Alumni show at OSU

2009 Julia Harris:

"Had Marion Fisher, art coordinator at the Ohio State University Faculty Club, been walking the club’s main hallway on July 10, she might have been more than a bit nervous.

Two lively children, probably between the ages of 7 and 10, were capering up and down the hall, playing a game of tag punctuated with the occasional body slam.
They managed, fortunately, to avoid crashing into any of the intricate glass objects also taking up space in that hall, though they were dangerously interested in a piece called 100 Spot Skateboard: A solid glass, life-sized skateboard etched with the representation of a $100 bill.

And valued at more than $3,000.

Part of the new “Leaders in Glass” exhibit that Fisher helped bring to the club, this piece and the many others displayed throughout the building will be on view through Aug. 28. Taken together, the works by 14 nationally recognized glass artists — all of whom are university alumni, whether of the undergraduate or graduate programs — showcase the talents of people who have been affiliated with Ohio State’s glass arts program.

“Big things are happening here at the university,” said Professor Richard Harned, coordinator of the university’s glass program and an accomplished artist in his own right.

“It’s sort of a small program but very powerful; our graduate program was ranked No. 6 in the nation by US News & World Report.”

Fisher enlisted guest curator Joel O’Dorisio, himself an alum of OSU’s glass program and an instructor at Bowling Green State University, to select artists whose works represented a wide range of styles, techniques and artistic vision. “I learned a lot about glass when I met Joel in 2007 and he exhibited his work here,” Fisher said. “We’ve been talking about putting this show together for a year and a half, as a way to showcase the breadth of talent that’s been developed in the university’s glass arts program.”

A unique way of approaching that breadth is O’Dorisio’s strategy of curating the artists instead of the art. After selecting the roster of artisans for the show — people who were active professionally and/or charting new ground artistically, O’Dorisio told them they had a free hand in choosing what works of art they wanted to exhibit.

“They’re all respected professionals, so I gave them a lot of freedom in what they wanted to show,” he said.

“They could choose what was representative of their body of work as a whole. As a result, we’ve got beautiful examples of cast work, sculpted work and blown glass.”

In his own work, O’Dorisio likes to explore textures and refraction of light, often making casts of various sizes and shapes and then alternately polishing surfaces and pressing textures like tree bark into them.

Harned, who has been on faculty since 1982, submitted a multi-faceted window paned with thick glass rectangles that bear a snippet of verse from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.

The idea of using glass as an artistic medium is a relatively new one, O’Dorisio said. Traditionally a factory-oriented craft medium, it wasn’t until the late ’60s and early ’70s that it began to transition into something artists could begin using in their own studios.

“Dominick Lobino, a glass scientist at a factory in Ohio, decided he could experiment with this kind of stuff in his garage,” O’Dorisio said. “He designed some furnaces, some tools and some new glass mixtures, and made it cheap enough so that other artists could start working with it too.”

Innovations from Ohio glass artists — many of them from Ohio State, and many of them featured in this exhibit — continue. For example, Ed Schmid, who received his MFA in 1990 and submitted two dramatic art sculptures, authored a book originally known as Big Ed’s Handbook of Glassblowing (reissued as Beginning Glassblowing in 2005) that both O’Dorisio and Harned cannot say enough good things about.

“It’s the ‘glassopedia Britannica,’”Harned said with a grin. “And we get a discount because we’re alumni.”"

Harris, J. "People who live in glass houses: New Faculty Club glass art exhibit invites reflection," July 15, 2009. OnCampus website. Ohio State University. website accessed July 20, 2009. http://oncampus.osu.edu/2009/07/people-who-live-in-glass-houses-new-faculty-club-glass-art-exhibit-invites-reflection/