Dorie Gutherie

Dorie Gutherie is a glass artist that uses the medium in a variety  of interesting and successful ways. From her standalone sculptures to intricate boxes to portrait "Nocturnal Veils", her work transfixes the viewer and creates a new world.

Born in 1982 in Moline, Illinois, Dorie was first exposed to the medium when she stumbled upon a small glass studio in her hometown. Since graduating from Illinois State University in 2008, Guthrie has continued her studies, being awarded scholarships, at Corning Museum of Glass, Penland School of Craft, and Pittsburgh Glass Center where she furthered her technique.

Over the last five years Dorie worked on staff at the Pilchuck Glass School, and also has been a teacher’s assistant at Corning Museum of Glass, Pilchuck, Haystack Mountain School of Craft and Pittsburgh Glass Center. Ms. Guthrie was selected to demonstrate flameworking at the 2013 Glass Art Society Conference in Toledo, Ohio.

Before uprooting to Brooklyn, Dorie taught kilncasting, flameworking, fusing, and imagery techniques at Brazee Street Studio, a Bullseye KGRC in Cincinnati, Ohio. Bullseye Glass Co. Resource Center has given her a solo show in NY, opening June 1, 2019. She is currently teaching, fabricating and working with visiting artists at UrbanGlass downtown Brooklyn.

Nancy Callahan

Nancy Callahan is a visual artist who works in a variety of mediums. She is known for her screen prints, drawings, and installations as well as her work in the field of artist’s books.

She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and has taught well-over a hundred workshops on innovative book structures. Her work is housed in many permanent collections throughout the United States and Europe including Yale University, Vassar College, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, University of Indiana at Bloomington, University of Michigan University of Delaware, Library of Congress, Rochester Institute of Technology, Wesleyan University Virginia Commonwealth University, Women’s Studio Workshop Saint Stephen Museum, Hungary, Bucknell University, SUNY Albany, and Harvard University.

Jim Bachor

Jim Bachor is best known for his pothole mosaics. His artist statement says it all:

Trying to leave your mark in this world fascinates me. Ancient history fascinates me. 

Volunteering to work on an archaeological dig in Pompeii helped merge these two interests into my art. In the ancient world, mosaics were used to capture images of everyday life. These

Inquiries?
jim@bachor.com
312-498-5287

colorful pieces of stone or glass set in mortar were the photographs of empires long past. Marble and glass do not fade. Mortar is mortar. An ancient mosaic looks exactly as intended by the artist who produced it over two millennia ago. What else can claim that kind of staying power? I find this idea simply amazing.

Using the same materials, tools and methods of the archaic craftsmen, I create mosaics that speak of modern things in an ancient voice. My work locks into mortar unexpected concepts drawn from the present.

By harnessing and exploiting the limitations of this indestructible technique, my work surprises the viewer while challenging long-held notions of what a mosaic should be. Like low-tech pixels,hundreds if not thousands of tiny, hand-cut pieces of italian glass and marble comprise my work.

This work is my mark.

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Karen Lamonte

Since 1990, Karen LaMonte has created sublime and enigmatic works in glass, ceramic, bronze, iron, paper, and marble. Her works range from monotype prints to monumental stone sculptures, and explore themes of beauty, gender, identity, and the natural world.

LaMonte received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and explored an early passion for glass sculpture at studios in New York and New Jersey. In 1999, she traveled to Prague on a Fulbright scholarship to work in the glass casting studios of Eastern Bohemia; while there, she created Vestige (2000), a glass sculpture depicting a life-sized dress with the wearer absent. This work garnered international acclaim, thanks in part to an essay about it by renowned art critic Arthur Danto.

In the early 2000s, LaMonte established a permanent studio in Prague, where she created her first major body of work: the series Absence Adorned. Like Vestige, these life-sized glass sculptures examine the interplay between public and private identities through garments that are opulently draped on invisible female figures; the works represent a re-invention of the traditional portrayal of the nude. Sculptures from Absence Adorned were first shown in a solo exhibition at the Czech Museum of Fine Arts in Prague, and have been widely exhibited since.

Drawing on the classical aesthetics of Absence Adorned, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia displayed works from the series in their 2009 exhibition Contemporary Amongst the Classics. The exhibition combined classical sculpture with contemporary works to highlight continuity of style and creativity across generations.

To further explore the nexus of clothing, culture, and identity, LaMonte traveled to Kyoto in 2007; there, she studied the design, construction, symbolism, and significance of the traditional Japanese kimono. Back in Prague, she used biometric data of Japanese women to create dress sculptures in ceramic, cast glass, rusted iron, and bronze. Her selection of materials for the works was inspired by aspects of Buddhist philosophy. She titled the series Floating World, after scenes in Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. These sculptures have been featured in exhibitions at museums including the Chazen Museum of Art and the Hunter Museum of American Art. They are also included in permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; and elsewhere.

