways glass can be made." Glassworks' studios incorporate all approaches from hot glass to cold glass, from flame working and glassblowing to stained glass.
But why is so much art glass activity happening in Louisville? According to Bromley, the city has a glass tradition that dates back more than a century to a time when Louisville "was a strong center for stained glass." In those days, a number of local manufacturers were creating dramatic windows for the area's many now historical churches. But the credit for what's currently happening can be attributed to a handful of local artists and aficionados who have combined their individual efforts serendipitously to take the local art glass scene to a higher level.
Each of the major players is quick to acknowledge the others, but the most frequently named catalyst for Louisville's newly found stature is Ken vonRoenn, cofounder of Glassworks and president of the nationally renowned and locally based studio, Architectural Glass Art, Inc. VonRoenn, whose designs for dramatic glass walls, windows and chandeliers adorn buildings from Kentucky to Charlotte, North Carolina, teamed up with local real-estate developer Bill Weyland to transform the old steel factory into a handsome and quite huge facility for glass-art making, education and exhibition.
Glassworks opened in the autumn of 2001, occupying the two lowest floors of attached buildings at Ninth and Market Streets. (The upper levels were renovated into loft condominiums.) With plenty of space for parties and special events and a hot glass studio overlooking Market Street, Glassworks quickly became a destination for locals and visitors alike. The large windows to the hot shop even draw in tourists who come downtown to visit the nearby museum of Hillerich & Bradsby, producers of Louisville Slugger baseball bats. "Bats and glass might seem like an uncomfortable pairing, but it's fun to see us drawing one another's visitors," Bromley says.
As the renovations for the Glassworks building were getting underway, another downtown neighbor, the Kentucky Art and Craft Foundation (recently renamed the Kentucky Museum of Arts + Design as it moved into newly refurbished quarters on nearby Main Street), decided to host a major exhibition, "Millennium Glass: An International Survey of Studio Glass," for the year 2000. The largest and most prestigious event in the craft organization's 20-year history, the exhibition featured works and demonstrations by international artists alongside Kentucky masters like Stephen Rolfe Powell. After the success of the Millennium show, it wasn't long before leaders of the Craft Foundation and Glassworks decided to jointly spearhead this year's Celebration of Glass. The Speed Museum on the University of Louisville campus quickly joined forces with the others, offering to share its nationally known art-glass collection. The Speed collection is considered one of America's best, thanks to donations, loans and promised contributions from longtime Louisville glass collectors Adele and Leonard Leight.
Leaders of both Glassworks and the Kentucky Museum especially credit artist Stephen Rolfe Powell as being instrumental in the area's rise to glass prominence. Powell's brilliantly colored, oversized glass creations, which he describes as being "influenced by the gestures and postures of the human figure," are being displayed at several venues during the current Celebration. He has exhibited and taught all over the world from Australia and New Zealand to Russia. In the mid 1980s, he built a glass studio and founded a glass art program at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. A decade later, with financing from Corning Glass and other companies, Powell designed and completed a new state-of-the-art Visual Arts Center for the college. The center has been host to such renowned artists as Marvin Lipofsky, Lino Tagliapietra, Richard Jolley and Jose Chardiet. And several of Powell's graduates have gone on to head glass programs at other colleges and universities; even the hot glass facility at Glassworks is run by former students of Powell.
According to Glassworks' vonRoenn, "We are just building on something that was already going. We had a nucleus of artists in the state because of Centre College and Steve Powell. We want to grow this into a larger glass community with more opportunity for artists."
Opportunities for artists from student novices to established professionals represent a major component of the missions of both Glassworks and the Kentucky Museum of Arts + Design. Although the two institutions are still in their infancies, with frustratingly limited budgets, they are offering glass artists a growing number of ways to become involved, with more on the way. What follows is a look inside their handsome facilities and the opportunities available to artists to teach and study there:
The Kentucky Museum of Arts + Design
Located in a century-old building a block from Glassworks, the new 4,000-square-foot quarters of the Kentucky Museum are five times the size of the organization's previous cramped home a block east. The new location is also visually exciting, with two levels of high-ceilinged gallery space and lots of windows that access daylight, making the exhibited works all the more dramatic to behold. A spectacular 3-D glass wall created by Ken vonRoenne of Glassworks separates the exhibit area from the museum's shop. On two upper levels, there are numerous meeting rooms and workshops.
