The Museum of Glass is pleased to announce the schedule for its Fifth Annual Visiting Artist Summer Series which features a different visiting artist in the Hot Shop each week. The Summer Series begins on June 13 and continues for twelve weeks, concluding Labor Day weekend.

The 2007 Summer Series marks the fourth year of collaboration between the Museum of Glass and Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA. Each summer, local and international artists come together in the Northwest to serve as instructors and resident artists at Pilchuck. The Museum and Pilchuck have partnered to offer a unique opportunity for museum visitors to view the creative processes of these glass masters who do not normally work in venues open for public observation. Of the thirteen artists featured in this year’s Series, eight will teach or serve as artists-in-residence during Pilchuck’s 2007 session.

The 2007 Summer Series also features two artists whose work will be displayed concurrently in the Museum’s galleries. A blown glass bottle created in 1965 by Marvin Lipofsky is included in the Contrasts: A Glass Primer exhibition as an example of work from the early Studio Glass movement. Fred Wilson’s Dark Dawn (2005) will be one of nine glass installations featured in the Museum’s Fifth Anniversary exhibition, Mining Glass, which opens on June 16.

All of the Summer Series artists will work with the Museum’s resident hot shop team, exploring and demonstrating various glassmaking techniques and styles. The program is designed to provide artists with a platform for experimentation and development and to extend Museum visitors’ understanding of the artists’ creative process.

Each residency will conclude with a Conversation with the Artist, a public lecture and slide presentation on Sunday afternoons at 2 p.m. Additionally, artist Preston Singletary will lecture at the Museum on Saturday, June 16 at 4 p.m. as part of the Museum’s Fifth Anniversary Celebration weekend.

About the Artists:

Patrick Martin / Emporia, KS
June 13 – 17, 2007
Conversation with the Artist: June 17, 2 p.m.
Patrick Martin earned a Masters of Fine Art from Tulane University in New Orleans and is currently an associate professor of art at Emporia State University in Kansas. He creates mixed-media sculpture with socio-political themes.

Martin’s Hot Shop residency will follow his Pilchuck Glass course, Cast Away—A Sculptor’s Journey. At the Museum, Patrick will create both blown glass and cast forms (oversized syringes, fumigator spray cans, life-size human digestive tracts and giant pill bottles) that explore variations in scale and design.

Greg Dietrich / Cozumel, Mexico
June 20 – 24, 2007
Conversation with the Artist: June 24, 2 p.m.
Greg Dietrich has been engraving glass since 1990. He has taught engraving techniques at Pilchuck Glass School and numerous institutions around the United States. A nature lover, Dietrich’s work is inspired by the exotic marine life that abounds in the waters surrounding the island where he lives, by Mayan ruins and by other animal life.

Dietrich will bring a new experience to Museum visitors with his residency by demonstrating graal engraving, a form of glass art that is seldom seen. Developed in Sweden in 1915, the graal technique involves cutting away layers of glass from large spheres or flattened shapes, creating “drawings” in the glass by revealing varying shades of the underlying colors.

Michael Rogers / Honeyoye, NY
June 27 – July 1, 2007
Conversation with the Artist: July 1, 2 p.m.
Michael Rogers is currently a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Crafts in New York. Previously, he spent eleven years in Japan where he was head of Aichi University of Education’s Glass Department.

Rogers creates intimate glass sculptures, often including found objects in their composition. “My current work in glass reflects my interest in language, literature, transparency, and found objects. I engrave text from my favorite works of literature onto the surfaces of my pieces. Glass for me is the perfect medium with which I can overlay words over words or images over images and in this way extend or obscure the definition of a text.”

Martin Blank / Seattle, WA
July 5 – 8, 2007
Conversation with the Artist: July 8, 2 p.m.
Martin Blank has admired the grace and flow of the human form since childhood. After earning a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1984, Blank began his professional career as a member of Dale Chihuly’s glassblowing team. He was an integral member of Team Chihuly for 11 years before opening his own studio in Seattle.

Blank’s Hot Shop residency coincides with the Museum’s Fifth Anniversary celebration weekend. During his visit, he will begin fabrication of glass prototypes for a water installation.

