In this time line I pull quotes to illustrate a thread in popular and scholarly writing and criticism about glass. Here we will see current glass artists defending their art against the accusations and separating themselves from these stereotypes and, hopefully, find out how and where the now-common opinion was born. Fundamentally, the general thesis seems to be born of the question, What Is Art? This question I will leave to others to answer, here I am only documenting the written history of a popular way of thinking and a popular taste. The years are not in chronological order, there are posts from 1886 to 2009, you may search by year, i.e. "1981" in the search box.
1993 Michael Perrault:
" With a twinkle in her eye, Sandy Sardella walked away from a career
Sandy Sardella shamelessly carries on a love affair in front of her husband, KUSA-Channel 9 news anchor Ed Sardella.
It's a love affair that has changed her life.
Ed understands and supports his wife.
You see, Sandy is in love with glass -- exquisite glass sculptures, the kind that can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
"Once you get into glass, you tend to really get into it. It's addictive," said Sandy Sardella, owner of PISMO, an art glass gallery at 2727 E. Third Ave. in Cherry Creek North.
"I love glass, I truly do," she said, pointing out how finely cut glass breaks sunlight into brilliant colors.
For Sardella, the appreciation for glass artwork was an acquired taste. She once was committed to a career as a financial analyst and tax accountant. She spent years earning a bachelor's and a master's degree in the field.
"I always wanted to be in finance," said Sardella, who after earning her master's degree thought she'd "stay in the field forever."
Sardella's former boss, Earl Wright, president of Asset Management Group, said she was an outstanding financial analyst and strategist while working for his company. But even in the financial industry she showed an inherent creative ability.
"I certainly saw that side of her," said Wright, who isn't surprised that Sardella has made a success of her gallery.
"Success was written all over Sandy," said Wright. "The only surprise is what she decided to be successful in."
In some ways Sardella, too, is surprised that she ended up owning the art glass gallery, which now features the works of more than 100 artists from around the world.
"I had no idea that this is what I'd end up doing," said Sardella. "I was just looking for something more creative, something of my own."
The only real retail experience she had before starting the gallery was during her college years at the University of Denver, when she was employed at Grassfield's, a local clothing store.
Max Grassfield, owner of the store, remembers Sardella for her exuberant personality.
"She had a Ph.D. in common sense," said Grassfield.
When Sardella was exploring the possibility of an art glass gallery several years ago, she bounced the idea off a number of friends and business people. Several people told her the Denver market wouldn't support such a gallery. She took that advice to heart and decided to open a shop that featured natural decorative items, such as coral and seashells, along with glass. In the back of her mind, though, she knew she wanted more glass.
From the beginning she knew she wanted her shop located a few blocks north of the Cherry Creek shopping center. It was always one of her favorite places while attending college, and she preferred a boutique shop.
Coming up with a name for the shop was initially difficult. She opened the shop a day before the Cherry Creek shopping center opened its doors, and she didn't want the name to resemble any new mall shops.
The name "PISMO" came up during a conversation with her husband as they strolled down the beach by that name in California, one of their favorites.
"It's short and catchy," said Sardella. It also works well as a conversation starter with curious customers. She didn't waste any time when she decided to commit to the business. She researched it in May of 1990, rented a location in June and opened in July.
In the three years since Sardella opened the shop, she has changed the product inventory dramatically. Instead of featuring primarily shells and coral, she now has 90 percent glass art. But she insists on keeping a few of the more natural items on hand to provide customers with an interesting product and price mix.
She likes the fact that her customers range from young boys who collect shells to serious glass art collectors -- she doesn't want to run a "stuffy" gallery.
A good portion of PISMO's profits have been reinvested in the store, primarily in improving the quality and caliber of glass art in the shop.
Sardella has honed her list of artists in the gallery to include people like John Nickerson, a former University of Colorado professor whose glass art is featured in the Smithsonian Institution. Artist Josh Simpson's "inhabited planets" glass pieces have been featured in Smithsonian magazine.
A few weeks ago, Sardella's gallery featured a showing of Italian artist Dino Rosin's work, a showing that drew students from Nebraska and glass art lovers from across Colorado. She now has about 10 showings per year.
