Talking Out Your Glass podcast

You might imagine that if you were born and raised on the island of Murano in Italy, with forefathers and relatives immersed in glass for generations, that one would have a mighty head start in becoming a famous glass artist. But in many ways, these connections make the goal of establishing an original voice as a glassblower a hefty challenge indeed. The artist in question would have big shoes to fill. Davide Salvadore strives for perfection in his work, surpassing the simple notion of glassblowing as a job and entering into the realm of passion, artistry and service to the material. His incarnations reveal his unique perspective on the world, alive with memories of the past, reactions to the present and hope for the future. This original voice attracted the attention of Bill Traver, Traver Gallery, Seattle, who was instrumental in supporting and exhibiting the Italian artist's work. "I have a great deal of respect for the artists of Murano, and for Davide Salvadore's heritage as part of a distinguished lineage of Venetian glassworkers," said Traver. "Davide is a truly amazing individual; he was raised amidst centuries-old traditions, yet is extremely forward thinking in his own work and his ideas about how glass can be used as a sculptural medium. His adaptation of techniques, as well as equipment, to create one-of-a-kind sculptural work unlike anything else made on the island is inspiring. His efforts, throughout the years, to cultivate and promote the appreciation of glass art on Murano and to share his passion for glass with future generations through his teaching are equally inspirational. In my opinion, it is exactly this kind of inventiveness, openness and enthusiasm that will help Murano maintain its position as the heart of the international glass community." Dating back to the 1700s, Salvadore is the 11th generation on his mother's side, credited with creating glass pieces. The first of this lineage were the Rosetto brothers whose works dated to 1721 for a Piedmontese princess. At a young age, Salvadore began following his grandfather, Antonio Mantoan, into the furnaces of Murano, first learning how to build the kilns and later working in the studios of Alfredo Barbini, who is often recognized as the ultimate glassmaker of Murano. Later, he worked as a glassblower in multiple well-known glass studios, learning from each and improving his abilities. In 1978 he began producing lampworked beads in his mother Anna Mantoan's jewelry studio, which she sold to Yves St. Laurent and other couture houses as well as to African merchants. With his mother's encouragement, Salvadore developed his own personal style of making lampworked beads, and these beads are still featured as part of his sculptural pieces today; a tribute to his mother's talent and support. In 1987, he opened his own studio, Campagnol & Salvadore, where he continued doing lampwork and further developed his glassblowing expertise and talent. In 1998, Salvadore made a conscious decision to turn away from traditional functional glass work. At approximately the same time, he began demonstrating his unique murrine technique at Corning Museum of Glass, Pilchuck Glass School, Pratt Fine Art Center, and others in the United States. It was then that he was introduced to the American Studio Glass movement, which Salvadore embraced. As a result of his ingenuity and the inventiveness of his creations, the artist's glass design became instantly noteworthy. In 2012, Salvadore founded his own studio, Salvadore SRL, where he continues to work today with his two sons, Marco and Mattia in Murano. Davide is a founding member of Centro Studio Vetro, a Muranese nonprofit association that aims to promote the culture and art of glass. After demoing at GAS Corning last week, Salvadore taught Mastering Muranese Magic at the Corning Museum of Glass, from June 8 – 14. Currently, Salvadore creates passionately expressive one-of-a-kind sculptures that push the boundaries of centuries-old traditions. He combines traditional Italian techniques and elements in innovative ways in his work, which reflects diverse influences such as African tribal imagery, Muranese roads, and the smokestacks of glasshouses.