Founded as the Kentucky Art and Craft Foundation two decades ago by the state's former First Lady Phyllis George Brown, the organization's initial purpose was to showcase the works of Kentucky artisans to a wider audience. The group's first major event was an exhibition of crafts from the Bluegrass State at Bloomingdale's department store in New York City.
In the 20 years since, the group's direction has broadened considerably, leading up to its international art-glass exhibit in 2000, its new facility and its co-sponsorship of this year's Celebration of Glass. Along with the new location, the organization decided to change its name to The Kentucky Museum of Arts + Design.
The switch has "been the topic of a lot of discussion," according to Executive Director Mary Miller, "but almost everyone seems to like it. Our view is that 'arts' is a longer umbrella than the word 'crafts.' I don't think crafts is a negative word, but 'arts' lifts everyone up to the same level. And design is at the core of what every artist does."
Whether it is described as art or craft, the Museum represents all forms of 3-D work (as well as a sampling of 2-D). Right now the emphasis is on glass, but future events will include all kinds of work from pottery to quilts. And while works by artists from all over the country (and abroad) are shown, "We don't ever want to leave our Kentucky artists behind," Miller says. "In our sales gallery you will see that 90 percent of the work is by Kentucky artists; ten percent is by others."
Much of the Kentucky Museum's educational outreach is to children, with numerous classes offered to youngsters from area elementary schools. But it does sponsor a popular three-day craft conference for professionals each summer. The meetings, which are open to artists whether or not they are Kentucky residents, alternate each year between "hands-on" learning and marketing seminars. This year's conference, which begins July 25, will be a marketing event. "It's one of our missions to help artists learn how to present and sell their work," Miller says, "and not everyone is very good at the business side of things."
The museum also offers occasional weekend seminars for adults and is developing an artist residency program. "We work with many artists to oversee our educational projects," says education director Shayne Hull. "When a school wants a particular subject taught, we do the matchmaking to find the right teacher from our roster of artists."
Hull also notes that, "Part of our long-range plan is to bring in artists of national stature for three-day workshops" designed especially for experienced adult artists. "We've finally got the space; now we're working on the fundraising."
As part of the Celebration of Glass, the Museum has recruited several outside artists to lead workshops in conjunction with its show "The Glass Vessel: An International Survey." The exhibition features pieces by 50 artists from Asia, Australia, Europe and throughout the United States. A concurrent exhibit features oversized cast-glass sculptures of industrial objects such as tools, screws and bolts by North Carolinian Rick Beck.
"These glass exhibitions are a particularly fun way to welcome everyone to our new home," notes Mary Miller. "It's so magical to watch glass artists do their work. Everyone is enjoying this event. ... Pardon the pun, but I'd have to say that glass is hot!"
For more information on the Kentucky Museum of Arts + Design or its educational programs, visit the Web site www.kentuckyarts.org, or call 502-589-0102. The museum's gallery is located at 715 West Main Street in downtown Louisville.
Glassworks
In the cavernous street-level hot shop at Glassworks, Karen Willenbrink of Washington state is conducting a demonstration, showing an eager audience how she carefully crafts one of her raptors of the Northwest. In the bleacher-style viewing stands, the crowd of about two dozen people includes fellow professional artists, college-age students and several fascinated tour takers, folks who have never seen this kind of "hot rod" action before. Meanwhile, in a spacious studio upstairs from her, resident artist Mark Payton patiently tends to his flame work, fashioning an intricate glass finial. He is one of several artists to have permanent space on that floor.
"I used to have my own private studio-slash-gallery," Payton says. "But when Glassworks opened, I jumped at the chance to move here. This is the studio I always wanted to build."
A Sunshine Artist subscriber, Payton is an artisan who knows the value of using a variety of approaches to expose his work to the public. At Glassworks, his creations are available for sale in the lobby gallery shop while he and his apprentices work upstairs filling custom orders for scores of galleries and boutiques throughout North America. He also does several art/craft shows each year, calling the show circuit "the best way to get to know what your public likes." Payton even finds time to lead workshops and to provide demonstrations of his craft particularly his specialty: the use of sculpting tools to manipulate low-expansion "hardglass" rods heated with a torch.
