The Washington Glass School is thrilled to celebrate the achievements of two of our talented resident artists, April Shelford and Kate Barfield, whose works have been selected for prestigious contemporary art exhibitions. Their unique glass artworks showcase the innovative spirit and technical mastery that define our studio’s creative community.
Artist: Kate Barfield; “Tribute to Ms. Mailou Jones”, Fused Glass, steel, wood; Photo Credit: Pete Duvall
Kate Barfield’s Vibrant Works at “The Power of Color” Exhibition
Kate Barfield’s captivating glass pieces, Tribute to Ms. Lois Mailou Jones and Rejoice Wind Up Bird, have been selected for the upcoming The Power of Color exhibition, sponsored by MD Fine Arts at the Circle Gallery in Annapolis, Maryland. This show highlights the dynamic use of color in contemporary art, and Kate’s work perfectly embodies this theme. Her piece Tribute to Ms. Lois Mailou Jones pays homage to the renowned Black DC painter, capturing the angular shapes, curves, and vibrant “POW!” of color that defined Jones’ work. Rejoice Wind Up Bird further showcases Kate’s ability to infuse glass with narrative depth and vivid expression. We invite you to visit the Circle Gallery to experience these stunning works in person and see how Kate’s artistry transforms glass into a powerful storytelling medium. MFA’S Circle Gallery from July 30th – August 23rd, 2025
Artist: April Shelford; “To Monet”, Fused Glass; Photo Credit: Pete Duvall
April Shelford’s To Monet in “A Sense of Place” Online Exhibition
April Shelford’s evocative piece To Monet has been selected for the A Sense of Place online exhibition, launched on July 7, 2025, by the Contemporary Glass Society (CGS), the UK’s foremost organization supporting glass artists. This global celebration of glass art features 77 international artists, each exploring how glass captures personal and cultural connections to place. April’s To Monet reflects her signature focus on color and pattern, inspired by her meticulous attention to detail and questing curiosity. Her fused glass work, reminiscent of the historian’s craft, assembles diverse elements into a cohesive and meaningful whole, evoking a profound sense of place. This online exhibition offers a unique opportunity to explore April’s work alongside other visionary glass artists from around the world. Visit the CGS website to immerse yourself in this remarkable showcase.
Celebrating Our Artists’ Vision and Craft
Both Kate and April exemplify the Washington Glass School’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of glass as a medium for contemporary art. Their selections for these prestigious exhibitions highlight their individual talents and the vibrant creative energy fostered at our studio. We are incredibly proud of their contributions to the global glass art community and invite you to join us in celebrating their achievements.
Stay tuned for more updates on our artists’ exhibitions and events, and visit the Washington Glass School to discover the transformative power of glass art!
Virginia’s Lorton Workhouse Arts Center opened their 10th Annual Glass International, an exhibition highlighting the depth and breadth of contemporary functional and sculptural glass art. This year, in celebration of Workhouse Arts’ 10th year exhibiting glass they opened eligibility to include artists working internationally.
Kate Barfield “Dream of the Wind-Up Bird”Patricia de Poel Wilberg
Washington Glass School was well represented by WGS Resident Artists Kate Barfield, Patrica de Poel Wilberg, and April Shelford- congratulations!
Washington Glass School artists (L-R) April Shelford, Kate Barfield, Patrica de Poel Wilberg, Arden Colley.
