As editor of Glass Art magazine from 1987 to March 2019, Shawn Waggoner has interviewed and written about multitudes of the world’s greatest artists working glass in the furnace, torch and on the table. In 2016, Waggoner turned her passion for glass art into a “Terry Gross” style podcast featuring interviews with the likes of Lino Tagliapietra, Narcissus Quagliata, Dante Marioni, Robert Mickelsen, Toots Zynsky, Shayna Lieb, Kelly O’Dell, Raven Skyriver, Ginny Ruffner, Lucio Bubacco, Banjo, Richard Marquis, Judith Schaechter, and many more.
Rated in iTunes New and Noteworthy in 2018, Talking Out Your Glass continues to evolve, including interviews with the nation’s finest borosilicate artists making both pipes and sculpture on the torch. Other current topics include how to work glass using sustainable practices and how artists address the issues of our times such as climate change, the political chasm, and life in the age of technology.
By becoming a Patron of Talking Out Your Glass (TOYG), you are helping to support TOYG’s featured artists in a world that doesn’t always value art or objects made with the artist’s hand. You are also helping to document and preserve the history of glass art and artists in Internet archives and online galleries. Through questions and guest suggestions, you have the opportunity to inspire the direction of the show and contribute to exposing lesser known artists and issues you, the Patron, feel are worthwhile.
Pioneering Cold Worked Glass: David Huchthausen’s Mysterious Fourth Dimension
The emitted light from a David Huchthausen sculpture is an artwork unto itself. For the last five decades plus, the artist has been captivating viewers through sculpture defined by its unique and other-worldly manipulation of light. A critic once described his work as “high tech spiritual,” an observation the artist rather liked.
Huchthausen once stated: “Creation is a continual and evolutionary process, constantly digesting and reevaluating past experiences and current perspectives. My work has always been deliberately enigmatic and mysterious. I constantly strive to generate a strange and curious quality that both tantalizes and challenges the viewer to develop his own response system. The work must have an existence of its own if it is to have any real significance.”
Huchthausen was one of the first artists of the Studio Glass Movement to emphasize cold working and fabrication techniques such as cutting, sawing, laminating, and optical polishing. Within his most recent crystal-clear geometric forms, the artist integrates complex shapes, concave lenses and intricate color panels, reflecting and refracting light as it hits the shapes and projecting colored glass patterns into the fractures and lenses below. Huchthausen’s sculptural narrative has always been enigmatic by design, challenging the viewer with its curious and unknowable quality.
Ferdinand Hampson, co-founder of Habatat Gallery, wrote: “David Huchthausen is one of an elite group of artists who have altered the history of contemporary glass. As a Fulbright scholar, university professor and museum consultant, his achievements over the past 50 years have played a vital role in the evolution of the material into a fine art form.
“As an architecture student at the University of Wisconsin, Huchthausen gravitated toward the sculpture department, working with welded steel, wood and found objects. In 1970 he discovered an abandoned glass furnace in the corner of an old brewery building on the Wausau campus. After six months of struggling, he learned of Harvey Littleton’s work in Madison 150 miles to the south. Once contact had been established, Huchthausen’s career moved with rapid strides. He served as Littleton’s graduate assistant in the early 1970s, ran the Illinois State University Glass Program during Joel Myers’ sabbatical in 1976 and lectured throughout Europe as a Fulbright scholar in 1977 and 1978. During this period, he established vital links between European and American artists and galleries, organizing numerous exhibitions in both the United States and Europe. As curatorial and acquisitions consultant for the Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, he conceived and developed Americans In Glass. This important series of exhibitions in 1978, 1981 and 1984 documented the evolution of American Studio Glass from its early emphasis on blown forms and hot working to the explosion of sculptural and conceptual concerns of the mid 1980s. The landmark 1984 exhibition traveled to museums across Europe and provided the first major review of any glass exhibition by Art In America.
“As an educator and art professor, Huchthausen has been a significant influence on a generation of glass artists. He was one of the first Americans to emphasize coldworking in the early 1970s. Large sculptural constructions such as Spider’s Nest, which combined hot-worked, cast, and architectural glass elements, stand as historical landmarks of the period. Many of the specialized fabrication techniques he pioneered are widely used by other artists today.
“Throughout his career, Huchthausen has remained a strong advocate of increased aesthetic criticism of contemporary glass. His outspoken and often controversial positions have helped articulate a basis for today’s increased level of critical dialog. As an artist Huchthausen has consistently maintained a high degree of integrity in his work. Limiting production to 12 to 15 pieces each year, he devotes several months to the development and creation of each sculpture. Even within a specific series the images are extremely unique, furthering his evolution of the concept without letting it harden into a formula.