In a heartbreakingly dark and beautiful panel depicting the Statue of Liberty afloat in a pond amongst lily pads, water grasses and small frogs, Jesse Olwen reveals his inner sadness about the state of affairs in the US and wider world today. Though the most recent, this is not the only one of his works to reference Memento Mori– a Latin phrase meaning, remember that you have to die. Olwen is a stained glass artist based in Montreal, working at the intersection of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary visual culture. His work reinterprets historic techniques through modern subject matter, exploring themes of memory, symbolism, and transformation. Through glass, he aims to create pieces that feel both timeless and culturally immediate. States Olwen: "I don't know yet how my work can impact viewers on a large scale, but I do know that working with stained glass offers a unique way to express my message while also pushing the boundaries of the medium, which may be enough to hook some people. I want to show what stained glass can do and break it out of stereotypes that limit it. I want to show people that stained glass can exist in equal respect to other conventional artworks in a gallery or museum setting." Bouncing from one high school to the next, at 16 Olwen was strongly considering dropping out. A local stained glass artist offered him a bit of foiling work to help her prepare for the holiday craft season. This mentor ended up encouraging him to finish high school, college and apply for an international exchange so he could see the world. After traveling and a long hiatus from artmaking, Olwen returned to Montreal to pursue glass in his own direction, a solitary path he is still navigating. Beyond basic copperfoil techniques, he had no experience with glass painting and was feeling frustrated with the design limitations of the lead line. Someone gifted his mentor with a glass kiln that she passed along to Olwen, and eventually he found the courage to do his first tests and taught himself to paint on glass. Now in an improved studio space, Olwen is perfecting his painting skills surrounded by tables and benches he built to his specific needs. He says: "Working with stained glass allows me to make art that is both physical and ephemeral: solid in its construction, yet constantly shifting with the light that passes through it. I am drawn to the paradox of permanence and fragility in this material. It can last centuries, yet remains vulnerable to the slightest fracture. That duality often mirrors the subjects I explore – the delicate equilibrium between beauty and decline, abundance and desolation." In recent years, Olwen's focus has turned toward two main directions – landscapes that hover between the real and the imagined, and Memento Mori-style pieces that explore mortality. He approaches the landscapes not as faithful depictions of place, but as emotional and environmental reflections of a planet in flux. Each work is painted and assembled by hand, the glass is layered with paint and fired many times to achieve the highest quality glasswork. "This work is a labor of love, and I believe working with glass is my life's purpose. Glass artists in 2025 have a responsibility to keep interest in this artform alive, and that can be done by testing the limits, breaking the rules and drawing attention any way they can. Personally, I aim for a balance of paying respect to the traditional compositions, subjects and techniques while portraying contemporary messaging. In this way I feel like I'm wrapping new flesh on the bones of an ancient craft."

Investigating interpersonal themes and the notion of community, Jen Elek is a studio artist and educator based in Seattle, Washington. She creates objects and installations of colorful glass and neon light employed as a form of non-verbal communication. Her most recent glass series titled Doliums is inspired by large Roman clay storage containers. Elek received her BFA from Alfred University in Metal and Hot Glass sculpture in 1994, after training as a welder in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was a student of Michael Scheiner, Dante Marioni, and Ann Wahlstrom at Pilchuck Glass School, and studied with Maestro Lino Tagliapietra at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. In addition to creating her own work, Elek has assisted glass artists such as Dale Chihuly, Kiki Smith, Preston Singletary, and Tagliapietra, on whose team she worked as a key member for 15 years. A vibrant contemporary glass artist, she exhibits alongside artists of other mediums, breaking some of the barriers that have kept glass in the realm of craft and offering it as a worthy medium of contemporary art. A member of the Northwest artist community, Elek's involvement in art organizations includes: Pilchuck Glass School, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Hilltop Artists, and as a guest lecturer at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Tacoma Art Museum, Pittsburgh Glass Center, and Traver Gallery in Seattle. Elek maintains a studio in south Seattle with husband Jeremy Bert, a Pacific Northwest neon artist with whom she collaborated on their project Illuminated Forest as well as a permanent public installation titled The Illuminated Palouse for the Port of Seattle, located near the D gates at SeaTac International Airport. Utilizing blown furnace glass, Elek creates sculptural objects that display the material's ability to reflect, magnify and represent bold color. Traditional and innovative processes combine in her work to create colorful landscapes of glass. In the spring of 2017, she was awarded the Pilchuck Artist at Work Residency where she developed a new body of work titled Visual Fun, which highlighted the infallibility and vibrant colors of glass. Elek has traveled to Canada, Japan, Australia, and throughout the United States teaching glassblowing workshops. In 2026 she will be an instructor at Tulsa Glassblowing School, Tulsa, Oklahoma, May 14 – 19, residency May 20 – 23; at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, New York, June 23 – 27; and at the Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, August 31 – September 5. She will be a gaffer at Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington, July 9 – 26.

Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend is an artist for whom ideas have always been more important than media, and possibly more integral to her work. It's interesting then that her art has been consistently viewed through the lens of glass. In the creation of her early X series to more recent Calendar Notations, she has pioneered techniques such as non-traditional, unfired painting on glass, mixing glass with other media, and presenting painted, decorated glass on the wall in reflected light. Throughout her career, the artist distilled her own life experiences in the creation of progressive and experimental work. While studying Fine Arts at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1973, Stinsmuehlen-Amend was serendipitously introduced to glass and went on to become partner with Rodney Smith and designer of Renaissance Glass, an architectural glass studio. Beyond teaching and employing 14 artists, she built a creative hub that included studio space, glass supplies, a hot glass studio, education and exhibitions. Understanding the cutting edge in the field, Stinsmuehlen-Amend invited luminaries in the Studio Glass movement such as Dale Chihuly, Paul Marioni, William Morris, and Narcissus Quagliata, among others, to lecture and teach in the early 1980s. The studio became the center for contemporary glass in Texas from 1973 to 1987. While balancing single motherhood, donating time to the arts, and running her business, she became the Glass Art Society's first woman president (1984 – '86). Concurrent with designing stained glass commissions, Stinsmuehlen-Amend was determined to make the craft form a means for personal expression. Through experimentation and rebellion and influenced by the local punk scene, her radical fashion designer best friend, Pattern & Decoration and Neo-Expressionism in art, as well as innovations in the world of craft, her work became unrestrained, kinetic, glittery, and jarring—defiantly not "tasteful" or functional. Combining mixed media with glass was a new idea at the time. For Stinsmuehlen-Amend, the shifting qualities of glass itself—its capacity to reveal, obscure, reflect, and distort—became integral to how meaning unfolds. Rooted in stained glass's narrative tradition, her story emerged through her everyday stream of consciousness rooted in the surreal logic of dreams. In 1987, Stinsmuehlen-Amend relocated to Los Angeles, where she became a full-time artist; solo exhibitions and dynamic public art commissions followed. She was the lead artist on the Hollywood Demonstration Project in Hollywood, completing a precast concrete crosswalk with inlaid glass and bronze and an adjunct wrought iron public space. In 1994, she completed leaded glass for the AT&T corporate headquarters and The Jewish Museum, both in in New York City. Throughout these decades, she maintained her commitment to teaching, returning to Pilchuck Glass School repeatedly (1980 to 2019) and serving as a visiting artist at RISD, RIT, Tyler School of Art, California College of the Arts, and numerous other institutions. Stinsmuehlen-Amend's work is included in major collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of the Arts, Oakland Museum of California, Corning Museum of Glass, Tacoma Museum of Glass, and Museum of Art and Design. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pilchuck Hauberg Fellowships, and the 2007 Brychtová Libenský Award. The artist served 14 years on Pilchuck's Board of Directors and is a Trustee Emeritus of The American Craft Council and an Honorary Life Member of the Glass Art Society. She was recently awarded by the American Craft Council with the biennial College of Fellows honor for contributions to the craft ecosystem. Opening on May 16, 2026, at the Corning Museum of Glass, Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio will feature Stinsmuehlen-Amend's work. This new exhibition celebrates the female artists who revolutionized American Studio glass. The artist states: "Many artists found my loose and inclusive approach to working with glass inspirational because I was continually violating preconceived notions about craft and glass specifically."

