Rev. ... 2003-07-24
The first Glass Art Society Conference that I attended was in Toledo, Ohio. This is the location of the start of the modern Art Glass movement in 1963, according to the people participating. Most of the meetings were held in the Toledo Museum of Art although events were held in Detroit and many other museums and studio. I attended a workshop before hand at Bowling Green State University.
The experience
of watching Lino and others work extended the astonishment I felt
during the workshop as I began to realize the choices available
in various ways of working glass. The seating was rationed at the
Lino demos, but the competition was not at the levels I saw at
Penland (which was crowded but had few limits) and Tucson (where
some comments were rude as far as ticket distribution was
concerned.)
The workshops at Bowling Green State
University involved the B-Team, which started as a group of young
people willing to travel rough and work glass at various
universities to expose students to other styles of glass work
than their instructor used. After a couple of years, the B-Team
became a permanent operation that did happenings rather than an
evolving group of rising young stars.
The newly constructed hot wall is powerfully ventilated as is obvious, but was flawed by putting air in from a big open door, which chilled me in passing on cold spring mornings.
[From HGB 13] Team members this year are Zesty Meyers, a Pilchuck staff member and a student at Massachusetts College of Art who does multi-media installation pieces; Thor Bueno who paints on blown glass pieces in San Diego; Deborah Czeresko has a masters from Tulane and works in New York and blows both large and small scale pieces of fine proportion and interesting distortion; Clay Logan is the student member, from Palomar College, CA, who makes a good goblet and quickly hot works small sculptures of horses and skulls. Marina Marioni is photographer, PR rep, and occasional glass handler. Matthew Leet does videotaping for documentation and acts as tour manager.
The workshop was very insightful as these people worked large glass very gently, while I had previously been exposed to people who worked the glass fairly hard.
