GASNews October/ November 2011 Volume 22 ... - Glass Art Society

Tavares Strachen at Pilchuck (Russell Johnson photo)
Magdalene Odundo, with David Walters (left) and Ethan Stern (right) at Pilchuck (Russell Johnson photo)
broadening his horizons by working with
a material that was so foreign to him.
He found Pilchuck, as many others have,
a magical place hidden in the woods, a
place where you can think something up
and it somehow materializes (and, as he
so enthusiastically stated, where the food
is good, too). It is of course Pilchuck’s
glassworkers who function as assistants
that translate the ideas, designs and
concepts into something physical.
McQueen ultimately found the furnace too
hot and casting only somewhat interesting;
it was actually a glass plate and piece
of string that captured his attention and
resulted in success.
McQueen was introduced to the idea of
going to Pilchuck by Kate Elliott (formerly
of Elliott Brown Gallery, Seattle) and
completed the residency alongside his
partner, Margo Mensing (also a fiber artist
and a Pulitzer-prize winning poet-laureate)
with whom he shared a studio while there.
Of the artists discussed, Jim Butler
is probably the one whose work underwent
the most dramatic change after his
residency at Pilchuck. Butler completed
his residency in 2005 but his introduction
to glass came much earlier. A selfdescribed
painter, he studied at Rhode
Island School of Design, where he was
familiar with their well-known glass
program. In the late 1990s, he began to
notice that his work emulated properties
of transparency. Wanting to capitalize
on this aesthetic, he looked around for
someone to fabricate work in glass for
him; eventually he realized he wanted to
develop the skills himself.
Butler was not unfamiliar with the
people in the glass world. He went
to school with Peter Drobny (former
designer at Steuben) and Hank Adams
(WheatonArts) and was friends with John
Childs (Vermont) and Deborah Czeresko
(New York). Still, learning glass, he says,
was like falling down the rabbit hole into
a wonderland of glass.
Pilchuck happened at exactly the right
time and place for him and was the single
most influential event in his professional
career. There, he collaborated with
Czeresko and Jill Reynolds on his City of
Your Dreams project and learned how to
transfer images to glass from Mark Zirpel
(University of Washington) and Brian
Bolden (Minneapolis). He recently took
these skills to The Glass Factory at Kosta
Boda in Sweden to make work using highfire
decals. Butler responded immediately
to his residency at Pilchuck by applying
the following year for a Hauberg Fellowship
(another Pilchuck program) with Rebecca
Cummings and Zirpel. Today, Butler
continues to work in both paint and
glass, making paintings of his sculptures
as well as sculpting his paintings out of
glass. Butler says that he has never had a
language problem with anyone who works
in glass because both are based on optics
and suspended colors. His City of Your
Dreams project, a micro-environment that
was 1,000 square feet and two stories tall
(at 1/4 inch to 1 foot scale), was realized
again at Middlebury College where he has
taught since the 1980s. He worked on the
Middlebury project with Reynolds, Adams,
Czeresco and Childs.
AiRs residents for the summer of 2011
include photographer and film maker
Catherine Chalmers. Chalmers is an artist
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