Rick Beck's modern cast and carved figurative glass sculptures are inspired by industrial and architectural works as well as the human form, with an emphasis on formal aspects. Interested in playing the volumes of mass against the rhythm of the lines, Beck enjoys the interplay of the visual versus the verbal, creating art that challenges the eye as well as the mind. Beck states: "My wife, Valerie, got me a book about the competitive relationship between Picasso and Matisse. Their artistic dialogue about the figure has fired my imagination, especially the way they shared and borrowed images and ideas from one another, as well as from history and literature. Between this book and visits to the Art Institute of Chicago, I've been inspired by the use of shape, form, and mass to create something more universal than the literal subject." A studio artist who was based in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, for 30 years before moving to Hawaii in 2020, Beck began working in glass at Hastings College in Nebraska, where he received his BA. The artist received his MFA from Southern Illinois University, where he studied with Bill Boysen. He was awarded residencies at the Appalachian Center for Crafts 1989 to 1991, and in 1994 received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council, followed by a National Endowment for the Arts regional Visual Arts Fellowship from the Southern Arts Federation in 1995. A student of the Studio Glass movement, Beck has assisted at Pilchuck Glass School, assisting artists Curtiss Brock and Jan Mares, as well as at the Penland School of Craft. Beck currently shares a studio with wife Valerie Thomas Beck in Hakalau, Hawaii. Valerie has been a designer and co-conspirator to Rick since 1984. Both artists have been artists-in-residence at Penland School of Crafts, North Carolina, (1991-94) and have also been instructors there. Their blown glass work consists mainly of vessels – canvasses for imagery based on dreams and experiences ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. These vessels document their lives while providing beauty and pleasure. Since moving to the Big Island, Beck's challenge in making glass work is two-fold. First, to create work without using fossil fuels or adding to the demand for capacity on the electrical grid. Their new studio is powered by a solar/photo voltaic and battery system. Second, to create work that excites and challenges his concepts of art inside these new energy parameters. For him, formal aspects are crucial. Beck stretches and manipulates common shapes and objects, reducing the objects to pattern and geometry. Currently, he is producing work focusing on the geometry of life, plant, and human forms. Beck's work will be on view in 2026 at Blue Print Gallery, Dallas, Texas, opening February 26; at Hidell Brooks Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina, in May; at Blue Spiral 1 group show, Asheville, North Carolina; and at Ken Saunders, Chicago, Illinois. His work is also represented by Raven Gallery, Aspen, Colorado.

No description provided.

Upon graduation from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture with a BFA in glass, Gemma Hollister was awarded the Windgate-Lamar fellowship from the Center for Craft, which allowed her and her partner to start a small studio in Philadelphia, Antolini Glass Co. While balancing her personal artistic practice and work as a production glassblower, the artist recently appeared on Netflix's Blown Away: Extreme Heat. The show inspired new work, which she made both in her own studio and during a residency at Monterey Glassworks. States Hollister: "Blown Away gave me a chance to challenge myself and level up my skills in glassmaking. It isn't very often that you are given such specific parameters and a time crunch to make your work. I gained so much confidence in myself as a gaffer and an artist. Looking back, it was also very special to me to be able to represent a younger generation of glassblowers, especially female glassblowers, on such a big stage." A 2023 Saxe Emerging Artist nominee, Hollister developed a practice that involves creating fantastical objects, sculptures, and installations that center around themes of imagination and control, manifesting as both literal and abstract sculpture. For her, working with glass is an exercise in the belief that her own actions directly affect change. She works to further understand the material so that she can control its outcomes by working with direction and intention. She says: "The act of creating glass, as in many crafts, is a protest against an unresolved and rapidly evolving technological world. Glass historically has proven the power to educate, inspire, and call to action those who observe it. In my practice, I manipulate traditional associations with both blown and stained glass — its narrative structure and divine light — by addressing contemporary issues that I want viewers to reflect upon." Hollister has traveled the country as a student and teaching assistant at institutions such as the Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG) and Pilchuck Glass School. She received a partial workshop scholarship from CMoG in 2024 and a Pilchuck Glass School Summer Staff Scholarship in 2023. She has been a teaching assistant to both hot glass and stained glass greats such as Martin Janecký, Jason McDonald, Bill Gudenrath, Aya Oki and Judith Schaechter. Hollister participated in Blown Away Season 4 Group Exhibition at CMoG in 2024, an exhibition with Karen Willenbrink Johnsen and Morgan Peterson at Traver Gallery, and a solo exhibition titled Heaven Is Full Of Junk in 2022. She will teach in 2026 at CMoG August 9 through 22 with her partner Tate Newfield.