Prices for glass art pieces in the shop range from about $50 to $20,000. Many of the more expensive glass pieces are purchased by clients of interior decorators. Sardella works with the decorators to find just the right glass for a particular mantel, table or corner of a room.
She said in most cases people decide on glass art much the way they select other types of art.
"Normally you fall in love with a piece," she said. "You want it to be part of your collection."
Collectors are willing to invest in the pieces that capture their attention. That makes keeping the bottom line a little easier for Sardella. But she still has to be careful to know when not to buy a piece, even if the brilliant glass refraction has captured her eye -- and heart.
Having a solid financial background helps her keep her penchant for buying in check. That is one of Sardella's strongest retail traits, said Tracey Welch, executive director of the Cherry Creek North Business Improvement District.
"She brings a numbers approach that not all retailers do," said Welch, who has known Sandy since she opened her shop.
Sardella doesn't always stick to the numbers approach, however. When customers occasionally ask her for the price of a little glass piece that she happened to make from hot molten glass, she answers -- unequivocally -- "priceless."
Then she goes about her business of tending her elegant shop. And some days, if you look closely enough, you may spot Ed Sardella sweeping the sidewalk or carrying out a crate. He wouldn't have it any other way."
Perrault, Michael. "Taking a shine to glass. (art glass gallery) (Women in Business)." Denver Business Journal. November 5, 1993. Retrieved November 06, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-14585508/taking-shine-glass-art.html
1993 Betty Klausner:
" Scanga aptly introduced his latest body of work, which makes strategic use of floral arrangements, in Santa Barbara, a year-round garden paradise. Each sculpture is made of found objects, mainly antiquated tools and architectural scraps, welded together to form tall vertical shapes. Each work features a conical
glass vessel containing different kinds of fresh flowers, some in bunches, some alone. The vases, varying in height from 19 to 26 inches, sit in iron ring-shaped holders attached to the metal upright part of the sculpture. Many of the tools are painted in Scanga's signature expressionistic style. It was a buoyant experience to see these 12 witty, totemic sculptures - a vision of unexpected pleasure.
For the past 20 years, Italian-born Scanga (now based in San Diego) has occasionally incorporated glass forms into his mixed-medium work. But these are the first pieces in which he has used such gorgeously colored, hand-blown glass in such a utilitarian mode. His contemporary-styled vases - most in intense, scumbled reds, greens and blues, with contrasting lips - were made by a Murano craftsman at the Pilchuck Glass Center in Seattle, under Scanga's supervision. An important part of the concept behind the new series is the participatory nature of the pieces, which goes beyond their collaborative fabrication. The gallery (or owner of the work), not the artist, gets to do the floral arrangement - choosing the roses, delphiniums, gladioli or birds of paradise to finish off what Scanga started.
Inspired by museums and flea markets, Scanga unabashedly dips into both art history - a full range of 20th-century "-isms" - and leftover stuff from everyday life to make his work. He ferrets out such discarded objects as a scythe, a doorknob, a chain, a scale, a frying pan, a ladle and a wrought-iron cowboy riding a bucking bronco to construct his floor-standing and table-sized assemblages. Like the objects in George Herms's or Betye Saar's work, Scanga's recycled artifacts evoke memories and questions about the past. Recontextualized in works of art, our culture's junk provokes us to reassess our disposable environment.
The essence of Scanga's strategy is clearest in one of the more successful works, a 70-by-16-by-14-inch sculpture titled Ice Tong and a Wrench. Here the contrasts and counterbalances are at their most effective. The organic flower atop the man-made tools invites an allegorical reading - life and death, perhaps. The ice saw's sharp-toothed edge, aggressive and dangerous, is pointedly incongruous with the delicate calla lily. And, adding to the internal contradictions of this sculpture, the transparent glass vessel, fragile and reflective, is placed in implicit opposition to the rugged steel blade.
This show marked a major shift for Scanga, not only in his choice of materials (primarily metal instead of his customary wood), but also in his willingness to allow his work to be "completed" by the variable addition of short-lived flowers. Here he seems to have won his gamble, demonstrating that art can be accessible, potentially useful, participatory and beautiful - attributes not often valued in the postmodernist mainstream."
