Marvin Lipofsky working at the Blenko Glass Company, Milton, West Virginia, 1968
Marvin Lipofsky’s use of glass as a gestural artistic material helped to reinvent a centuries-old craft tradition as a Modernist art form. His sculptures crystallize a lifetime of travel and material investigation, as well as the sumptuous colors of the natural landscape, the visceral forms of the body, and the alchemical processes of manipulating blown glass. As an artist, educator, and inveterate traveler, Lipofsky has been an inspirational force throughout the international glass community for more than four decades. Nowhere has Lipfosky's influence been greater than in the San Francisco Bay Area. After earning his MS and MFA in 1964 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison under the tutelage of Harvey Littleton, Lipofsky initiated glass programs at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 and at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1967 where he served as chair until 1987. Throughout decades of travel, Berkeley, California has been a consistent point of return for the artist, helping to establish the Bay Area as one of the preeminent centers of studio glass production. Marvin Lipofsky has created work and led workshops at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Jerusalem, Israel), the Union of Bulgarian Artists (Sofia, Bulgaria), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, Maine), Pilchuck Glass School (Stanwood, Washington), Fratelli Toso (Venice, Italy), and The Gerrit Rietveld Academie (The Netherlands) where he was the first Visiting Artist Critic. His work can be found in over 90 collections worldwide, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum (San Francisco, CA), the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, CA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (Sapporo, Japan), Detroit Institute of Art (Detroit, MI), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), Musée d’Art Contemporain (Skopje, Yugoslavia), Museum Für Kunsthandwek (Frankfurt, Germany), Umeleckoprumyslove Muzeum (Prague, Czech Republic), Auckland City Art Gallery (Auckland, New Zealand), All-Russia Decorative, Applied and Folk Art Museum (Moscow, Russia), and Renwick Gallery, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.). Randall Miller Micaëla Gallery
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