Michael (Mick) Meilahn's body of work, which includes glass sculpture and large glass and multi-media installations, intertwines the artist's investigation into agriculture, crop production, genetic food modification, and the ancient history of corn. Primordial Shift, a quintessential example of Meilahn's later installations, consisted of 32 hand-blown glass ears of corn averaging 4-feet high, suspended on stalks of cord with leaves of cast bronze on a backdrop of video projected to create an illusion of gentle swaying in the breeze and surround-sound audio that included the chirping of birds and rustling of leaves. Since 2022, Meilahn's Primordial Shift exhibition has been touring the U.S. with stops at Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass (Neenah, Wis.), The John P. McGovern Museum of Health & Medical Science (Houston, Texas), South Dakota Art Museum at South Dakota State University (Brookings, S.D.) and the Rochester Art Center (Rochester, Minn.) from June 1 through September 30, 2025. Primordial Shift is a work of art. But underlying Meilahn's aesthetic is an agnostic, if not ambivalent, philosophy concerning agronomy or the crop science and the application of that science by horticulturists to plant production for the enhancement and improvement of nature for human and animal life. In that sense, Primordial Shift, along with most of the artist's other installations, are not agents for or of change, but artworks that illuminate the pros and cons of genetic modification. States Meilahn: "With today's sophisticated technology and global positioning, a 24-row corn planter can plant 1,000 acres a day with laser accuracy, 35,000 plants per acre with placement exactly 6" apart, and 1 3⁄4" deep. The instant the seed hits the ground, germination begins. That germination is as primal as it gets. It's everywhere! Just look. The shift part is engineered; with results that are all so convenient. Is this shift good? You decide." Meilahn (b. 1945) grew up on a family farm near Pickett, in Central Wisconsin. After graduating in 1964 from high school in Ripon where he excelled in art, he entered the University of Wisconsin-River Falls to study agriculture. He subsequently switched his major to art, after he realized agri-business was not his passion. At UW River Falls he took his first course in glass, and in 1966 he started blowing glass. At this time, Harvey Littleton was running the studio glass program at UW Madison, made famous by a slew of glass graduates, the most famous being Dale Chihuly. As an undergraduate, Meilahn spent a quarter abroad working with glass legend Erwin Eisch in Frauenau, Germany, on the Bavaria/Czech border, an area with a rich tradition of glass making. After graduation in 1971, he spent a year in Bolivia as an idealistic Peace Corp volunteer intent on helping people in South America by sharing knowledge he'd learned from farming. Subsequently, he enrolled at Illinois State University, Normal, where Joel Philip Myers had begun a glass program and earned his Masters degree in art. Ultimately, Meilahn's roots drew him back to his family's farm in 1975 where he and his wife, Jane, raised their children, and where he alternately operated the family farm and the hot glass studio he built. In time, his passion for art and farming became one-in-the-same as a form of creative expression. Since 1996, when he turned 50 and began planting genetic seed, Meilahn's artwork has focused on genetic modification, which has symbiotically shaped his life and work, both as an artist and a farmer. His installations afford viewers the opportunity to view and contemplate the production of corn from the dual perspective of an artist who knows the subject from life. For the past 15 years or so, this convergence has been the basis for a number of important works. Meilahn served as the President of The Board of Directors of the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah, Wisconsin. He has taught at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and The Archie Bray Foundation in Montana. His work has been exhibited in the traveling museum exhibitions, Wisconsin's Glass Masters and Environmental Impact, produced by David J. Wagner, L.L.C., the annual Smithsonian Craft Show, and at The Corning Museum of Glass, which has also featured the artist's work in its New Glass Review for over four decades. Meilahn says: "An ear of corn is the point of convergence for my dual careers in farming and art. Corn is not a typical subject in art. But for me, the lines, rows, numbers, higher prices, lower prices, color spectrums, mapping, information technology, air masses, and species have all combined to have unwittingly become a catalyst for my art."

