The Washington Glass School

Four innovative artists are at the center of a new exhibit at the Renwick Gallery opening September 9, 2016. Visions and Revisions presents the work of Steven Young Lee, Kristen Morgin, Jennifer Trask, and Norwood Viviano. These artists work across numerous mediums, including raw clay, porcelain, metal, glass and gold. They take innovative approaches to their selected mediums and share a fascination with themes of transformation, ruin, and rebirth. Their visual sensibilities range from traditional Asian pottery to vintage Americana, and from the romance of the Victorian Era to the algorhythmic precision of the computer. Each is actively engaged in a dialogue with an idyllic past and in making sense of it for the present moment, investigating what we carry with us and what we leave behind as we remake ourselves time and again.

Norwood Viviano; “Mining Industries: Downtown Boston”; 2015; Rapid prototyped pattern kilncast glass, mirrored glass, fabricated steel and transparency.

Norwood Viviano explores American cities and industry through glass and metal sculptures. He combines data from LiDAR scan technology, antique maps, and historical census data, and employs techniques as varied as bronze casting, kiln-fusing, glass blowing, and 3-D printing to map fluctuations of growth and decline as industry and other forces exert pressure on populations. His work engages not only the geography but also the history of a place, imbuing each object with layers of information to tell stories of how urbanization, immigration, and industry shape both personal and shared histories.

The exhibition includes more than 70 objects showcasing a range of early and new works by each artist. The artists were selected by Nora Atkinson, the museum’s Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft; Suzanne Ramljak, curator of exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts and editor at Metalsmith; and Anna Walker, the Windgate Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Craft at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Visions and Revisions is the seventh installment of the biennial Renwick Invitational.

Visions and Revisions: Renwick Invitational 2016

September 9, 2016 – January 8, 2017
Renwick Gallery
17th and Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC

This summer the permanent collection returns to the Smithsonian Museum’s Renwick Gallery with a dynamic new presentation of 80+ objects celebrating craft as a discipline and an approach to living differently in the modern world.

The installation, titled “Connections” will include iconic favorites alongside new acquisitions made during the museum’s renovation, which will be displayed at the museum for the first time. Nora Atkinson, The Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft, selected the objects and conceived the innovative presentation. Atkinson’s arrangement breaks from typical display formats based on chronology or material to instead focus on the interconnectivity of objects and the overlapping stories they tell.

Steven Young Lee, Vase with Landscape and Dinosaurs, 2014, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Richard Fryklund, Giselle and Ben Huberman, David and Clemmer Montague, and museum purchase through the Howard Kottler Endowment for Ceramic Art

In selecting both pioneering and contemporary pieces, Atkinson selections also explore the underlying current of craft as a balancing, humanistic force in the face of an ever-more efficiency-driven, virtual world. The exhibition highlights the evolution of the craft field as it transitions into a new phase at the hands of contemporary artists, showcasing the activist values, optimism, and uninhibited approach of today’s young artists, which in some way echoes the communal spirt and ideology of the pioneers of the American Studio Craft Movement in their heyday.

The artworks range from the 1930’s through today and span numerous media. New acquisitions such as John Grade’s Shoal (Bone Shoal Sonance), Judith Schaechter’s The Birth of Eve, Marie Watt’sEdson’s Flag, and Akio Takamori’s Woman and Child make their debut in the gallery while seminal works including Wendell Castle’s Ghost Clock, Karen LaMonte’s Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery, Albert Paley’s Portal Gates, and Lenore Tawney’s Box of Falling Stars return to view.