“Huchthausen’s background in architecture and personal fascination with primitive art and ritual, have remained strong influences over the years. He deliberately imbues his sculpture with an enigmatic quality, generating a strange and curious energy, which entices the viewer.
“One unique aspect of Huchthausen’s sculpture is his innovative integration of glass and light, the concept that the projected images and patterns constitute an integral and inseparable component of the sculpture. These ideas have their genesis in his large totemic forms of the early 1970s and have permeated his work to varying degrees throughout his career. They were more fully explored in his mysterious Leitungs Scherben series of the 1980s, where transformed and altered patterns were projected with amazing clarity onto the surface beneath the piece. Huchthausen’s next body of work expanded on that foundation.
“The Adumbration and Implosion series (1991 – 1999) combine the integral color laminations that have become a trademark of his work, with massive blocks of crystal. By juxtaposing the pristine optically polished surfaces with fractured jagged edges, Huchthausen created precariously balanced fragments alluding to a larger whole. The colored shadow projections are directed into the heart of the piece, splashing colored light onto the fractures, radiating like translucent watercolors into pools of intense color. Huchthausen creates an illusion of incredible complexity that appears and then vanishes as the viewer is drawn around the piece, only to reappear as the refracted image mutates and projects onto another plane. The constantly shifting visual depth and dimensionality create new and unique views from every angle. This use of the full 360-degree circumference of the piece sets Huchthausen apart from many artists, creating sculpture that is in perpetual visual motion.
“The Implosion sequence evolved into the Echo Chambers, which expanded on the use of hand polished lenses cut into the bases of the sculpture. These concave orbs reflected and distorted the geometric color patterns laminated onto the top of the sculpture, further enhancing the complexity of the illusionary space and creating a kaleidoscopic effect as the viewer moves.
“Huchthausen’s latest series of Spheres began after he read an article on the theoretical analysis of gravitational fields. The article described the three-dimensional universe that we perceive, as a holographic projection, generated by a two-dimensional field at the edge of infinity. The optical simplicity of the sphere permits an intimate exploration of the interior geometry. With the Spheres, Huchthausen has fully escaped the perception of three-dimensional space. His spheres have no top, bottom, up, down, front, or back; every axis point creates a unique visual perspective that is in a constant state of flux.”
Today, Huchthausen creates sculpture from his Seattle studio. He has also renovated several historic buildings in the city, including the 150,000-square-foot Bemis Brothers Bag Building, where studio space is leased to other artists. Over his 53 years in glass, Huchthausen’s work has been documented in many books and catalogs. He is currently working on three new books to include Classic Motor Yachts 1910-1960 and Art Deco Glass: The Huchthausen Collection, as well as a book covering the history of his own sculpture. An exhibition of the artist’s Art Deco collection has been travelling for seven years.
On his way to Cebu in the Philippines where he escapes Seattle’s gray winter, Huchthausen spoke with TOYG about when he fell in love with light, how he uses glass in the telling of his stories and why his work remains relevant and collectible into the 21st century and beyond.
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Anja Isphording
Anja Isphording: Referencing the Mysteries of the Natural World through Exquisite Glass Castings
With glass as her medium and lost wax casting as her primary technique, Anja Isphording creates idiosyncratic sculptures familiar enough for us to recognize that they are inspired by nature, yet rarely resembling anything that we have actually encountered. Her intimate-scale objects, tactile and rich with deeply saturated colors, are reminiscent of basic molecular structures, honeycombs or coral reefs, but their biological reference remains ambiguous.
In Germany, Isphording’s early glass engraving studies in the 1980s with FS Zwiesel and Franz X Hoeller were followed by a stint as an engraving instructor at the summer school Bild-Werk, Frauenau. She founded her first studio in Helminghausen, Germany, in 1989, but relocated to Vancouver, BC, Canada, in 2000 and switched her focus to casting.
Isphording’s work has been exhibited in Europe and the United States, and collected by museums worldwide, including the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Museum of American Glass, Wheaton, NJ; Glass Museum Kamenicky Senov, Czech Republic; Museum of Applied Arts, Frankfurt; and Kuntsgewerbemuseum, Berlin Germany, among others. She has been juried into New Glass Review – the Corning Museum of Glass’ prestigious annual survey of cutting-edge glass – an unprecedented 10 times.
