Blog

Washington’s Innovative Glass Scene Seen at Artomatic 2024

trish kent, patricia de poel wilberg, nancy kronstadt, april shelford, graciela granek, kate barfield
Washington Glass School Co Founder Erwin Timmers outlines the Studio Glass Movement timeline to audience at Artomatic 2024.

In the 1960s, The American Studio Glass movement transformed glass from craft into fine art.

Artomatic helped create the movement, as after the 2000 Artomatic, the Smithsonian Museum acquired artist Tim Tate’s glass sculpture that was on display. Artist Erwin Timmers’ artwork was also on exhibit at that Artomatic, and after that show, the two began to collaborate, later teaming up to start the Washington Glass School & Studio with the funds from the sale of Tate’s glass artwork to the Renwick.

Washington Glass School Co-Founder Tim Tate’s work at Artomatic 2024.

In 2008, Artomatic organized an exhibit at the Washington Glass School, showcasing the unique approaches to glass sculpture in three “glass” cities: Washington, DC; Toledo, Ohio; and Sunderland, England, fostering international partnerships and collaborative ventures.

Glass works by VA-based artist Griffon Dillon on exhibit at Artomatic 2024.

As the 21st century unfolded, artists across various media have shown growing interest in glass as a creative medium, despite its technical challenges. The Washington Glass Scene has emerged as a hub of innovation, elevating glass to a significant position in contemporary art. The Washington Glass School encourages artists to push boundaries and redefine the possibilities of glass as a fine art medium.

There is a great example of works by DC glass creatives on display at Artomatic 2024, open now thru April 28th. Although the glass works are on many of the 8 floors of art, the 5th floor is the central spot to get ones glass fix. Some photos of Washington Glass School’s reception are featured in this post.

Glass artwork by artist Michael Janis seen at Artomatic 2024 on M Street.

The James Renwick Alliance will hold a craft tour of works on display at Artomatic 2024, March 24th, at 1-3PM More info here on the free tour: James Renwick Alliance Craft Tour – 5th Floor Washington Glass School Installation – Artomatic.

patricia de poel wilberg, kate barfield, april shelford
Curator Howard Cohen reviewing glass art on exhibit at Artomatic 2024.

Baltimore based art curator Howard Cohen came this past weekend to Artomatic to handpick glass artists from the DC area for a contemporary glass showcase exhibit at Montpelier Art Center this June. Howard was able to talk with many of the artists and get insight to their narratives and process. Looking forward to the upcoming show!

artomatic 2024

Artomatic, 2100 M Street NW, Washington, DC 20037

Book Signing at Artomatic

The first comprehensive book about the Washington, D.C., art world, this study features humorous and unique stories about the artists and art districts of one of the U.S.’s most visited cities. The city’s many firsts include are the first modern art museum, the first African-American gallery, and the first art fair. Important in the feminist art movement, it hosted the opening of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Featuring trends in portraits and landscapes, galleries and museums, nonprofits, cooperatives, art fairs, family stories and the “Artomatic Experience”! 

Meet Author Brett Abrams -On Level 5 Reception/Glass Lobby

Artomatic Event: The Washington Glass Scene, March 16th, 5-7PM

Step into a world where glass transcends its ordinary form and becomes a canvas of boundless creativity. The Washington Glass Scene on display in Artomatic’s Level 5 invites you to celebrate the kaleidoscopic fusion of artistry and craftsmanship on April 16th, 2024 from 5-7PM. Prepare to be captivated as the magic of glass takes center stage in a creative showcase unlike any other. Join us as we celebrate the transformative power of this versatile medium, where every piece tells a unique story and invites you to explore the depths of imagination. Meet the artists that are making the Washington Glass Scene a distinctive voice and push the boundaries, redefining the possibilities of glass. Event is Free and open to the Public!

Artomatic 25th Anniversary Event: Celebrate DC’s Glass Scene!