LaMonte next found inspiration in the music of John Field and Frederic Chopin, as well as the paintings of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. She channeled their atmospheric, night-themed compositions through her Nocturnes series of dress sculptures, for which she designed and sewed evening dresses to “wrap the female body in night” with white bronze, blue glass, and rusted iron. Some of these figures are modeled in reclining positions, a subtle subversion of the traditional odalisque through the removal of the nude body itself.

Within her Nocturnes series, LaMonte created Etudes, one-third-scale works that reference the historic Parisian project Théâtre de la Mode. During World War II, artists, dancers, and fashion designers created touring exhibits of small fashion mannequins installed in scaled theater sets, in hopes of helping the country move beyond the horrors of war. LaMonte’s Etudes–which echo that resilient wartime artistry–have been displayed with the larger-scale Nocturnes in exhibitions including Embodied Beauty at the Hunter Museum of American Art. In 2017 and 2019, LaMonte displayed her Nocturnes at Glasstress, an exhibition mounted concurrently with the Venice Biennale.

Recent works by LaMonte focus on clouds and climate change, reflecting her long standing fascination with themes of common and interlaced humanity. Her monumental 2017 marble sculpture Cumulus, also shown at Glasstress in Venice, was modeled from real-life weather data in collaboration with climatologists from the California Institute of Technology.

LaMonte’s newest body of work uses biomimetic materials to reinvent historic Venus figurines for the 21st century.

The Next Big Art Movement - Mosaics and the Artists Breaking the Mold

By George Tibbett, curator

Perhaps even more exciting than the opening of the anxiously anticipated extension of the Q subway line along 2nd Avenue in Manhattan was the mosaic art in each new station. Many NYC subway stations have some mosaics but these new stations bring it to a new artistic level with artwork by Sarah Sze, Chuck Close and Vik Muniz all translated into large mosaics.

So will this push the art of mosaics into greater acceptance in the established art world?  Mosaics as with ceramics, has long been relegated to crafts rather than fine art. But this may be changing. Established ceramicists, such as Betty Woodman, have had solo shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Emerging ceramicists like Lulu Yee have been the toast of Bushwick Open Studios. So as go ceramics, so go mosaics?

Mosaics should mean more than just a jigsaw puzzle of pieces that form an image. Great mosaic art should expand the range of the medium. Here is a list of the top five ground-breaking mosaic artists working today:

Jorge Campos aka Pixel

Pixel, is a Santiago street artist whose mosaic work pixelates cultural heroes such as Nicanor Parra, artists such as Van Gogh, and iconic artwork like from Roy Lichtenstein. Pixel brings his mosaics to the streets where his work blends with other forms of street art for people to enjoy on the streets of Santiago. According to MosaicArtNow, Pixel explains the relationship of his art with the public. He says, “At first, people think they are facing a painting. Approaching and touching, they realize they are in fact facing a mosaic. Then, they wonder if it was really hand made.  They also play with distance to appreciate the work in detail, take photos, and when the image is revealed perfect and detailed on the small screens of their smartphones, they fall for it!”

 

Sonia King

Using a range of different materials, King’s mosaics are complex compilations that, as her website states, stimulate the imagination. Some of her work is described as coded messages. She asserts, “These mosaics explore the dynamic tension created when familiar organic shapes can be seen as both macro and micro visions of our landscape. Shapes that are simultaneously at rest and moving, pulling the tesserae together into a complex composition while exploring the interaction of each element and the mystery of the spaces between.”

 

Charlene Weisler

Weisler describes herself as an urban artist with an interest in decaying and discarded objects. First starting in photography, Weisler was captivated by decaying, peeling and eroding street art. From there, she gravitated to collecting and assembling discarded and broken objects to not only capture their inherent beauty and mystery but also to create new mosaic images. She explains, “My mosaics are often unplanned and are created organically as the pieces come together to tell their story. A broken mug, a piece of shattered plate or a discarded misshapen object are all important elements in my work.”

 

 

 

 

 

Isaiah Zagar

Isaiah Zagar might be best known for one of his greatest achievements – The Magic Garden in Philadelphia, which is essentially a full house and side yard of compiled mosaic art.  As described by Lonely Planet, “Think of all the things you have thrown away this week – an old shoe, a broken mirror, a loose button, an empty bottle of wine. Then picture all of it broken apart, artfully cobbled together with quirky objects like antique tiles and hand-carved Mexican dolls, and applied to a wall with cement, clay, paint and glue to form a gloriously colorful mural. This is the work of septuagenarian Philadelphia-born Isaiah Zagar: mosaic artist, world traveler, visionary, dumpster diver.”