An abandoned, dilapidated swimming pool in the forest. A pile of trash smoldering in a secluded backyard. A dark and deserted highway flanked by an unexplained light. Michael Endo's kiln formed glass is about the potential of empty spaces and how people inhabit the subliminal area between the civilized world and wilderness. It begs the question: Is our world real or manufactured? Says Endo: "Locked in a loop of familiarity and strangeness, my gestural paintings, drawings, glasswork and sculptures exist in a moment of tension. By depicting the boundary between a wild space and the city, I present scenes where my interest in alternative communities, the relationship between space and psychology, occult knowledge, eschatology, ecology and the uncanny converge." To reveal and examine the experiences people tend to gloss over is Endo's primary aesthetic goal. He states: "Some people get turned off by what they perceive as a darkness to the work. But it doesn't bother me. They are entitled to their own opinion, and I don't consider it while I am making the work. I don't think the work is exclusively dark. People read that into it, but I am interested in exploring these marginal spaces and experiences and bringing them forward." Endo's work is currently on view in What Remains, the fourth exhibition at The Byre, a centuries-old stone barn turned into an exhibition space by Bullseye Projects in Caithness, the northern-most county in mainland Scotland. What Remains features site-specific installations and works by Celia Dowson, Katharine Dowson, Endo, and April Surgent that reflect on stories and experiences reconstructed from fleeting shadows in memory and the earthed-over remnants found in the landscape. The show will remain on view until March 2026. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1979, Endo received an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, in 2009 and a BA from Portland State University, Oregon, in 2005. His studio work has been included in national and international exhibitions at venues such as The National Glass Centre (Sunderland, UK), Disjecta (Portland, Oregon), Yuan Yuan Art Center (Jinan, China), and Bullseye Projects (Portland, Oregon and Mamaroneck, New York). Endo is currently the curatorial consultant at Bullseye Projects, organizing exhibitions at The Byre and assisting with traveling exhibitions and art fairs. In 2019, he moved to Yucca Valley, California, where he founded High Desert Observatory with his partner Emily Endo. Michael is currently the Artistic Director at Pilchuck Glass School. This year was "a banner year" for both interest in and enrollment at Pilchuck, says Endo, who sites the school's successful casting conference and upcoming design conference as high points. Enjoy this conversation with the artist about his studio practice and the balance he maintains between curation, administration, and studio as well as the role Pilchuck plays in glass education around the world.

Chaiah (pronounced 'Kaya') Sullivan has been impressing the glass world and Instagram followers with his beautiful and intricate cactus-inspired functional glass to the tune of a 94K following and growing. He came upon the cactus after a friend mistakenly referred to another plant pipe he had created as a cactus and decided to give making a realistic cactus pipe a try. "I never really expected to be the cactus guy," Sullivan says. Growing up in Paonia, a small town on the Western Slope of Colorado, Sullivan first discovered flameworking in 2005 at age 14. Two years later, he started working as an assistant at a local hotshop, North Rim Glass LLC. He practiced as a hobbyist while finishing high school, then put all his focus into glass. In 2010, he attended Penland School of Crafts, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. There he studied with Janis Miltenberger, a Washington-based artist who works with borosilicate glass to create large-scale narrative sculpture. Like Sullivan, much of Miltenberger's glass art is inspired by botanical elements found in nature such as leaves and flowers. In 2013, Sullivan took a series of collaborative classes at Glasscraft in Golden, Colorado, where he had the chance to learn from artists such as Salt and Robert Mickelsen, from whom he learned the hollow sculpting technique he uses today. Says Sullivan: "The inside of my pieces have the same contour as the outside. I put all my ridges in and then along each ridge I add dots; once those are all melted in, I pluck each spike out individually. Sometimes I do get a little sick of plucking thousands of spikes over and over and over again. But once you see all your work come to fruition, it makes it all worth it. There's something about making it functional on top of it being a beautiful art piece that really pushes me." After learning many different styles and techniques, Sullivan explored and experimented to develop his own style of work under the name Unparalleled Glass. He was awarded Dr. Dabber Glass Masters 1st Place in 2023; the Puffco Glass Open 1st Place in 2022; and Champs' Emerging Artist 1st Place in May 2017. Enjoy this conversation about the progression of Sullivan's cactus designs, the device attachments he's been developing and his recently released foot pedals and oxygen systems. He also discusses recent lighting and installation pieces as well as some fun projects in the works.

