Please select the Artist Below:

	Antonakos,Stephen
	Chihuly, Dale
	Morris, William
	Statom,Therman

ART OF GLASS
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Stephen Antonakos
Born: 1926, Greece, immigrated to America 1930
Resides: New York, New York

Stephen Antonakos, who might well be called the grand man of neon, has been the major pioneer in the sculptural use of that vibrant light for over four decades. He is known primarily for large-scale public art in neon, which has been permanently installed in airports and subway stations, on entire building facades, and in a wide variety of buildings in cities that literally range the globe. In the United States his public work may be seen in numerous locations in New York and in such other cities as Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Seattle, and Tacoma. Abroad, his neon's may be seen in Cologne and Frankfurt, Germany, in Dijon, France, and in Tokyo and Fukuoka, Japan. In 1997, he represented Greece at the Venice Biennale with The Chapel of the Heavenly Ladder, a 25-by-25-foot square structure in steel, concrete, and neon which has a ladder rising skyward (in reference to the heavenly ladder of John Klimax shown in a Greek icon preserved at Mount Sinai).

Stephen Antonakos is a deeply spiritual man who sometimes draws on his Greek Orthodox heritage for inspiration, but seldom for imagery. He is best termed a minimalist. Antonakos states:

My use of neon is really my own. I began with it around 1960 and very soon it became central to my work. The geometric forms, usually incomplete circles and squares, were a tremendous excitement to me. It is very difficult to separate light from space – even when the art is directly on the wall. For years I have been investigating the great subtlety and range of neon using forms that haven’t changed that much since the beginning. Its spatial qualities interested me – formal relationships within a work and with the architecture of the room or building and the kinetic relationship that a viewer may feel in the space of the light. I feel that abstraction can have a very deep effect visually, emotionally, and spatially.

Quoted in "Stephen Antonakos Blue Line Room," University of Florida, 1997

Stephen Antonakos will be represented in Art of Glass by a large-scale two-part work, which will appear on both the exterior and interior of the Chrysler Museum of Art – on the Hague facade and suspended from the rafters over Huber Court. In conjunction with the Chrysler installations, The Arts Center in Portsmouth will show the artist’s neon easel works.

Selected Museum Collections: Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum in New York.

ART OF GLASS
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Dale Chihuly
Born: 1941, Tacoma, Washington
Resides: Seattle, Washington

Often called "the world’s greatest glass artist," Dale Chihuly has single-handedly changed the glass world with his elaborate and extraordinary works, his retrieval of ancient glass-bowling techniques, and his founding and support of the influential Pilchuck Glass School, the most important glassblowing school in the world. After winning a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Venice, Italy in 1968, Chihuly formed a creative team of master glass blowers. In his Seattle "hot shop" the team pushes the limits of molten glass, darting across the room like dancers, their movements choreographed by the master. Working with this team, in 1996 Chihuly created 15 enormous chandeliers, placing them under bridges and across the Venetian canals throughout the ancient city as a tribute to the BI-annual Aperto Vetro. The result was an electrifying, unforgettable experience. Several of these works will be re-sited at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia for Art of Glass.

Chihuly has been obsessed with glass throughout his life. As fellow glass artist Ben Moore observes, "Dale’s contribution…is almost beyond description. He has personally pushed glassblowing farther than anyone ever imagined it could be pushed and his whole impulse is to share his knowledge with anyone and everyone he can bring together." Chihuly has traveled the world, learning ancient glass techniques in Finland, Japan, Italy, and Austria, and incorporating them into his own work. His artistic vision depends on the natural properties of glass and the space in which the works are seen. The results are often breathtaking as art historian Robert Hobbs notes:

Seen under bright light they look like nature caught on fire, nature in molten flux, nature in the process of being created…Chihuly attempts to catch the formulative moment, the time when creation is happening, when it is still fluid. Ruffled edges, whiplash outlines, striations and intense mottled colors in these large pieces all call to mind living, breathing, pulsating form…

Dale Chihuly: Installations is a presentation of three decades of Chihuly glass. As a seminal part of the southeastern Virginia’s collaborative Art of Glass exhibition, Chihuly’s contribution is an unparalleled spectacle of beauty, craftsmanship, and magic.

Selected Museum Collections: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Palais du Louvre, Paris; the Kyoto Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art and the Yokohama Museums in Japan; also museums in Korea, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Australia, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Israel, and British Columbia.

