Letter from the Board Chair

by Katya Heller

Welcome to our Winter 2023 issue of Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly!

This October marked the tenth anniversary of a transformative renovation that expanded and revitalized our space, and provided us with a street-level presence and state-of-the-art studios. It equipped us to continue our mission of fostering and promoting the use of glass as a creative medium and making it accessible to our community and beyond.

We celebrated this significant milestone in the presence of the UrbanGlass and New York City art community at our October 11 Gala, where we honored Sciame Construction, which was instrumental in helping us complete our renovation back in 2013, and KEEP, founded by Sue Špiranović and Adam Holtzinger, designers and master glassblowers who have called UrbanGlass their creative home since even before our decade-old renovation. 

Thank you to everyone who came out to help us raise funds to support UrbanGlass and raised their glasses to cheer us on!I am excited to introduce this Winter 2023 issue of UrbanGlass’s Glass Art Quarterly, which includes as a bonus The Corning Museum’s New Glass Review, which was curated and edited by our contributing editor Samantha De Tillio, who also authored the final installment of her three-part series on performance art with glass for this issue. Samantha De Tillio was just announced as a winner of the Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing by the American Craft Council, who characterized the series as “an important contribution to glass history” — congratulations!

Joining the lineup is an oral history of Indigenous artists working with glass, from the late Tony Jojola to a new generation of artists such as Raven Skyriver and Dan Friday, with commentary by Preston Singletary, perhaps the most high-profile Native artist. The cover article is an in-depth consideration of the Mirage glass installation by Scottish contemporary artist Katie Paterson, which includes a snaking line of nearly 500 columns of cast glass containing sands from deserts around the world, sited at Apple Park adjacent to Apple HQ in Cupertino.

Among the stellar features in this issue is the fully updated 2024 Directory of Glass Education Programs and Suppliers, a definitive source for like-minded individuals, organizations,and resources in the glass art community worldwide. Whether or not you made it to New York City Jewelry Week in November, "UrbanSparkle," an UrbanGlass jewelry exhibition runs through January 5 in our Agnes Varis Art Center store and features wearable art by Joanna Manousis, Karen Kriegel, Kathryn Kirk Murphy,and Bead Project alum Maria Aroche.If you can’t stop by in person,check out “Our Gift Picks” tab on the website at www.urbanglass.org/store.

On view in our Robert Lehman Gallery is the exhibition “Form and Formless: Constellations of Knowledge,” which showcases some of the contemporary artists working with glass as they explore the intersection of art and identity, featuring, among others, Deborah Czeresko, Shahzia Sikander, Julia Kwon, and Chitra Ganesh. The exhibition remains open to the public through January 4,and I encourage you to visit and experience the thought-provoking works.

As we close out this year and look back at all we have accomplished since the renovation ten years ago, UrbanGlass rings in 2024 deeply committed to expanding access to making with glass while serving our existing community, and grateful for your continued support. To all those who have given so generously, or will do so at year’s end, thank you!

Sincerely,

Katya Heller

UrbanGlass Board Chair

Editor's Letter

by By Andrew Page

From the staircases and transparent exteriors of its stores,to the sleek screens of its tablets and phones, Apple’s architectural and product designers have exalted glass as the ultimate fusion of form and function ever since the iPhone debuted in 2007. So it was no surprise that glass would take center stage when the world’s largest corporation commissioned a public-art project to elevate the land adjacent to its massive glass-circle headquarters, designed by Norman Foster.

In this issue’s cover feature, contributing editor Emma Park explores the snaking row of hundreds of standing glass columns that undulates through the olive groves, each totem encasing sand from deserts around the world, calling attention to the diverse geographies and distribution of minerals on our planet. Speaking with internationally known Scottish artist Katie Paterson, who developed the project with her architect collaborators Zeller & Moye, Park discovered how the project was designed to transport viewers far beyond Cupertino, California, where it is installed. As Paterson puts it: “It really takes you on a journey, all through time and all through space.”

Speaking of a wide sweep, contributing editor Samantha De Tillio completes her three-part series with this issue’s final installment of her examination of the history and future of glass as a medium of performance art. Looking at current trends that show the way forward, De Tillio documents the new, more diverse range of voices who are bringing the field full circle, sharing themes and subject matter with the earliest practitioners five decades ago.

The embrace of glass as a medium of Indigenous art is rapidly expanding, and its origins can be traced to the influence and mentorship of Tony Jojola, whose untimely death in 2022 sparked an outpouring of sadness and appreciation across the glass community. In this issue, contributing editor John Drury explores Jojola’s importance as a trailblazer and a connector through extensive interviews with Native artists he inspired, including Preston Singletary, one of the most prominent among them.

And last but not least, we present our expanded and fully updated "2024 Guide to Glass Education and Suppliers to the Field", extensively fact-checked and expanded. If you’re considering a degree in glass, or need to track down equipment or materials, keep this issue handy as the most complete document of the increasingly global field of glass art.

Hourglass

John Miller goes big for his solo show at the Lowe in Coral Gables, Florida; after five years, Pilchuck’s executive director Christopher Taylor makes abrupt exit; in memoriam: outsider artist Robert Blackstone (1971-2023), whose Crystal City installation is a visionary portrait of Dayton, Ohio, falls victim to the city’s gun violence.

Reviews

Group exhibition, New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts;Baptiste Debombourg in Quebec City, Quebec; group exhibition at VetriGlass, Seattle; Karen Donnellan at the Royal Hibernian Academy,Dublin, Ireland; Venice GlassWeek 2023 in Murano, Venice, and Mestre

UrbanGlass News

An Unforgettable Evening at the UrbanGlass Gala 2023!

UrbanGlass Catalogue

“Form and Formless: Constellations of Knowledge” at the Robert LehmanGallery at the Agnes Varis Art Center.

Reflection

by Andrew Page

Mother’s Play: Two Brooklynites, who met when their daughters became“besties,” embrace sustainability and spontaneity in their collaborative practice,creating ethereal found-glassassemblages out of trash.

Mirage at Apple Park

by Emma Park

How artist Katie Paterson and architects Zeller & Moye were commissioned by one of the world’s largest corporations to produce a site-specific sculpturalinstallation that embeds desert sands from around the world into 448 glass columns.

Post-Disciplinary Practices

by Samantha De Tillio

Contemporary glass performance has echoes of the pioneering artists’early embrace of body art and mixedmedia, but features anincreasingly diverse range of voices and strong self-awareness in tunewith our intensely voyeuristic cultural moment.(Last of a three-part series.)

Native Glass Now

by John Drury

Conversations about the late Tony Jojola’s influence on Indigenous artists working with glass,and where things stand as a new generation comes into the spotlight.

The Ultimate Guide to Educational Programs and Suppliers to the Field

by Kinshasa Peterson (with research assistance by Jana Elsayed and Jahlil Rush)

Fully updated and expanded, the 2024 Glass Quarterly Resource Guide isthe most comprehensive directory of educational programs and suppliersto the field.