A symbiotic interaction between artist and art consumer is at the heart of Glassworks' philosophy. "The more you educate the public about how glass art is created, the more you are creating an audience for it," says Beverly Bromley. "It's a cyclical thing. The public's spending helps finance more educational opportunities for glass artists." At Glassworks, people can buy art glass of all price ranges from the gift shop or make major purchases from the upscale Tobin-Hewett Gallery just across the lobby.
Glassworks includes both a for-profit business division (which operates the gift shop, tours, and special-events services, including a roof-garden party facility) as well as a non-profit educational foundation. Barely a year old, the foundation sponsors and reaps any financial rewards (including admission charges) from major exhibitions, such as the current Glass Celebration show of "Chihuly Baskets" by Northwest artist Dale Chihuly. (Chihuly's popularity is widely hailed as a big factor in the Seattle area's growing reputation as an art glass center. See accompanying article.)
Although "we're still taking baby steps," as Bromley puts it, Glassworks boasts an increasingly ambitious educational program. In addition to offering occasional residencies for glass artists, the foundation sponsors a wide variety of six-week long classes, bringing in accomplished artists to teach them. Students can learn how to use soft and hard glass rods and tubes in developing flame working techniques, or they can take a course in fused and slumped glass. Other courses range from sand casting to bead making. "One of the interesting things we've noticed is how many artists from other mediums come here to try their hand at glass blowing," she says. "We also have teachers, sales people, folks from all walks of life who want to learn how to create art glass."
Glassworks' educational model is multi-disciplinary, focusing on the "language of art through the principles of design. ... Although glassmaking and designing with glass is an art form, the process involves integrated learning including art, history, science, mathematics, social studies and economics," according to its literature.
Officials of Glassworks are currently in discussions with the University of Louisville about working together on new educational programs: "It's premature to discuss them but the possibilities are quite exciting," Bromley says. Glassworks also has offered to host a national meeting of the Glass Art Society (GAS) in the not-too-distant future. And, of course, plans are already underway for the second biennial citywide Celebration of Glass in 2005."
Sievert, B. "Louisville Glass." article first appeared in Sunshine Artist Magazine, July 1998. Orlando, FL. Accessed October 18, 2009. http://www.kentuckyarts.org/Glass_reviews/sunshine_artist.htm
1998 Malin Wilson:
"Glass is a slowly cooling liquid. Very slowly. The surfaces of old windows ripple more over time, and they are thicker at the bottom than the top as gravity pulls the molecules earthward.
The sinuous, liquid, bubbling qualities of glass have been masterfully exploited by artisans from antiquity. An ancient cobalt Persian oil lamp with trails of tiny bubbles comes to mind, as does the great Venetian legacy of glass blowing.
Dale Chihuly, the amazing American showman of glass, went to Venice for inspiration and technique. Today, his Seattle atelier of master glass blowers creates glass components for immense installations of glowing sea creatures, and pendulous pods clustered in hanging chandeliers, and petal-shaped bowls nestled to create fantastic, impossible blooms.
Glass seems a magic material, but the artists who come to terms with it must also be athletes. All of this is a brief and perhaps misleading prelude to my enthusiasm for the current exhibition by Stacey Neff.
Neff is a 24-year-old glass blower whose command and control of the medium are impressive. What is misleading about my emphasis on the material is this artist's lack of emphasis on her craft. Her skill serves something more than the making of extravagantly crafty and nifty objects. She has something more in mind.
Titled "Semblance of Sensation," this is an exhibition of bulbous, attenuated glass pods with fiberglass coatings. They all feel larger than human scale. Hanging off the wall like immense tendrils of engorged seaweed, these alert antennae suggest a science fiction landscape. Or they could be exotic jewelry for a giant. "Swimmer's" elongated milky body has a segmented tail and a clear glass sphere in its upturned throat. "Seed Stick" is cut away to reveal what look like large, luminous taste buds. The two graceful pods called "Night Pod" are rubbed with graphite. In one of the strongest works, two serpentine feelers glistening with sand dangle from rusted metal holders.
Two of my favorite works, "Crowning V" and "Twin Lamper," are not such direct references to the sea. Rather, they're born from working with the droop and weight of molten glass. All of Neff's works transcend their materials and all the works in this exhibition are sensuous semblances of fertility, fragility, strength, delicacy, restraint and boldness. The work titled "Pregnant Stick" seems a harbinger in this exhibition.
