This week, we have the honor of hosting Marvin Lipofsky in the Hot Shop. He was one of the first students of the American glass pioneer Harvey Littleton and has had an extensive career teaching and working in glass. He founded the glass program at the California College of Arts and Crafts as well as the Glass Art Society.  He’s best known for abstract sculptures and a series of works inspired by pop culture, including hamburgers and pickles.

I stumbled across the transcript of an interview with Lipofsky conducted by the Smithsonian in 2003. It’s quite long, but here are a couple interesting quotes from the beginning.

“I think that abstraction found me, rather than I finding abstraction. It just seemed to be the way that I expressed myself in art school. I studied industrial design at the University of Illinois. At that time, in the late ‘50s, there wasn’t a sculpture major. I knew that my interests were in making things. I knew that I wasn’t going to be a brain surgeon or a lawyer or a doctor, so design had sort of been the only choice that I really kind of recognized. But while I was an undergraduate, I took every sculptural course that was offered, so I gravitated towards that three-dimensional – making things in three dimensions, and I gravitated towards the abstract.”

On art vs craft:
“…there isn’t anyone, any group of people who are more limited in what they use than painters, who paint on four-by-six foot canvases using oil or acrylic paint. I mean, there’s nothing more limiting than that, so it can’t just be material. And again, I think it’s primarily education and socialization – socially, where – how people feel, where they came from, what they did, what their experiences were, because if you say, well, craftspeople always use the same material, hmm, that’s quite interesting, when the majority of painters never deviate from the canvas and oil, I don’t understand that. I don’t understand why that’s better than someone who uses clay. So, I think, again, it’s the success of what they make, and I think that’s more important that someone is more – I would rather have a wonderful bowl to eat cereal out of that I really felt good about, enjoyed looking at, then have some horrible velvet Elvis Presley hanging on my wall.”