Many consider Isphording’s intimate sculptures among the most intriguing objects ever made from glass. They embody reverence for nature’s mysteries and explore the patterns and structures of nature without ever literally reproducing them. Often they evoke a mood as much as an image. Plants and marine creatures may echo in the forms, but ultimately, they are guided by the artist’s exquisite imagination.
Isphording’s awards include 1998-2001 scholarships at Pilchuck Glass School, WA; 1995 scholarship at the Creative Glass Center of America, Wheaton Village, NJ; 1993-1994 scholarship at the Academy of Applied Arts, class Vladimir Kopecky, Prague, Czech Republic; 2011-2012 prizes in TGK Competition, Germany; 2004 Artist of the Month, Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass; 2001 prize, WG at BE Exhibition, Portland, OR; 1993 Bayrischer Staatspreis; and 1986 prize, Leistungswettbewerb der Handwerksjugend, Germany.
First modeled full-size in wax and then cast in glass, Isphording’s intricate compositions often require multiple firings. When finished, the sculptures have a tactile quality and emotional range that sets them apart from contemporary trends and renders them timeless. Each piece takes months to create – follow this link to learn more about her process. Demanding technical challenges coupled with the complexity of her forms conspire to limit her output.
This Friday, August 18 – September 1, 2023, Heller Gallery in NYC will present Isphording’s latest sculptures as part of their summer pop-up series titled Rotations.
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Kenneth von Roenn
Kenneth von Roenn: The Architectural Application of Expressive Glass
Kenneth von Roenn Jr. has designed and executed more than 1,500 commissions in the U. S., Middle East, Far East, Europe, Canada and Mexico. His work has been published in more than 75 books, magazines, and digital publications, and he has received more than 25 awards for work, including two hall of fames and lifetime achievement for the state of Kentucky. Von Roenn has also written and lectured on the topics of art in architecture, the evolution of architectural glass art, and the development and concerns of public art.
This Sunday, October 1, 2023, von Roenn will present examples of the architectural application of expressive glass and an introduction of what is on the horizon at the Stained Glass Association of America’s conference, Forging New Paths, held September 27 – October 1, 2023 in Buffalo, New York. Also, a new documentary film about von Roenn’s work by the noted film maker Sam Halstead has just been released and can be viewed here:
Says von Roenn: “As an architect, I am primarily concerned with the sympathetic relationship between my works of art and the buildings of which they are but a part and parcel. Harmonious integration is achieved when the work expresses a visual dialogue with the architecture by responding to the particular character and specific needs of a building.”
Von Roenn was born in 1948 in Louisville, Kentucky. As a young man, his interests were athletic, primarily in springboard and platform diving. He attended Florida State University on a full athletic scholarship, while also pursuing his interests in fine art, philosophy and English, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1970.
Beginning his career in glass later that year at Louisville Art Glass, von Roenn was promoted to General Manager and in 1975 to President of the studio. In the early ‘70s he was an active member of the Stained Glass Association of America, serving on the executive committee and also as chairman of the publications committee. During this period, he compiled a body of innovative architectural glass artwork and established the studio as one of the most aesthetically and technically progressive in the country. He wrote regularly for several magazines on the topic of glass in architecture and taught courses in architectural art at the University of Kentucky School of Architecture from 1974 to ‘76.
Recognizing a need to pursue his evolving interest in architecture, von Roenn took a leave of absence from the studio in 1977 to pursue a master’s degree in architecture at Yale University, graduating in 1981. While at Yale, von Roenn further developed his interest in architectural art through work with the architect/sculptor Kent Bloomer, which was culminated with his independent thesis entitled, “The Primary Modalities of Art’s Relationship to Architecture: Integration, Juxtaposition and Synthesis.” While still in graduate school he founded in 1979 the von Roenn Studio Group in Branford, Connecticut, which designed and produced glass, architecture, graphics and furniture, executing commissions nationally and internationally.
In 1983, von Roenn returned to Louisville and worked for two architectural firms before establishing an architectural practice with two partners to form Bailey, Preston, von Roenn Architecture. Also at this time he returned to competitive diving, which culminated with winning 10 National Championship titles and two World Championship titles, setting two world records at the age of 41. Having achieved his earliest goal of becoming a world champion, von Roenn turned his exclusive attention to his true passion, expressive glass in architecture.
