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pillars of glass
May
2008 by richard speer
This
is not your grandfather’s glass art. If you’re among those who
hear the phrase “glass art” and immediately conjure a
gondola-and-goblet fantasia set somewhere between Murano and
Disneyland, then you haven’t seen what’s going on in the
contemporary glass scene, particularly in the Pacific
Northwest. From Seattle down to Portland and further south
into Northern California, the west coast of the United States
has joined Australia, the Czech Republic, and yes, Italy, as a
guiding light for a new breed of glass artist, largely
interested in wresting glass away from its decorative past and
propelling it into the future as a medium for conceptual art,
fully on par with painting, sculpture, digital video, and
installation work. This summer, like a trio of exclamation
points, three major exhibitions will skip down the coast,
spotlighting the pioneers who made this new approach possible:
master glassblower Lino Tagliopietra at the Museum of Glass in
Tacoma (closing Aug. 24); venerable artist and educator Klaus
Moje at the Portland Art Museum (May 31-Sept. 7); and
innovator and all-around-phenom Dale Chihuly at the de Young
Museum in San Francisco (June 14-Sept. 28).
This trio
of exhibitions is a flowering whose seeds were planted in the
1960s and 70s at the advent of the American studio glass
movement. In 1962, artist Harvey Littleton delivered a seminal
lecture at the Toledo Museum of Art, espousing the
then-radical idea that independent artists could work with
glass in the intimacy of their own studios rather than relying
on the elaborate support systems found in large glass
factories. The idea caught fire, and the following year,
Littleton established the first-ever glass program in an
American university, the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Among the hundreds of young artists the program nurtured were
two figures who would play important roles in the development
of a glass culture in the Northwest: Chihuly, who settled in
Seattle-Tacoma and has been there ever since, and Dan
Schwoerer, who wound up in Portland and co-founded Bullseye
Glass Company, a major force in elevating glass’ reputation as
a legitimate medium in contemporary art.
Pilchuck
and the power of shared knowledge For his part,
Chihuly, along with art mavens John and Anne Hauberg, founded
the Pilchuck Glass School in 1971, and saw the Stanwood,
Washington facility become a magnet for up-and-coming artists
the world over. During the course of residencies and classes
offered each summer, emerging talents rub elbows with
established stars, sharing not only technical knowhow, but
also a passion for communicating ideas through a medium
traditionally known more for sheer, lumious beauty than for
expressive capabilities. Through the intensive, elbow-to-elbow
environment of these workshops and others around the world
that use Pilchuck as a model, today’s glass world has come to
possess a sense of community hard to imagine in more
competitive media such as painting.
“There’s a built-in
sense of community and collaboration and assisting,” says
Washington-based artist Mark Zirpel, known for fantastical,
quasi-scientific sculpture and installations. “I think it’s
just an inherent part of the glass community that they’re
eager to share, they’re very open, and they’re not averse to
work that’s untraditional or idiosyncratic.”
Another
Washington artist, Richard Marquis, is one of a handful of
studio-glass pioneers who did much to engender that spirit of
shared knowledge. Marquis, who now lives and works on Whidbey
Island in Puget Sound, went to Italy on a Fulbright Grant in
1969, while he was an art student at U.C. Berkeley. There, on
the isle of Murano, he studied under master blowers who
grudgingly imparted their centuries-old techniques to the
fresh-faced 24-year-old. In the years that followed, Marquis
opted to share these techniques rather than hoard them in the
insular, vaguely sinister Venetian tradition. Embarking on a
series of lectures and workshops in the 1970s and 80s, he
helped incite nascent glass movements around the world,
particularly in Australia. Around the same time, at the
California College of the Arts in Oakland, another Harvey
Littleton disciple, Marvin Lipofsky, brought in European
master teachers to teach the values of perfectionism and craft
to American students predisposed to a more freewheeling, DIY
approach. In the years that followed, at workshops and lecture
courses at CCA, Pilchuck, and Bullseye, towering figures in
glass—Lino Tagliapietra from Italy, Stanislav Libensky from
the Czech Republic, Bertil Vallien from Sweden, and
German-born Klaus Moje from Australia—have fostered a respect
for a traditionally grounded, multidisciplinary approach to
the medium. Says Moje: “What I try to give students is a
balance in their approach: the balance between skill and
creativity. Skill is not a four-letter word, you know.
Students should go through a very hard drill in drawing,
modeling, and sculpting, to learn the language of art—before
they even touch a piece of glass.”
Tacoma draws its
pilgrims Many of Moje’s students have been featured in
exhibitions at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, with its 13,000
square feet of exhibition space and its distinctive
architectural signature, a whimsically tilted steel tower that
climbs 90 feet into the air. The Museum is also home to the
Chihuly Bridge of Glass, a colorful, art-lined overpass
spanning 500 feet, linking the Museum to downtown Tacoma. Both
the bridge and the museum itself opened to the public in July
2002 and have become regional landmarks, attracting
rank-and-file tourists as well as connoisseurs on glass-art
pilgrimages.
Another Tacoma stop for these pilgrims is
both a place of lodging and an attraction in its own right.
The freshly operational Hotel Murano, owned by Portland-based
Provenance Hotels, opened its tony doors with a gala
celebration on March 8. Showcasing 46 contemporary glass
artists—among them Karen LaMonte, Cobi Cockburn, and Steve
Klein, along with the ubiquitous Chihuly—the Murano’s
permanent collection was handpicked by curator Tessa Papas,
whose aim was to create “a cohesive, balanced, truly
international collection, with all threads leading back,
directly or indirectly, to the island of Murano.” Papas says
she was “particularly excited by the work of younger artists
who aren’t awed by the ‘beauty’ aspect of glass, but instead
use it as just another medium to express their
ideas.”
