Fritz Dreisbach (Tucson, AZ)
Residency: June 25 – 29
Conversation with the Artist: Sunday, June 29, 2 p.m.

Fritz Dreisbach has been called the Johnny Appleseed of the American Studio Glass movement. For more than 40 years, he has acted as a crusader for glassblowing, spreading the excitement, techniques and science of the craft through demonstrations and workshops all over the world. A pioneer of American glass-forming in the 1960s and 70s, Dreisbach has shared his knowledge of glassmaking freely, encouraging countless artists and students to experiment with glass as a medium. Dreisbach was a founder and former president of the Glass Art Society and the recipient of the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002. He will be an instructor at Pilchuck Glass School this summer teaching traditional and non-traditional hot and cold glass techniques.

“My glass is a balance between absolute control of the material and the spontaneity of a liquid medium. I always try to show movement and gesture in all my hot-worked glass. For my residency I plan to make large Mongo pieces. I can’t make these pieces everywhere, and the Museum equipment and skilled crew offer a great opportunity.” Dreisbach began his Mongo series in 1979 as a reaction to the tightly controlled, more symmetrical work he made in the mid-1970s.

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Fritz Dreisbach: The “Johnny Appleseed” of Studio Glass
The Corning Museum of Glass, The Gather Magazine, fall 2005

He’s been called “the Johnny Appleseed” of the American Studio Glass movement because of his unparalleled role as a proselytizer of glassblowing, spreading the new excitement, techniques, and science of the craft through demonstrations and workshops all over the world for more than 40 years. A pioneer in the seismic shift that took place in American glass-forming in the 60s and 70s, Fritz Dreisbach has shared his knowledge of glassmaking freely, encouraging countless artists and students to try working with glass. In the process, he has put his own stamp on American glassblowing, studying and reinventing historic shapes with gusto, humor, and a rare talent for retaining a sense of the fluid nature of the material. Many of his goblets and vessels are made with swoops of colored glass that are so loose and sensuous that they represent the unconfined potential of the hot liquid material they started out as.

Influenced initially by funk ceramics and the spirit of West Coast art in the 60s and 70s—earthy, humorous, and, above all, dynamic and free—he began in the 60s “re-animating” early American containers and medieval German drinking cups with lively decorations, and making Pop Art-inspired sculptures of everyday items in his glassmaking demonstrations around the country. He has also borrowed heavily from the Venetian tradition to create colorful, sometimes whimsical goblets, such as the goblets with flamingo, scallop, cornucopia or grape stems that he made with Dante Marioni in 1991. Many of his goblets are reversible; the user can drink from either end. This is simply because Dreisbach was not satisfied with the blown foot of his goblets. He solved the problem by altogether, replacing the foot with a second bowl or a lariat rope-like, handle- base. Hundreds of his classic goblets have a champagne flute at one end, and a brandy or cognac snifter for the other end.

Since 1979 he has made a distinctive contribution to large-scale glass blowing with his “Mongos,” or large vases and bowls. Abandoning his earlier quest to make the “perfectly symmetrical” vessel, he is now concentrating on capturing the liquid movement of glass in these blown and hot-worked mongos, each with a massive lip that looks wet and fluid. Decorated with splashing colors, cane work, and optic bits, Dreisbach says that he has returned to “letting the glass tell me what it wants to do.”

Dreisbach, who grew up in Akron, Ohio, was drawn to art early, studying painting and sculpture at the University of Iowa, where he earned an MA. His introduction to glass was serendipitous. His major painting instructor at Iowa planned to be away from campus the summer of 1964 and did not want Dreisbach to be influenced by a young “hot dog” painter who would be his summer faculty replacement. The professor encouraged Dreisbach to study ceramics and sculpture on a separate part of campus. A two-credit course in glassblowing was part of the curriculum. (Curiously, the young “hot dog” painter he had been told to avoid was none other than David Hockney.)

Dreisbach then continued his studies at the University of Wisconsin, earning an MFA. He was inspired by three people who were among the most influential in the flowering of the American glass movement. Two are known as the “fathers” of Studio Glass in America. Dominick Labino, a glassblower with a fascination for the science and technology of glass, invented the compact furnace that made it possible to blow glass outside a glass factory, and he supplied the raw material, cullet marbles. The second, Corning-born Harvey K. Littleton, spearheaded the two renowned Toledo, Ohio glass workshops of March and June 1962, and he worked tirelessly to place glass into schools and museums. Dreisbach’s third mentor was the German-born Erwin Eisch, who inspired him as a painter and glass engraver and who also excited everyone with his German Expressionist-influenced sculpted glass.

It was a time when the excitement of working with glass was just catching on. Often using a trailer equipped with a furnace, annealing oven, bench, water bucket, and propane tank, all pulled behind an aging sedan, artists like Brian Lonsway “showed their stuff” to students and other artists in workshops and demos. No one traveled more often and farther than Dreisbach. “I crisscrossed the United States making lobsters in Maine, palm trees in Florida, snail cups and chain saws in the Pacific Northwest, and even a mardi gras float in New Orleans,” Dreisbach recalls. “I also demonstrated filigree cane work, murrine, and hot color additions.”

Now an historian of the American Studio Glass movement, as well as one of its players, Dreisbach visited the first summer of the Pilchuck Glass School in 1971. He has been active with the school as teacher, advisor and trustee for 37 years! Dreisbach helped found the Glass Art Society, which gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2002. Often referred to as a “teacher’s teacher,” he has taught at most schools and major glass programs in the country. The Corning Museum of Glass presented Dreisbach with its Rakow Commission in 1993, inviting him to make a ceremonial piece commemorating the 30th anniversary of the seminal workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art. Developing a new color he called “Royal Purple,” he produced a blown and engraved piece that has drawings, on one side, representing the relatively crude glass studios of the mid 60s. The other side commemorates his own 30 years in glassmaking. A relief-engraved map of the United States is covered with more than 100 dots showing the locations of his lectures and workshops and images of the two vehicles in which he crisscrossed the country. Fittingly, he refers to the map as his “seed-spreading road show.”