Seeing into It: Messages in Glass

The Craft in America Center will celebrate the visionary work of rebel glass artists Paul Marioni and Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend with an exhibition. Both artists, distinguished for their unconventional approach to technique, material and form, have been essential to the development of glass as teachers and creators. Pictorialism, symbolism and message have defined their work and set it apart. The exhibition will feature a selective retrospective of two dozen of the artists’ most meaningful works spanning the 1970s to the present.

Over the course of their thirty-five year friendship, Marioni and Stinsmuehlen-Amend have continually inspired each other, having crossed paths professionally at pivotal moments. Marioni, an outspoken leader in the studio glass movement who started teaching at Pilchuck Glass School in its first years, ignited Stinsmuehlen-Amend’s experimentation with the communicative potential of glass when they initially connected at a gathering of makers in the late 1970s. Both were drawn to expressive work that challenged aesthetic trends and asserted personal identity.

Among the various themes that emerge in their work, consciousness and how the mind operates are launching points for each artist. Mortality, corporality and sensuality appear throughout. Marioni often encases hallucinatory visions and supernatural creatures in blown vessels and flat panels that are spiked with Surrealist wit. Stinsmuehlen-Amend recurrently contemplates the mindlessness of daily existence and the inner thoughts that manifest themselves in the visual form of scribbles and doodles, which she recreates in glass. Layers of thoughts are deconstructed and sandwiched together in her flat, multi-dimensional glass paintings. For each, glass is the ideal material for confronting the darkness and lightness of being.

These two rule-breakers have fearlessly taken the road less traveled and consistently pushed glass into new territories of expression. They are acclaimed for innovatively using figurative and narrative imagery that asserts the profound potential of glass as a medium. Their commitment to exploring the way that light, color and line converge in glass to transmit messages is unsurpassed. In a rare pairing, the exhibition will honor their voices and contributions.

Craft in America is pleased to announce the publication of a companion catalog. To view it online, visit our Publications page.
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