Recognizing a need for the development of expressive architectural glass, in 1991 von Roenn bought the Louisville Art Glass Studio and renamed it Architectural Glass Art, Inc. He expanded and reorganized the company, redirecting its focus on new roles and opportunities for glass in architecture. The studio quickly became recognized for its innovative application of new technologies in the execution of architectural glass art. Within the studio he served as the director of design and CEO/President, managing a staff of 30 and directing the exploration and development of techniques and technologies in glass fabrication. Von Roenn designed, and his studio produced, the world’s largest glass sculpture, which crowns the top of the 3 Wells Fargo Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. This work weighs more than 500,000 pounds, can be seen from miles away and is designed to withstand hurricane force winds.
In the late ‘90s, von Roenn’s desire to expand the studio led to his search for a new space. During this period, he joined with a group of developers and investors interested in the revitalization of downtown Louisville as well as the region’s firm commitment to the arts. The group, guided by von Roenn’s vision of a multipurpose glass facility, formulated a concept for Glassworks. From the original idea of a new home for Architectural Glass Art, von Roenn created a space for more than 50 glass artists to work and sell their art. He owned and oversaw the two galleries, a public workshop, a tour program, a special events program, the glass blowing studio, and a mobile glass blowing van powered by vegetable oil, all of which comprised Glassworks. More than 125,000 people visited Glassworks annually, which made it one of Louisville’s most popular tourist attractions. In 2012 von Roenn sold his interest in Glassworks to focus his attention exclusively on architectural glass art.
In addition to designing his own projects, von Roenn has also collaborated with several significant artists on major projects including Al Held, Jose Bedia, Laura Battle, Thomas Sayre, and Jennifer Bartlett. He has also worked with many of the leading American architects including Cesar Pelli, Charles Moore, William Turnbull, Thomas Ventulett, Graham Gund, Turan Duda, Gyo Obata, David Rockwell, Peter Marino, Mark Simon, to name a few.
Von Roenn’s work has been published in numerous books and in many major architecture magazines, including a feature article on his work in Architecture magazine. He has lectured extensively throughout North America and Canada and has written dozens of articles on art and architecture. Von Roenn has received numerous awards, including the Faith and Form Visual Arts Grand Award, American Crafts Award for Architectural Art, the AIA Allied Professional Award, the DuPont Benedictus Award, the Corning Museum Award, the Al Smith Fellowship, Tau Sigma Delta Architecture Fraternity Award, five Ministry & Liturgy’s Bene Awards and 10 CODAworx Awards. In addition, von Roenn received the Crystal Award for his design of a glass bridge for the Louisville arena. This project has been recognized as a technological tour de force for the way in which artistic glass was used as a primary structural element for the bridge. He has been inducted into the American Glass Hall of Fame as well as the Atherton High School Hall of Fame and was named one the 25 most influential art professionals in the Midwest by Dialogue magazine. He was presented with the Governor’s Award in the Arts for Lifetime Achievement in 2011 by the governor of Kentucky, which is the highest honor bestowed on a Kentucky artist.
In 2013 von Roenn decided it was time to begin to slow down (primarily at the urging of his domestic partner, Ursula Vourvoulis). He closed Architectural Glass Art and moved to Tallahassee, Florida, to work with Florida State University on the development of a new public art program. At FSU von Roenn also served as the Director of the Master Craftsman Studio as well as the founder of the Public and Architectural Art program. As a professor, von Roenn taught courses in public and architectural art as well as sculpture and creative entrepreneurship. He did not renew his contract with FSU in 2016 so he could once again turn his attention exclusively back to glass. That year, von Roenn was invited to present the keynote address to the American Glass Guildannual conference in Chicago.
With his move to Florida, von Roenn established Kaiser / von Roenn Studiowith his partner Vourvoulis and serves as its Design Director. K/vR Studio’s focus is on large-scale architectural glass projects nationally and internationally. Since its inception in 2013, K/vR Studio has completed major projects in Manilla, Philippines, Dublin, Ireland, Austin, Dallas and El Paso, Texas, Nashville, Tennessee, Denver, Colorado, Los Angeles and San Diego, California, Washington DC and Miami, Florida. He lectures frequently on the topic of public art and its role in communities as well as the role of artistic glass in architecture.
Says von Roenn: “As an artist and craftsman, I emphasize the poetic expression of glass or acrylic as it is animated with light by enhancing and employing its inherent and intrinsic characteristics and qualities. In developing Fluidity and the Ordered Turbulence pieces, I was primarily concerned with ensuring that the composition involved the viewer mentally and visually in a manner appropriate to its context. I believe that if viewers are to fully understand a thematic concept, they should mentally construct their own meaning, and that my role as both artist and architect is to assist, encourage, inspire and direct that effort.”
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