Author and architectural glass artist Robert Sowers wrote that lead should be considered a design element and not just a matrix to hold stained glass. That idea spoke to Richard Prigg, who has developed a body of work that celebrates lead and solder as much as it does breathtakingly beautiful glass. Though historically stained glass windows conveyed the teachings of the church, Prigg's work intentionally tells no stories, but rather impacts the viewer by combining more expressive lead work with various light-modulating elements of and beyond the window itself. States Prigg: "I have an aversion to storytelling. I feel that it can often move the viewer away from the work so that instead of observing and considering what is in front of them, they fly off to the never-never land where the story takes them. Of course, I recognize that storytelling is an integral part of being human. We tell stories to one another to help define our identities. The stories in our culture give us a we that can guide our ways of living. But there is a dark side of storytelling, and it is intrinsic to the spoken word. It is our human tendency to use story to deceive. So, I am distrustful of art with a story, because a story can be a lie. I am distrustful of religion with a story, too. Religion and art – they are such good friends." A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Prigg started his career at Beyer Stained Glass, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He later joined Willet Hauser Architectural Glass, the largest stained glass studio in the US, where he served as General Manager from 1999 to 2011. There, he oversaw challenging projects such as restoration of the Alcuin and Charlemagne and The Death of Sir Philip Sidney windows, which included re-creating missing plates for areas of the windows where the glass had chemically decomposed. He also oversaw the creation of $3.5 million of gothic stained glass fabricated by Willet Hauser for St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston. It was huge job that took 2.5 years to finish. Says Prigg: "I worked closely with Crosby Willet, who was incredibly generous to me and taught me a lot about stained glass. He introduced me to everyone in the business more or less. That included Charlie Lawrence who became a mentor and friend as well." In December of 1999, Prigg left Willet Hauser and opened Sycamore Studios with his wife Ellen Lustgarten, where in addition to repair, restoration and new work, he developed a unique body of personal work featuring mouthblown antique sheet glass in conjunction with calligraphic lead lines built up with lead came. These works include Spin for a Western Light and Two Circles and a Dot. Later, he began to explore concrete as a matrix, resulting in works such as Blue Moon, Tossed and his recent Tower series. Prigg also uses his Lansdowne studio to showcase the work of young artists who often can't get into galleries. Prigg is a member of the Stained Glass Association of America and has served on the board of directors of the American Glass Guild (AGG). He is the recipient of two AGG AGNX Awards for Excellence in the Art of Stained Glass. In 2025, he presented From Artist To Artisan To Artist: How I Painted Myself Into a Corner and Escaped through a Stained Glass Window at the AGG conference. Recent exhibitions of his work include: 2025 at the AGG AGNX Show, Mesa Contemporary Art Museum, Mesa, Arizona; 2025, Juried Show: Vibrance at the Aston Mills Art Center, Aston PA; and the 2023 Juried Show: 100 Skulls, Aston Mills Arts Center. His work can be found in private collections in Philadelphia as well as at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists. Says Prigg, about goals for his personal work: "When I began working with glass, I was so in love with these materials – lead and glass – that I just wanted to find ways to show people what delighted me. I wanted people to be presented with these materials in a way so that they would be engaged in the textures, the colors, the voices of the materials."

Beth Lipman is an American artist whose sculptural practice generates from the Still Life genre, symbolically representing the splendor and excess of the Anthropocene and the stratigraphic layer humanity will leave on earth. Assemblages of inanimate objects and domestic interiors, inspired by private spaces and public collections, propose portraits of individuals, institutions, and societies. Through works in glass, wood, metal, photography, and video, Lipman presents a meditation on our relationship to Deep Time, a monumental time scale based on geologic events that minimizes human lives. Each installation is a reimagining of history, created by placing cycles often separated by millenia in proximity, from the ancient botanical to the cultural. The incorporation of prehistoric flora alludes to the impermanence of the present and the persistence of life. The ephemera of the Anthropocene becomes a symbol of fragility as the human species is placed on a continuum where time eradicates hierarchy. Lipman has exhibited her work internationally at such institutions as the Ringling Museum of Art (FL), ICA/MECA (ME), RISD Museum (RI), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Gustavsbergs Konsthall(Sweden) and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC). Her work has been acquired by numerous museums including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Kemper Museum for Contemporary Art (MO), Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC), Jewish Museum (NY), Norton Museum of Art, (FL), and the Corning Museum of Glass (NY). Lipman has received numerous awards including a USA Berman Bloch Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Grant, Virginia Groot Foundation Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Alturas Foundation, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center's Arts/Industry Program, and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Recent works include Living History, a large-scale site-specific commission for the Wichita Art Museum (KS) that investigates the nature of time and place and Belonging(s), a sculptural response to the life of Abigail Levy Franks for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR). Lipman's work is on view now in three independent installations including: Hive Mind at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa; ReGift at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA), Toledo, Ohio; and the permanent installation One's-Self I Sing at theMuskegon Museum of Art (MMA), Muskegon, Michigan. To celebrate the official unveiling of One's-Self I Sing, the MMA is hosting an Artist Talk and Unveiling Reception this Thursday, July 17 at 7 p.m. The event is open to the public and free to attend. Find out more at www.muskegonartmuseum.org Suspended in the museum's central atrium, the sculpture explores the interconnectedness of time, culture, and nature through materials such as glass, wood, metal and gypsum. Measuring approximately 240 x 120 x 60 inches, One's-Self I Sing functions as an "exploded" still life – an expansive, suspended constellation of objects that invites viewers to reflect on humanity's place within Deep Time and the Anthropocene. Says Lipman: "The marriage of transparent and opaque forms alludes to what is seen and known juxtaposed with what is concealed and lost over time." The sculpture spans both floors of the museum, encouraging viewers to encounter it from multiple vantage points. Braided suspension cables carry the piece vertically through space, suggesting both ascent and descent, growth and entropy. Lipman incorporates subtle visual references to the Muskegon Museum of Art's permanent collection, binding the sculpture to the museum's history while extending its meaning outward across time. "One's Self I Sing is a showstopping first impression when visitors walk into the museum," says Kirk Hallman, Executive Director of the Muskegon Museum of Art. "It's a powerful and visually stunning complement to the museum's new Bennett Schmidt Pavilion and a bold reflection of the MMA's ongoing commitment to celebrating women artists." Enjoy this conversation with Lipman about current installations, artistic motivations and the behind the scenes challenges of creating site-specific work that communicates to viewers.