Exhibiting Glass International Artists: Karen Abbott, Kate Barfield, Denise Bohart Brown, Beryl Brenner, Lee Campbell, Guillermo Castaneda Jr., Marcy Chevali, Anthony D’Amico, Patricia de Poel Wilberg, Jeanne Marie Ferraro, Olga Gobernik Kon, Ruth Gowell, Jennifer Hand, Mollie Hansen, Jennifer Hecker, Marla Heiner, Sara Hitchcock, Mary Jones, Martin Kremer, Kelly Lacy, Becca Low, Sandi Martina, Kimberly McKinnis, Shawn Messenger, Paul Messink, Jack Schmidt, Michael Scupholm, April Shelford, Madeline Shir, Ori Shir, Aric Snee, Chuchen Song, Tim Spurchise, Heather Sutherland, Tabitha Thierjung, Katherine Thomas, Exer Thurston, Michael Tracy, Snuffy Wright
April G Shelford with her glass work “Good Lord Bird” at Strathmore Mansion exhibit
April G. Shelford is an intellectual historian that has recently published a new book that seeks to reposition the colonial Atlantic in early modern intellectual history, tracing the advent of particular practices and ideas amongst white male colonists – planters, officials, doctors, merchants, and military men. As described in a review of April’s book by Ingrid Schreiber of the University of Oxford, these “Enlightened” colonists sought to assert their identity as legitimate thinkers and civilized, modern individuals. This was, on the one hand, an attempt to assume a shared culture and gentility with Europeans, and colonists eagerly emulated the fashions of metropolitan consumer culture, including in the amassing of globes, telescopes, and musical instruments. Whether asserting a European or uniquely Caribbean identity, colonists relied on the figure of the enslaved as a symbolic Other to civilization, thus reinforcing a logic of racial superiority. How did these as models of colonial morality and with their sense of noblesse oblige reconcile the realities all the while maintaining a notoriety for cruelty toward the slaves on their own properties? April’s new book brings to life some all-too forgotten corners of Caribbean history.
We caught up with the multitalented artist and historian April a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
What inspired you to delve into the intellectual life of the Caribbean during the 18th century?
As we historians like to say, it was all contingent. About 25 years ago, I’d been on the academic job market for a while & couldn’t get a position. (Since then, the situation for new phds has become just dire.) A colleague heard about a two-year position at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, & he & another colleague went to bat for me. So I was hired to teach European history, mostly early modern (roughly 1450-1789). I trained in 17th-century France–the “Great Century” of Louis XIV–& here I was in a former British colony built on the foundation of very profitable agricultural commodities (chiefly sugar) w/a labor force of thousands & thousands of enslaved Africans. I knew nothing about this history, & a colleague at UWI suggested I “look around” & see whether I could find topics to research. The rest, as they say, is history, if not in a straight line!
Illustration from April Shelford’s book “A Caribbean Enlightenment”
How do you hope your book contributes to our understanding of intellectual history in colonial Caribbean worlds?
When I first began working on the eighteenth-century Caribbean, the dominant view in a sense was that there was no intellectual history to tell. Then & now, the image of White Caribbean societies was that they were utterly philistine. That view was increasingly changing among scholars as I was researching this book. And please note: the cliche of philistinism was like all cliches–there’s always a tough kernel of truth. But some early research convinced me that that wasn’t the whole story, & that this other part was worth telling.
When most people think of Enlightenment, they think of Voltaire, Adam Smith, in North America, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. There are a couple of prominent Caribbean intellectuals, French & British. But I was doing something different. For a long time, scholars have been rethinking Enlightenment; the result is studying how Enlightenment ideas spread & most importantly how people used them to understand the world they lived in, developed & extended them to change their situations. And that was the point: acquiring “useful” knowledge to “improve” some aspects of personal and social life.
Some examples: When a lot of Americans think about Enlightenment, they think about politics, rights & their foundation. And you certainly see that in the Caribbean. When the editor of a newspaper in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) published many articles on the Stamp Act crisis in North America, he was giving to French colonial readers more ideas about defining their rights vs the French government–& believe me, they were no happier with their colonial governors than colonists in Virginia or Massachusetts. But the Enlightenment was also–maybe even more on both sides of the Atlantic–about agricultural improvement. So you had French colonists writing into the newspaper about improving the cultivation & processing of existing crops, consulting books on botany & chemistry, sending information to metropolitan scientific societies. Publications were most important in spreading Enlightenment ideas, so I spend a lot of time in two chapters giving a sense of how many books were coming into Jamaica, what kind, how people shared them & what they might have made of them.