ART OF GLASS
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

William Morris
Born: 1957, Carmel, California
Resides: Stanwood, Washington

William Morris, one of America’s greatest virtuoso glassblowers, is known for his astonishing and ravishingly beautiful glass artifact groups. He produces these with his own hands "hot-at-the-furnace" without the use of molds – pinching, tugging, and nudging the glass into richly colored sculpture. The Seattle-based art critic Matthew Kangas has aptly dubbed his work "paleoglass." Morris, who grew up in a family of medical doctors and nurses, sees bones as symbols of the cycle of life and therefore life-affirming. As a child he picked up Native American arrowheads and pot shards in the hills around Carmel. As an adult he is a rugged outdoorsman who hunts big game with a bow. Of his imaginative artifacts, Morris says that he makes things that he would like to find in an archaeological dig.

His career in glassblowing began when, at age 20, he went to work as a truck driver for the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State. So great were his energy, ability, and enthusiasm for the medium that he not only learned how to blow glass, but soon became an instructor at the school, and then principal gaffer (head glassblower) for artist Dale Chihuly. Under Chihuly’s direction, Morris physically made most of the blown glass produced by Chihuly in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the mid-‘80s he struck out on his own with Chihuly’s blessing, and in a very different direction. Chihuly’s imagery had been of the sea, Morris chose the earth and forest.

Morris began with vessel forms – at first adorned with abstract images and then with colored drawings evoking Native American petroglyphs and European cave paintings.

In the late 1980s he went to Italy to study solid work with Venetian masters and soon was producing sculptures that incorporated glass bones and a host of primitive images. Large-scale installation pieces followed: Garnering (1990) a 25-foot long work was created for the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. Its elements have since been dispersed. The installations he created for the American Craft Museum in 1993 and 1997 have not since been shown on the East Coast and they have never been shown together. Art of Glass will bring them both to Hampton Roads, and will incorporate additional work.

William Morris will be represented in Art of Glass at the Chrysler Museum of Art by a group of installations that are evocative of prehistory. These will include Cache, a 36-foot-long sculpture consisting of over 100 life-sized glass elephant tusks intermingled with the glass bones of ancient hunters, and wall-mounted Artifact Panels that incorporate glass antler racks, ancient vessels, and prehistoric sculptures – all made by Morris.

Selected Museum Collections: American Craft Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chrysler Museum of Art, Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

ART OF GLASS
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Therman Statom
Born: 1953, Winterhaven, Florida
Resides: Los Angeles, California

Therman Statom – sculptor, glass artist, and painter – is probably best known for his life-size glass ladders, chairs, tables, miniature houses, and box-like paintings, all created through the extraordinary technique of gluing window glass together. He paints portions of these sculptures in vibrant colors with an absolute air of spontaneity and often attaches found objects to them. Sometimes he fashions his own blown or cast glass objects for inclusion with these sculptures.

Statom, however, thrives on the creation of daring, often playful, site-specific installations, having produced over a dozen for museums and galleries across the United States since 1980. These temporal works have been constructed in such cities as Cincinnati, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Toledo, and Washington, D.C. His installation Hydra (1996) at the Toledo Museum of Art incorporated works from that museum’s collection that included paintings by Van Gogh and Cézanne and the enormous cut glass punch bowl that Libbey made for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Statom has also executed commissions for large-scale permanent works at the Los Angeles Central Public Library and at the Los Angeles County Metro Rail, Westlake/MacArthur Park Station in 1993.

Therman Statom’s fascination with art began through his childhood friendship with his Washington, D.C. neighbor, Cady Noland, whose father Kenneth was then creating his famed target paintings. Young Therman told Kenneth Noland that he could paint like that too, and made his own version. From Noland, Statom realized that he didn’t have to be a doctor, like his father, to make a living. Statom went on to study glass blowing at Pilchuck in 1972 and obtained degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA-1974) and the Pratt Institute of Art & Design (MFA-1978). His work is keenly informed by a broad knowledge of art history. His site-specific installations have grown progressively richer. Critic Matthew Kangas has called Therman Statom "one of the most significant and prolific American experimental glass artists," and has stated that his "temporary installations using glass comprise a highly important (if subsequently destroyed) body of work." Art of Glass will permit Statom to write yet another chapter in that body of work.

Therman Statom will be represented in Art of Glass by a series of environments or site-specific rooms at the Chrysler Museum of Art constructed from painted window glass, plywood, and found objects. The artist, who takes a special interest in working with children, will enlist local youth to assist him in the creation of this installation. He plans to offer additional hands-on educational services to the community in conjunction with Art of Glass.

Selected Museum Collections: American Craft Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art, Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.