Since Neff is so young, she is an artist that is poised at the beginning of a long and hopefully prolific career. You can walk out of her show knowing that much is yet to come."
Wilson, M. "Glass Blower More Than Crafty." September 24, 1998. Albuquerque Journal (Albuquerque, NM). 1998. Retrieved November 05, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-414428_ITM
1998 Lisa Bornstein:
"
Famed glassblower Dale Chihuly employs an army of workers to carry out his crystalline visions.
Muscular arms, thick chests, gleaming brows. These are the real tools of the glassblower.
And the eyes, which tell the glass artist how much more heat a piece can bear before it slumps into a puddle, how much further a tube can be stretched before it snaps.
Dale Chihuly, the nation's -- if not the world's -- premier glass artist, is burly of body and curly of hair. His physique immediately signifies a man who knows not only the artistry but the back-aching labor of glass art.
And yet, he seldom blows his own glass. Instead, Chihuly, who will attend the opening of six glass installations tonight at the Albuquerque Museum, is the ringleader of a crystalline circus. He envisions the pieces, from graceful, shell-like bowls called seaforms to massive constructions such as a coming installation at the Citadel in Jerusalem to mark the millennium.
He envisions the pieces -- and then he passes them on, to a team of glass artists, much as Warhol's employees did in the Factory, or as Chihuly likes to remember, like Michelangelo used in his sculpture.
They're not just glassblowers, either -- there are about 100 full-time employees at Chihuly Studios outside of Seattle, a veritable fine-art factory. There are installers who travel with the pieces to make sure they arrive intact and make sure the exhibition reflects the artist's vision. There are the packers who prepare for shipping. And the truck drivers who transport the art. There are publicists, secretaries and an entire publishing company that produces a catalog for nearly every exhibition.
Chihuly stands in the center, or rather, above the center, orchestrating a circus of his own creation. Common knowledge has it that a 1976 auto accident, in which Chihuly lost the vision in one eye (and therefore his depth perception), led him to stop blowing his own glass. Common knowledge may be wrong.
"A lot of artists, they might do the same kind of work for their whole life, but I'm the kind of artist who does the same kind of work for a while and then changes," Chihuly says.
Eventually, he says, he probably would have stepped back from the physical work and become the Grand Imaginer he is now.
"It just speeded it up," he says of the accident. "But I can't say anything for sure."
The accident was one of several events in Chihuly's young adulthood that might have shattered his future.
At the age of 15, his older brother, a Navy pilot, was killed in a training accident, and within a year, his father was felled by a heart attack. There was a shoulder dislocation a few years later that further impaired Chihuly's ability for the heavy lifting involved in glassblowing.
Like the art, life can be fragile.
"I think that's one of the reasons people like the glass," he says.
The possibility of destruction makes the art -- maybe even life -- all the sweeter.
And it is art. Chihuly, more than anyone since Louis Comfort Tiffany, has been credited with elevating glasswork from craft to art. It's a distinction that is of dubious meaning to Chihuly.
"I think it's kind of a ridiculous border," he says. "I'm not saying that there isn't art and craft, and there may not be a difference between them. I think the best of craft is art, and a lot of art is craft. It's an art form."
'It's completely instinct'
Chihuly, 56, has made room in the art world not only for himself, but for hundreds of other glassworkers. A native of Tacoma, Wash., he returned there after a number of youthful, international escapades and graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin and the Rhode Island School of Design.
He was working at RISD in 1970 when the school shut down during student protests. Chihuly returned to Washington, and a year later, he and some fellow artists founded the Pilchuck Glass School outside of Seattle. Today, Pilchuck is the country's foremost glassblowing school, drawing first-time blowers on summer vacation as well as established artists such as Kiki Smith and Ann Hamilton.
As for Chihuly, he teaches the occasional class, as well as hiring dozens of glassblowers to work with him. And in a room where seconds make the difference between hot, malleable glass and cold, brittle shards, an unspoken communication exists.
As many as 10 men -- and they are usually men -- may be required to finish a single, massive seaform or gravity-defying orb. They must know how to translate Chihuly's faxes, paintings and conversations into glass.
"It's completely instinct," Chihuly says. "Some of them have worked with me for 25 years. You communicate with different gaffers (glassblowers) in different ways. It might take 3,000 pieces, and it might take several weeks to make them, and there needs to be communication during those."