Marvin Lipofsky / Berkeley, CA
July 11 – 15, 2007
Conversation with the Artist: July 15, 2 p.m.
Having worked with glass for over forty years, Marvin Lipofsky is a pioneer of the Studio Glass movement. He studied under Harvey Littleton, the founder of the first Studio Glass program in the United States and, after joining the faculty of the University of California in Berkeley, established the second Studio Glass program in the U.S.

Lipofksy has traveled extensively worldwide and draws inspiration for his abstract sculptures from the area and culture in which he is working. The work from his Museum of Glass residency will undoubtedly reflect his visions of Tacoma and the Northwest.

Beverly Semmes / New York, NY
July 18 – 22, 2007
Conversation with the Artist, July 22, 2 p.m.
Beverley Semmes is an internationally respected sculptor and installation artist who is best known for her larger-than-life dresses, sometimes reaching the height of a giraffe. Semmes often creates the dresses in a solid fabric—velvet, cotton or silk—making a bold statement of color and strength that fills a wall, ceiling to floor.
Semmes works in a variety of media, including ceramics and glass. For her residency, she will direct the Museum’s Hot Shop team to make large “pulled glass” vessels that will be featured in future installations of her artwork.

Fred Tschida / Alfred, NY
July 25 – 29, 2007
Conversation with the Artist, July 29, 2 p.m.
Fred Tschida is a professor of glass design at Alfred University in New York and director of The Museum of Luminous Phenomena in Alfred. Prior to his residency at the Museum, Tschida will be teaching Casting Light at Pilchuck Glass School, a course for artists and designers who want to create luminous objects that will stand alone as sculpture, function as lamps or integrate with architecture.

“My work relies strongly on my basic interest in physical phenomenon and the inherent qualities of different materials. Learning about light, gravity, electricity, mass and atmosphere has triggered endless questions for which my experimentation and research seeks answers.”

Marc Swanson / Brooklyn, NY
August 1 – 5, 2007
Conversation with the Artist, August 5, 2 p.m.
Marc Swanson studied at the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and received his Master of Fine Arts degree from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in Annandale on Hudson, New York. In 2006, Swanson’s mixed media installation The End of the Beginning of the End (2003) was featured in the Museum of Glass exhibition, Fresh! Contemporary Takes on Nature and Allegory.

Swanson’s residency is concurrent with an installation of his work at Tacoma Art Museum. He will work with the Museum’s Hot Shop team to create monotone, large-scale glass paper wasp nests with branches and leaves. “My work is heavily influenced by my upbringing in New England and as the son of an Eagle Scout and U.S. Marine. The woods and hunting imagery were a large part of my upbringing.”

Fred Wilson / New York, NY
August 8 – 12, 2007
Conversation with the Artist: August 12, 2 p.m.
Fred Wilson is one of eight artists featured in the Museum’s Fifth Anniversary Exhibition, Mining Glass, which opens June 16, 2007. Wilson has worked with blown glass to create culturally-inscribed forms, including shapes he calls “drips” and “drops.” He uses the color black to reference racial stereotypes and various black liquids such as oil, tar, or ink as they relate to global issues. During his Museum of Glass residency, Wilson will expand this theme into new forms.

“I am interested in glass for its properties, the fact that it’s always a liquid. And I’m interested in beauty, but always beauty in the service of meaning.”

Jay Macdonell / Victoria, British Columbia
August 15 – 19, 2007
Conversation with the Artist: August 19, 2 p.m.
Jay Macdonell has been blowing glass since 1992. He completed a traditional apprenticeship at Robert Held Art Glass in 1996 where he worked closely with maestro Daniel Vargas. Macdonell was the exhibition director for the B.C. Glass Art Association from 1995 to 1998 and president for two years. In 2000, he won the Tiffany Glass Scholarship to attend Pilchuck Glass School where he was nominated for the Corning Award for Excellence.

Macdonell is currently exploring a sculptural series called Formulations which he began at Pilchuck Glass School in 2000. For his residency at the Museum, he will continue this series, exploring the relationship between form, tension and balance.