Klausner, Betty. "Italo Scanga at Ro Snell. (Santa Barbara, California)." Art in America. March 1, 1993. Retrieved November 05, 2009 from accessmylibrary: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-13578441/italo-scanga-ro-snell.html
1993 Dan Dailey:
“Le Vin: Cristallerie Daum (The Wine)”. 1993. Edition of 125. At auction at Habatat Galleries on April 23, 2009, estimated value $25,000 to $35,000. Accessed April 21, 2009. http://www.habatatglass.com/upimages/2009auction/2009_auction_preview.htm
1993 Wheaton Arts:
"Maximizing the Minimum: Small Glass Sculpture, 1993 exhibition catalog text
More than thirty years have passed since a workshop held at the Toledo Museum of Art gave birth to the American Studio Glass Movement. In the summer of 1962, ceramist Harvey Littleton, grass scientist Dominick Labino and a group of young artists built a small glass furnace and blew glass outside of the traditional glass factory setting.
Their goal was to prove that glass, like clay, stone or metal, could become a contemporary artistic medium. Up until this time, glass was primarily utilized in factory settings to create purely functional objects.
The size and cost of building and fueling a glass furnace had previously been based on the industrial glassmaking scale, making the cost prohibitive for the individual artist. For their experiment, Littleton and Labino reduced the size of glassmaking equipment and created new glass formulas which made glassblowing possible in an independent artist's studio.
With the assistance of Harvey Leafgreen, a retired glassblower, who demonstrated the art of glassblowing before the eager but inexperienced students, the first workshop paved the way for a second one. After Littleton and Labino met with further success, glassblowing programs sprang up at universities throughout the country during the 1960s and 1970s.
Intrigued by its potential, students and artists began experimenting with this ancient medium. Within ten years, glass became an accepted material for artistic expression.
These artists soon discovered that working with molten glass required extraordinary discipline and dexterity. Utilizing tools such as the blowpipe and the pontil which had changed little since Roman times, they produced simple forms and bubbles. These designs were predominantly influenced by ceramic designs because many of the budding artists, like Littleton, had received artistic training in that field.
After mastering the rudiments of this demanding craft, the artists began to challenge glass into new directions, leaving the utilitarian vessel behind and moving on to sculptural forms. Limited only by their imagination, they produced work ranging in style from the realistic to the abstract.
The appeal of the emerging studio glass movement spread rapidly. Museums and gallery exhibitions heightened public awareness of this new art form in both the United States and Europe.
In the meantime, each generation learned from its predecessors and continued to make new strides in the field. The diversity of the movement can be seen in the vast array of work created by the artists.
As glass technology advanced in the years that followed, unleashing new creative possibilities, so did individuality. Machines no longer dictated the form and function of glass but took on a whole new role as artists adapted technology to the area of contemporary art.
The artists who worked with glass began pushing the boundaries of size until sculptures became larger and larger. The tendency toward grand scale, while often dramatic, can be imposing for collectors and museums with limited space.
This exhibition was organized to illustrate that size constraints do not interfere with the scope of an artist's vision. The glass artists invited to participate in this exhibition have displayed a wide range of talent despite the fact that they were required to submit a piece limited in size to 8 inches by 8 inches by 8 inches. Several of the artists, such as Tom Patti, Paul Stankard and Emily Brock regularly create works within these parameters. Doug Anderson, although his sculpture is not illustrated in this exhibition catalog, is another artist who has produced work of this size. Others, like Jon Kuhn, Jay Musler and Amy Roberts-Chamberlain, were challenged to confine themselves to this restrictive scale. The collective work in this exhibition is infused with an innovative spirit that intrigues both the observer's eye and imagination.
Liberated by readily available technology and training, which had been unknown to earlier generations, today’s glass artists can concentrate on translating their ideas into reality. As a result, contemporary glass art, like most forms of art, will continue to evolve in new directions in the years to come.
For some artists, work created on a small scale will remain as challenging to create as massive sculpture. Just as glass has transcended its functional limitations in the past thirty years, so too, these artists will continue to prove that size has no effect on the quality of a successful work of art."
Unknown. "Maximizing the Minimum" catalogue text. Wheaton Arts, NJ. website accessed June 8, 2009. http://www.wheatonarts.org/museumamericanglass/exhibitions/pastexhibitions/1993maximizingtheminimum/