2100 M Street, Washington, DC 20037

A Look Into Museum of Glass’ “A Two-Way Mirror”

The Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass (AACG) online First Friday Fired Up! program on Friday, March 1, at 1 p.m. ET presents a virtual tour and panel discussion with artists in the current exhibition at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, A Two-Way Mirror: Double Consciousness in Contemporary Glass by Black Artists. See the works and hear from several of the artists who have used glass to create work that deconstructs social, cultural, gender, and racial identity concerns. The artists range in background from African American, to British, to Puerto Rican. Each artist uses glass to reflect thoughts and bodies that have historically been fraught with exploitation. Due to its reflectivity and translucence, glass is an apt medium to interrogate identity constructs such as the theory of double consciousness presented by W.E.B. Du Bois in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk. Artists from the exhibition participating in the panel are Layo BrightCrystal CampbellChris Day, and Leo Tecosky. The panel’s moderator is Jabari Owens-Bailey, Museum of Glass Curatorial Education Program Manager.Layo Bright, from Nigeria, explores migration, legacy, and identity through hybrid portraits, textiles, and mixed media. She has participated in Art Basel Hong Kong, and is the recipient of Pittsburgh Glass Center’s Ron Desmett Award and Urban Glass’ Visiting Artist Fellowship.Crystal Campbell is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, and she uses underlined archival material to consider historical gaps. She received the 2022 Creative Capital award and the Pollock-Krasner Award.Chris Day is a biracial glass and ceramic artist who uses the beauty of glass to make comments on issues of race. He received a special commendation at last year’s British Glass Biennale, and was selected to participate in the prestigious Artrooms Awards in London.Leo Tecosky deconstructs iconography through an impressive range of glass-making techniques. He juxtaposes the complexity of visual language with the fluidity and transparency of glass. He is the recipient of the 36th annual Corning Museum Rakow Commission as well as the 2023 Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Craft. The AACG FIRED UP program is free and open to the public, so please spread the word and join this engaging and important discussion!


Exhibiting Artists: Anthony Amoako-Attah, Radcliffe Bailey, Layo Bright, Crystal Z. Campbell, Chris Day, Cheryl Derricotte, Alejandro Guzman, Mildred Howard, Jason McDonald, Parfums de Vigny, Ebony G. Patterson, Pellatt & Green, Related Tactics, Salviati and Company, Joyce J. Scott, Shikeith, Therman Statom, Renée Stout, Barbara Earl Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Leo Tecosky, Kara Walker, Fred Wilson.

Click here to register for Fired Up!

BLACK ARTISTS OF DC PRESENTS: BACK.FORWARD

Black Artists of DC Presents: Back.Forward

Curated by Jarvis DuBois.

How it all started and where they are now in their artistic practice prompts this exhibition of Black Artists of DC (BADC) at Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland. Focusing on the influences, challenges, and discoveries experienced by the artists and the trajectory of their creative journeys, they will present earlier and current works in conversation in the gallery. During the exhibition, an in-person discussion will allow the artists to shed more light on the preparation and process involved in their art-making.

Back.Forward

Public Reception: Saturday, February 10, 2-4 pm

Artist Talks: Saturday, February 24, 3-5 pm

Montpelier Arts Center

9652 Muirkirk Rd, Laurel, MD 20708

Black Artists of DC Presents: Back.Forward Public Reception – Park and Recreation – Prince Georges County MD (pgparks.com)

April Shelford Reads Agency and Identity in the Caribbean Enlightenment

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.

April is also one of the Washington Glass School Faculty and Resident Artist, and she recently had a solo exhibit of her glass sculptures at the Brentwood Arts “Front Window Gallery”.

A Caribbean Enlightenment: Intellectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, 1750–1792 Cambridge University Press, 2023, ISBN 9781009360807

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!

A Caribbean Enlightenment
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.

Follow April on Instagram: April Shelford (@aprilglassshelford)

GLASS COAST WEEKEND 2024

This week, glass universe goes south – to Florida! The Glass Art Fair takes place in Sarasota, FL from Feb 1st – 4th Ringling College of Art + Design Studio A. Habatat Galleries‘ 4-day glass art experience “Glass Coast Weekend” features six special exhibits of contemporary glass.

