GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly Issue #145, Winter 2016-17 | Page 10

EDITOR’S LETTER
by andrew page

T

he sight of molten glass taking shape
at the end of a pipe fills seats at
demonstrations. Frozen in mid-melt,
kiln-formed glass transfixes viewers at galleries.
Its unique plasticity gives glass a powerful role as
a record of transformation, an aspect with great
metaphoric potential. The inspiring mutability
of glass comes to mind when considering how
the field of glass art and design is undergoing
a period of profound transition. Demographic
shifts in the loyal collector base that sustained its
growth for decades are reshuffling the economics
and forcing innovation in galleries and artist
studios. New technologies are competing with,
if not displacing, hot glass studios as the showpieces of college and university art departments.
And the steady march of globalization is finally
encroaching on price points at the high end of
design, putting long-standing glass companies
in Europe under pressure.
The feature articles in this edition of GLASS,
while spanning the globe, could be grouped
under the heading of “a field in transition.”
For the cover article, artist, educator, and
critic Scott Benefield traveled to Kosta, Sweden,
to witness the creation of a “legacy” piece by
79-year-old Bertil Vallien, who straddles the
worlds of sculpture and design in an unusual but

mutually beneficial arrangement. The Kosta Boda
factory where Vallien cast Passage is at once a
logical yet highly unusual setting for this landmark
work, and Benefield proves a canny witness to
the fabrication, which doubled as a sophisticated
art-tourism package that just might show the
way to engage potential new collectors.
Back in the U.S., artist and educator Tina
Aufiero is uniquely comfortable occupying the
shifting ground of transformational change, as
contributing editor Victoria Josslin discovered in
her in-depth profile. When her glass teaching job
at Parsons in New York City was threatened by
closure in an effort to make room for digital
studies, Aufiero adapted, and ended up running
the new-media program. While she has embraced
coding and the intricacies of making art in the
digital era, Aufiero’s passage from glass to new
media demonstrates the artist’s ability to shift
the conversation, and her own process, to
embrace the universal aspects of expression. As
artistic director at Pilchuck Glass School, Aufiero
is in a unique position to shape the future, and
her progress is notable and a cause for optimism.
Looking back at a transformative moment
in history, contributor Bruno Andrus assesses
the outsized impact of the 1967 World’s
Fair in Montreal, Canada, the first encounter

Western artists had with the work of giants of
Czechoslovakian glass such as Stanislav Libenský,
Jaroslava Brychtová, and René Roubicek. The
scale and expressive refinement stunned up-andcoming glass artists such as then-grad student
Dale Chihuly, and this watershed encounter
between East and West inspired a nascent art
movement to use glass as a full-scale sculptural
material. Andrus brings the event to life, but also
traces its impact, particularly on two local artists
who would go on to be the founders of Espace
Verre, the seminal glass center in Montreal.
And finally, we have an examination of the
Australian glass scene, rocked by the recent
passing of its leading light, Klaus Moje, whose
program at Canberra set the bar high, establishing
refined qualities that have come to be associated
with glass Down Under: restraint, sensitivity to
surface, and a preference for minimalist resolved
forms. Curator and critic Ivana Jirasek examines
the history, the high-water mark, and the
questions facing glass as government funding
shifts away from a medium it once supported
so strongly. Like everywhere in the glass world,
it’s a time of transition and adaptation in which
one might see echoes of the early years, the lean
years before the commercial market came, when
everything required ingenuity and imagination.

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