An American born artist dedicated to developing new techniques of glass working, Joshua Hershman combines optical physics with the fluidity of glass to make his contemporary sculpture. By harnessing light though hand-polished lenses, he employs unique methods of casting, coldworking, and photography in his boundary pushing work. Hershman states: "My work offers meditations on the complexities within the concept of photography and the repercussions of the camera's impact on culture. The incredibly creative and destructive nature of photography is both inspiring and alarming to me. It has helped bring our global society closer together but also driven us desperately apart. It can teach us or deceive us, show us the furthest reaches of space, or the closest representations of matter itself. It is these contrasting realities that exist within photography, which inspire my works of contemporary art." Being born with no peripheral vision or depth perception, decades of vision therapy led Hershman to his lifelong fascination with the complex nature of the visual system and the science of light and optics. By using cameras themselves as frames for his experimental photographic processes, he asks us to look more closely into the simple act of taking a photograph. His work focuses on the significance that film and photography have played on the development of contemporary global culture. More recently Hershman's work has focused on the torus — the most common shape found in galaxy formations and human cellular biology. His series, Messier Objects, was named after the French astronomer Charles Messier, who famously catalogued anomalous objects that confused his search for comets in the night sky. Originally from Colorado, Hershman was born in 1981 and first began working with glass at the age of 17. In 2004, he graduated from the Craft and Design Program at Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada. In 2008, he went on to earn a BFA with Distinction from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. Most recently, he completed the Master's program at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Sculptural/Dimensional Studies. In 2009, Hershman had his first solo exhibition at Pismo Glass in Denver and went on to participate in many group exhibitions and art fairs including Sofa Chicago, the Armory Show, Art Hamptons, SF Art Market, the Habatat Invitational, and many others. He loves to teach and has led workshops and lectures at California College of the Arts, Public Glass in San Francisco, Pittsburgh Glass Center, and at D&L Glass Supply in Denver. Hershman has received numerous awards, was included in the Bullseye Emerge international glass competition, Young Glass 2017, and can be found in numerous private collections. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Ebeltoft Museum in Denmark, The National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia, and Museum of Glass, Tacoma (MOG). In fact, MOG exhibited Hershman's sculpture in the nation's first LGBTQ+ glass exhibition titled Transparency. He has been invited to participate in several artist-in-residence programs including North Lands Creative Glass in Scotland, D&L Art Glass in Colorado, the Appalachian Center for Craft in Tennessee, and most recently completed a semester-long residency at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. The artist worked for Berengo studio in Murano, Italy, where he made work for the world's leading contemporary artists. Living and operating a private studio in Los Angeles, California, Hershman makes his personal work and also operates the Glass Foundry, which provides casting and coldworking services to other artists. Additionally, he is employed at Judson Studios, where he's currently working on a large-scale architectural glass project for James Jean. "Casting glass was something I could do in isolation in my studio which was a huge advantage during the pandemic. Without the need for a furnace or lots of facilities, this process allowed me to make a highly challenging sculpture without the need for a team of assistants or expensive equipment. I think what draws me most to lost wax casting is the constant challenge and problem solving that is required to get a high-quality casting."