The event includes a pop-up exhibit of over 150 pieces at the Ringling College of Art + Design’s Studio Labs Sound Stage A. Explore four themed curated exhibitions, two solo exhibits, and visit the newly opened Sarasota Art Museum and the Basch Gallery on the Ringling College campus. Additional highlights include a Masterworks Auction, a demonstration by artist John Kiley, artist talks, a Ringling Museum mystery, Habatat-Zoom Live, the Imagine Museum’s Annual Fire and Light Gala

Hope to see you at the first HUGE glass event of the year!

DC Commission on the Arts Hosts “Legacy: Civil Rights at 60”

The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (CAH) is commemorating the 60th anniversary of the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Legacy: Civil Rights At 60. This juried exhibition explores how DC artists have been influenced by this landmark legislation, which aimed to prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. By visually depicting the material, personal, and direct-action work of the past 60 years, this exhibition is a call to continue pursuing equity and social justice both locally and nationally. The exhibition is a collaborative curation of the CAH and a jury panel including: Karen Baker, Artist and Curator; Fabiola Delgado, Curator and Creative Consultant; Maleke Glee, Executive Director, STABLE Arts; Andrew Johnson, Arts Writer and Editor, Adjunct Faculty at Georgetown University.

Michael Janis’ glass installation titled “How We Take Care of Each Other” is featured in Legacy.

Installed in the gallery are the works of:

Ann Bouie, Anna U Davis, Antarah Crawley, Anthony Le, Antonia Tricarico, Ashley William, Briget Hunnicutt, Connor Czora, Cooper Joslin, Darlene Taylor, Denise Wright, Esther Iverem, Gail Rebhan, Gail Shaw-Clemons, Imar Hutchins, Julio Valdez, Kandace Davis, Karen Ruckman, Kofi Tyus, Lauren Emeritz, Mark Kelner, Mary Belcher, Michael Janis, Paula Stern, Rickie Dean, Roderick Turner, and Sally Canzoneri

Legacy: Civil Rights at 60

FY 2024 Juried Exhibition Grant Exhibition
January 12 – March 1
Monday to Friday, 9 am – 5:30 pm
200 I (Eye) Street Gallery SE

The gallery is free and open to the public

Monday to Friday, 9 am – 5:30 pm

Exhibition Reception Friday, January 12 from 6 – 8 pm

RSVP here

CAH is an independent agency in the District of Columbia government that evaluates and initiates action on matters relating to the arts and humanities and encourages programs and the development of programs that promote progress in the arts and humanities. As the designated state arts agency for the District of Columbia, CAH is supported primarily through District government funds and in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Artomatic is Back for 2024!

Great news for the DC-area arts scene! Artomatic will be back next year! In its 25-year history, Artomatic has become a DMV institution. It has provided an alternative venue for local artists, offering an art festival that’s part art fair and part performance madness, but always is the best open art show around! (Open means that there are no jurors or judges and that every artist who wants to do it, can do it!) Besides heaps of visual arts of all types, the fair showcases local Dance, Theater, Spoken Word, Music, Film, Story Telling, Workshops, and whatever else DMV creatives can incorporate into the month-long event. And because it doesn’t use judges, curators or hierarchy, Artomatic is as democratic as an art show can get.

The projected dates for the event is March 8 to April 28, Wednesdays through Sundays at 2100 M Street, Washington, DC (DC’s West End between the Dupont Circle and Farragut North Metro stops). Plans include two DJ stages, at least one film space, a small theatre (for plays and readings), and a dance stage/open performance space. Want to see the space? Join the ARTOMATIC mailing list and join the next tour!

Artist Sean Hennessey leads visitors at 2008 Artomatic on tour of the glass works in exhibit.

Artomatic is a nonprofit organization, and there is no admission fee for the public to attend the show. They note that they “rely on volunteers to serve as staff who promote and advertise events, welcome the public, manage security, and perform a variety of other duties to ensure a successful experience for both artists and audiences.” Go online to www.artomatic.org. Info on registration – click on this link: https://www.artomatic.org/2024-how-to-register/