As these were slave societies, as this was a period during which ideas of equality AND race were developing, & as anti-slavery feeling was emerging later in the century–well, it all bubbles up in the sources. French colonists wrote planters manuals, some of which get into questions of managing the enslaved. Assumptions about the “nature” of the enslaved, their capacities, some explicit, some implicit undergird the authors’ discussions. An overseer in British Jamaica read through a lot of material on slavery & the enslaved, practical advice & “scientific” assertions that we now completely reject. What did he make of all this? Tough to determine from his notes, but his reading exposed him to a lot of ideas, not all of them in agreement.
One of the things I think is most valuable about my study is showing how Enlightenment could contribute to the making of a White colonial identity, a “politics of culture,” as an American colonial historian once put it. Becoming “enlightened,” if you will, was a way for colonists to push back against metropolitan characterizations of them as degenerate Philistines. It was also a way to assert that their authority over the enslaved was not just a matter of brute strength & violence– the Caribbean was a place of terrifying violence– but that it was also legitimated by cultural superiority.
April Shelford working on her glass sculptures at the Washington Glass School.
As a glass artist and author, do you find any parallels or connections between your artistic process and the historical narratives you explore in your book?
During a lot of the period of researching & writing this book, I was getting into glass, & I thought that these were just different. But there are similarities. As a historian, I’m really source driven. I read an eighteenth-century book, & I wonder, why did this person think this way? Who were they? Who were they talking to? What did their readers make of it? So when I start, I’m not at all clear how it’s going to come out, what story I’m telling, what else I need to know, what my work might contribute to historical debates. Eventually, I get there. Glass is THE source, & more often than not I don’t know what I might be getting at with it. Most of my work is based on slicing up bigger pieces into smaller, then assembling them in a way that makes sense. Writing history, I’m always assembling bits and pieces into something that (I hope!) means something, that I feel I’ve responsibly interpreted. Then you open the kiln door & get something you didn’t expect, so you have to rethink, sometimes dump it. Believe me, when I write, a lot ends up on the cutting room floor (sorry for the mixed metaphors!). Writing & glass-making are both processes, & you have to trust the process.
April Shelford, “Gravity’s Loom” 2023, fused glass
You are quickly rising in the glass art world – do you see any parallels in the academic world and the art world?
First, please, I don’t see myself as rising in the glass art world, though I’m flattered you think so. But I can say something about parallels. I see history as a humanities subject first & foremost. These are called disciplines because it takes a lot to learn your craft. The humanities are about human beings, & human beings are terrifyingly complicated, so we’ll be wrangling about what it means to be human forever. That doesn’t make the question less important–if anything it makes it more central to what we think we should do as individuals, as a society, even as a world. And with AI coming on strong, we might want to get to work on it yesterday. What more basic question than the meaning of being human is there in art? And you have to learn your craft, your discipline–you have to work at it. But there’s joy in the work, historical, artistic. Unfortunately both endeavors are horribly undervalued, & it seems to get worse & worse. We all know about art programs & humanities departments being cut back, even closed. This diminishes all of us, every one of us, as human beings.
Washington Glass School Resident Artists at “A Caribbean Enlightenment” book launch. L-R Nancy Kronstadt, April Shelford, Patricia Kent and Kate Barfield.
Tell us about your next project. Is there a new book in the works? Perhaps a glass mystery?!
No idea. I have some much more modest historical writing projects in mind. I’m currently involved in an editorial project with an academic journal, & I’m loving it. With glass, I want to push myself to go bigger & learn some new techniques. I’d like to explore photo transfer: In my mind, I see a big book–now there’s crossover! I also feel I can say more. Making something that’s aesthetically pleasing–that’s enough. But I love it when someone feels a piece speaks to them.