The process, he says, is "sort of a ballet or a symphony."
He is the conductor, occasionally stepping up to the instruments and once more putting mouth to pipe.
"I don't know if I do it for my own pleasure, or kind of to stimulate the glassblowers, just to get in there and show them I can do it," he says. "I work in a freer way than they do."
The dozens of employees lead to constant comparisons between Chihuly and Warhol, and earlier this week, Chihuly spent an hour on the couch watching an A&E "Biography" on the late pop artist, who had assistants execute his silkscreens.
"He happens to be my favorite artist of my time," Chihuly says. "I hate to say it, but my studio is way bigger than Warhol's was. And Warhol, with the Factory, it was just full of really crazy, wild people that came in almost off the street. But after he got shot, that whole thing changed."
Not everyone thinks that having dozens of employees and becoming a celebrity is the road of a true artist, and Chihuly has suffered his share of criticism, from charges of having assistants making purely decorative craftwork to being basically a businessman.
"That's not how they perceive an artist," he says of his critics. "They think of an example from the late 19th, early 20th century, like Van Gogh, Cezanne. (But) Michelangelo at one point had 200 employees."
As far as money goes, "they always put Jasper Johns high on the list, and he always made a good living," Chihuly says. "If you have other people working with you, that bothers a lot of people."
Works of glass in the desert
Some of those employees arrived in Albuquerque on Monday, where they began installing the exhibition. At the entrance is what the artist calls a "quintessential Chihuly seaform installation," a series of fluid, anemone-like creations in a variety of vivid hues.
Another section contains what he calls a "Macchia forest," an assembly of forms from the Macchia series, which incorporated most of the 300 colors available to the glass artist into vessels that seem like giant, carnivorous clams.
A chandelier hangs from the ceiling, like a giant wisteria of blown glass, and Chihuly's drawings, not directly connected with but evocative of the exhibition, are displayed as well.
A "Persian ceiling" is carpeted with exotic forms, and a video will eventually describe the process and the history of his work. While the styles have different names, they all come back to a basically Modernist impulse: to explore the possibilities of color and the medium in an abstract form.
The Albuquerque Museum exhibit is neither his first nor his greatest work in the state. For that, you must go north, to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where Chihuly built a glass shop in 1974. Or south, to Ruidoso, where arts patron Jacqueline Spencer spent $1 million commissioning three Chihuly installations for her Antoine Predock-designed Spencer Theater for the Performing Arts, which opened last fall.
There, Chihuly's work is framed by the stark white Spanish stone of the $20 million building. In addition to a wall filled with Persian flowers so bright they provoke childlike giggles, Chihuly worked in two other forms in Ruidoso for the first time.
Drawing directly from the landscape, Chihuly designed a bank of Indian paintbrushes, waving yellow stems with red tips that look as if 300 lions had stuck their heads in the sand and waved their tails in the air.
And in the ceiling stretching over a patrons' patio, a few dozen colored glass "onions" encase light bulbs. Since then, Chihuly has made other onion forms, floating them in the water or using them in chandeliers.
"But I think that was the first use of them," he says.
Chihuly estimates that 75 percent of his work is made for private and public commissions, from the Spencer Theater to the canals of Venice. The buyers get some input into the creation -- to an extent.
"It really depends a lot on the person," Chihuly says. "We build everything full-scale in my studio before we go to the site."
Patrons can fly to Seattle and view the work before delivery, if they like. "They usually like it the way we did it," he says.
But suggestions are welcome.
"If they say I want it to match the colors in my living room, that's a different thing," he says.
Those patrons -- enough to require five full-time registrars at Chihuly studios -- clearly think of his work as art, as do the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just two of dozens of museums who count Chihulys in their collections.
And yet the skeptics persist. Sometimes Chihuly himself is one of them. And then he remembers.
"I was mentioning to somebody the other day, why is it my work is going through these drastic changes?" Chihuly says. "And a guy who knew a lot about art said, that's the difference between an artist and a craftsman. A craftsman is happy to do the same thing his whole life, while an artist is searching.""
Bornstein, L. "Working glass.(The Arts & Entertainment)." The Albuquerque Tribune (Albuquerque, NM). June 12 1998. Retrieved November 05, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-108364085/working-glass-arts-amp.html
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