Dave Walters / Seattle, WA
August 22 – 26, 2007
Conversation with the Artist: August 26, 2 p.m.
David Walters earned his Bachelor of Fine Art degree from Rhode Island School of Design in 1993. He moved to Seattle soon afterward, where he worked for many of the city’s legendary glass artists. In 1994, he began working for Lino Tagliapietra and continues to play an instrumental role on his glassblowing team.

In his recent work, Walters has referenced children’s stories and fairy tales for their nostalgic nature and often complex themes. During his Museum of Glass residency, he plans to further develop these themes by exploring several new blown forms along with his current designs. “I approach the vessel as a three dimensional canvas which is a central component of the stories being depicted, not for decorative purposes alone.”

Jeremy Lepisto and Mel George / Portland, OR
August 29 – September 2, 2007
Conversation with the Artist: September 2, 2 p.m.
Mel George earned her Bachelor of Fine Art from the Canberra School of Art, Australia, and Jeremy Lepisto earned his BFA from Alfred University, New York. They met while working at Bullseye Glass in Portland, Oregon and went on to co-found Studio Ramp LLC, a kiln-forming fabrication studio that translates design into glass for artists and architects. George and Lepisto continue to produce their own artwork at Studio Ramp while also teaching at Pilchuck Glass School and other institutions worldwide.

During their Hot Shop residency, the artists plan to experiment with translating flat panel drawings into three dimensional glass vessels and blowing glass replicas of domestic objects (salt shakers, lidded bowls and platters) for use in creating mixed media vignettes.

The Visiting Artist Program is generously sponsored by Courtyard by Marriott / Tacoma

Image credits:
Patrick Martin, Untitled, 2002. Hot worked glass, metal, 36 x 15 x 12 inches.
Grez Dietrich, Reef Lamp, 2006. Cameo engraved blown glass, wood, 7 x 12 x 7 inches.
Michael Rogers, Neruda Bottle, 2006. Engraved blown glass, cast glass, magnet, iron filings, key, 23 x 9 inches. Collection of Andrew and Barbara Moore. Photo by James Via
Marvin Liposky, Australian Landscape #1, 2004. Glass, 11 x 16 x 12 inches. Photo by M. Lee Fatherree
Beverly Semmes, Rose I, 2005. Velvet, organza, dimensions variable. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Fred Tschida, Sun with Lucy, 1997. Mixed media time exposure, 12-inch diameter.
Marc Swanson, Untitled (Black Buck Full Sneak), 2007. Mixed media, 21 x 20 x 36 inches
Fred Wilson, The Unnatural Movement of Blackness, 2006. Glass globe, electric light fixture with bulb, chandelier elements, and beads, 14 x 13 x 18 inches. Photo by Pace Wildenstein
Jay Macdonell, Articulated Series, 2006. Sky blue cane with copper blue and reddish amethyst, 36 x 9 x 10 inches. Photo by the artist
Dave Walters, Help Yourself, 2007. Blown glass and enamel paint, 21 x 12 x 12 inches. Photo by Russell Johnson
Jeremy Lepisto, Built to Leave, 2005. Kiln formed glass, 26 x 5 x 3 inches.
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The Museum of Glass provides a dynamic learning environment to appreciate the medium of glass through creative experiences, collections and exhibitions. In addition to the Hot Shop Amphitheater where visitors can watch artists work, the facilities include galleries, outdoor exhibition areas, a theater, studio, grand hall, store and café.
The Museum of Glass is sponsored in part by the City of Tacoma Arts Commission, the Washington State Arts Commission, ArtsFund and Comcast.

Hours and Admission
Open Wednesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Third Thursdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Sunday 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Store is also open Tuesdays 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. Summer hours: from Memorial Day through Labor Day, the Museum is also open Monday and Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Admission is free for members, $10 general, $8 seniors, military and students (13+ with ID), $8 groups of 10 or more, $4 children (6-12) years old. Children under 6 are admitted free. Admission is free every third Thursday of the month from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Info Line 253-284-4750/ 1-866-4MUSEUM
Address Museum of Glass 1801 Dock Street Tacoma, WA 98402