 

Domingo Zapata

Better known as a painter, Zapata had a chance encounter when he walked into Koko Mosaico in Ravenna, Italy.  It was there that he saw the potential of mosaics to translate his paintings into formative artwork. “With these pieces, I wanted to create great contrast and pay tribute to the history of art.  I find taking a painting done in graffiti and recreating it using these ancient techniques helps me to understand the contemporary moment. These works represent to me where we have been and where we are going – they derive their strength from this duality,” he states on MosaicArtNow.

Loren Stump

Loren Stump is a self-taught artist based in California who is taking glass blowing to the next level, making murines, rods of colored glass that are melted together in particular patterns.

The surprise, as with a geode, comes when the glass is sliced open, revealing a scene constructed out of the glass rods that is often inspired by medieval art. The murrina method of glassblowing is more than 4,000 years old and originated in the Middle East, but it’s perhaps most famous to Westerners through its Italian variations, which were developed on the island of Murano. It mostly differs from the well-known millefiori technique, which mostly deals with abstract patterns like stars and flowers, through its attempts at more sophisticated subjects.

It is not just the novelty of Stumps work that makes it so intruiging, it is the quiet beauty of each slice that reveals an amazing complexity and ability.

 

Stephanie Hirsch

Through her use of beads, sequins and embroidery, Stephanie Hirsch's canvases are literally 'illuminated' with phrases of enlightenment and hope. Continuing her personal investigations into individual development through text, Hirsch ups the ante by removing the "easy access" of familiar graphic elements inspired by iconic punk-rock album covers and adding a recognizable figurative element. The use of the figurative element humanizes her compositions and is based upon self-portraits driven by her fascination on the whole social media "selfie" craze.  Wanting to delve deeper into how "selfies" create an image of how we want to be portrayed in the world rather than who we actually are, she shot her "selfies" while saying and feeling the emotional content in the compositions.  Hirsch states, "I was also inspired by Cindy Sherman's work titled 'Aging Socialite.' Sherman perfectly executed the daunting look in the eyes that spoke of insecurity and fear of a life no longer lived.  My fear of just existing while living promoted my 'selfie' study as well.  I am also profoundly influenced by Barbara Kruger whose text based work questions autonomy and desire, which I yearn and struggle for within myself."

 

The journey of how Hirsch struggles with her external and internal self creates a unique entry point for the artwork.  The viewer can identify and reflect upon their own personal experiences by simply reading the words and connecting with the visage.  This simple, yet profound shift creates the intimate and introspective underpinning to the work allowing the viewer to oscillate between the beauty of the materials and the message implied. Using insights like "I'd Rather Die on My Feet than Live on My Knees," "I Was Not Built to Break," "We All Find Our Way," and "It's Never Too Late," Hirsch weaves a story of overcoming one's personal adversity and building an inner spirituality that hopefully filters out into the world.

 

Stephanie Hirsch has shown in exhibitions in New York, the Hamptons, Miami and San Francisco. She was a featured artist in Miami Design District's Art Walk (2012) and showcased in the Mercedes Benz VIP lounge at Lincoln Center during New York Fashion Week (2012).  Hirsch was among 30 artists commissioned to create a unique commemorative crown for display in Harrods (London) in celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee (2012). Hirsch is the founder of Inca resort wear and author of "Mother Nurture," published by William Morrow (2008).  She lives and works in New York City.

Edward Burne-Jones

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company.

Burne-Jones was closely involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition of stained glass art in England; his stained glass works include the windows of St. Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham, St Martin's Church in Brampton, Cumbria, the church designed by Philip Webb, All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge and in Christ Church, Oxford.

Burne-Jones's early paintings show the heavy inspiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by the 1860s Burne-Jones was discovering his own artistic "voice". In 1877, he was persuaded to show eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery (a new rival to the Royal Academy). These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right, and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement. In addition to painting and stained glass, Burne-Jones worked in a variety of crafts; including designing ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, mosaics and book illustration, most famously designing woodcuts for the Kelmscott Press's Chaucer in 1896.

To some, Burne-Jone's work is too sentimental. But to others, it is work on a grand and mystical scale. His technique is flawless and through the use of form, color and a dash of drama, the work evokes a majestic historical significance that draws the viewer in. Moody, often to the point of meloncholy, one cannot be but moved when in the presence of a Burne-Jones artwork.