Hunting Studio Glass: Creating Beautiful Blown and Cast Glass as a Canvas for Signature Murrini

From their trademark blown vessel forms to more recent large castings, Hunting Studio of Princeton, Wisconsin, uses glass and its myriad mysteries to tell stories of unapologetic beauty and celebration of color. The work of this father-son team, Wes Sr. and Wesley Hunting, is on view now through February 4, 2024 in Directing the Flow: The Art of Wes Hunting, at the Bergstrom Mahler Museum of Glass (BMM) in Neenah, Wisconsin. The studio was awarded First Place and a solo show at the Museum following its 2022 Glass Arts Festival.

States BMM Executive Director, Amy Moorefield: “The Huntings create blown and cast glass vessels and sculpture featuring colorful palettes and murrine inspired by past and present creations of artists working in Murano, Italy. Through the process of painting with colored glass and cold surface cutting, Hunting’s newest creations invite the viewer to gaze inward into miniature worlds, paying homage to the aesthetics of overlay paperweights.”

Hunting Sr. studied under glass artist Henry Halem while attending Kent State from 1975 to 1979. He served as an assistant to Richard Ritter and has taught at the University of Kansas, Tennessee College of Crafts, Florida Keys Community College, and the University of Wisconsin – Madison. 

Hunting Studio’s work can be found in museum collections internationally to include the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass, Neenah, Wisconsin; The White House, Washington D.C.; the Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph, Michigan; the Windhover Center for the Arts, Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin; the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona; the Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, Iowa; the Museum of American Glass, Millville, New Jersey; the Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, North Carolina; Cafesjian Museum of Art, Armenia; The Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington; and The Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi. Hunting corporate collections include Bank One, The Hyatt Corporation, The Standard Oil Company and The Quaker Oat Company, to name just a few.

In the early 1980s, a trip to Penland School of Craft in North Carolina and travel through Italy set Wes Sr. on the path he continues on today. His studio visits with artists such as Mark Peiser, Billy Bernstein, Gary Beecham, Steve Edwards, Rob Levin, and Harvey Littleton and witnessing the millefiori process of the Italian masters helped refine his own goals in glass. Now as his son assumes increasingly more responsibilities at their studio, new ideas and bodies of work are fleshed out, investigated and introduced to their enthusiastic collectors. From their early Colorfield series, the artists have expanded into new aesthetic territory in the creation of their Optical series, Remnantseries and Castings.

Says Wes Sr.: “We are always striving to take the work to a new level of intensity. It has developed into a way for me to express myself by painting with molten glass. There is no other material like glass. The colors are totally unique as they can be transparent or opalescent. The way light passes through colored glasses adds a third dimension that cannot be duplicated by any other material.”