Portland in the center Geographically
and in many ways temperamentally in the center of the 800-mile
San Francisco-to-Seattle corridor, Portland, Oregon is no
longer viewed as “Seattle’s little sister” in the glass
community. While Seattle’s fame initially sprang from the
collaborative, wildly demonstrative, swaggeringly macho world
of glassblowing, Portland has earned its reputation largely
through the more meditative, if no less expressive, practice
of kilnforming, in which glass shapes are fused, cast,
slumped, and manipulated in other ways, often over repeated
firings. Portland’s prominence in evolving the kiln-form
medium has earned it a place in the worldwide spotlight this
year, as the host city of the annual conference of the Glass
Art Society, which will take place June 19-21 (see supplement
essay, “Into the Heart of Glass”).
The innovations in
kiln-working that have drawn so many young artists to glass,
germinated in the shared studio of three erstwhile hippie
glassblowers—Ray Ahlgren, Boyce Lundstrom, and Dan
Schwoerer—who in 1974 started a glass company on little more
than a bellbottom and a prayer. Under their guidance, Bullseye
Glass Company began finding solutions to the technical
questions that were prohibiting artists from expressing
themselves in glass. One of the biggest questions of all was
how to make glass components—frits, stringers, confetti, and
other, more exotic configurations—compatible with one another
so they could stand up to repeated firings and not crack while
cooling. Schwoerer, who today co-owns the company with his
wife, Lani McGregor, eventually established a research
department and charged his white-coated, bespectacled staff
with solving these and a myriad of other problems, many of
them brought forth by artists who flocked to Portland to
experience Bullseye’s outside-the-box working methods
firsthand. When famed ceramicist Jun Kaneko came to Portland
to undertake his first show in glass, he did not know he was
asking Bullseye’s researchers to do things that had never been
done: to create 7-foot-high planks of solid glass, shot
through with multi-colored dots and dashes; and to turn 20,000
pounds of raw glass into a spiraling, 42-foot-long wall of
shimmering glass threads. As research and education director
Ted Sawyer observes: “Jun Kaneko was one of quite a few
artists we’ve worked with who have backgrounds in media
outside of glass, and who therefore don’t know the rules or
even the possibilities. They just know they want to do
something, and it’s our challenge to help them make it
happen.”
In Kaneko’s case, after the technical problems
were addressed and surmounted at the Bullseye factory in
Southeast Portland, the finished pieces were exhibited at the
company’s eponymous gallery, of which McGregor is director.
Since 1995, Bullseye Gallery, now located in a
15,000-square-foot space in Portland’s loft-and-latte Pearl
District, has been a must-see on the city’s monthly “First
Thursday” gallery walk. About a dozen blocks away from the
gallery, abstract sculptor Henry Hillman, Jr., has a cavernous
glass factory and studio of his own, where he starts at the
beginning—sand—creating glass out of silica and, after a long
gestational process, casting it into the spiraling geometric
towers that have become his calling card. Obsessive and
prolific, Hillman exhibits his work widely and is represented
in Portland by the Elizabeth Leach
Gallery.
Wherefore Northwest glass?
Northwest glass artists, whether working on a
monumental scale like Henry Hillman or in intimate, highly
personal curios such as those created by Portlander Mel
George, have gravitated to the region as sculptors once
flocked to Florence, portraitists to the court of Charles I,
Abstract Expressionists to New York City. What’s the appeal?
Richard Whiteley, head of the glass workshop at Australian
National University in Canberra, sees Australia and the
Northwest United States as complementary nexuses of a movement
spanning the Pacific. “This place, the Northwest, has become a
powerhouse for sharing knowledge and bringing people into the
medium. Organizations like Pilchuck and the Bullseye Company
have developed cultures which are very sophisticated and are
pushing the material into innovative applications. What that
means is that as people come to the material, there’s a lot
more knowledge around; you’re not just throwing things into
the kiln and seeing how it turns out.”
With glass’
ascension into a heightened aesthetic respect comes the
challenge to consider the medium in ways that transcend
traditional expectations among curators, critics, collectors,
the gallery community, and above all, artists themselves.
While some have distanced themselves from glass’ naturally
seductive properties (Richard Marquis often talks about
“kicking it down a notch,” making sure his surfaces don’t turn
out too shiny), others embrace glass’ long association with
the B-word, beauty, in all glass’ reflective, refractive,
shimmery effulgence. “Awhile ago,” recalls Klaus Moje, “I was
talking with someone who was saying, ‘Glass is so garish,
glass presents itself like a whore!’ Well, I must say, I love
this whore. I have always loved it, and to this day, if I can
do something in a given piece to get just one more streak of
reflection into the material, I do
it.”
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Klaus
Moje (May 31-Sept. 7). Portland Art Museum 1219 SW
Park Ave. Portland, OR (503)
226-2811 www.portlandartmuseum.org
Chihuly at the de
Young (June 14-Sept. 28). de Young Museum Golden
Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive San Francisco, CA
www.famsf.org/deyoung/index.asp
Lino
Tagliapietra: In Retrospect, a Modern Renaissance in
Italian Glass (Feb. 23-Aug. 24) Museum of Glass
1801 Dock Street Tacoma, WA (253) 396-1768,
www.museumofglass.org
May
2008 by richard speer
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