Audrey Handler: A Conversation with “The First Lady” of Glass

Housed in a 19th-century cheese factory, Audrey Handler’s studio was founded in 1970 and is one of the oldest continually operating glassblowing facilities in the country. Through demonstrations she gave there and workshops she taught on the road at places such as Penland School of Craft and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, she helped spread the idea that glass could be used as a medium for personal artistic expression. 

A pioneer of the Studio Glass Movement, Handler started working in glass in 1965 as one of Harvey Littleton’s first female glass students. He and his students experimented and learned together, renting old glassblowing films from the Corning Museum of Glass and trying to emulate the techniques. “It was so exciting,” Handler recalls. “Every day was something new.”   As a glassblower, Handler creates fruit forms, glass platters, and vases but also sculptural environments that comment on universal experiences, usually domestic in nature. These sculptures reflect small worlds and landscape portraits with life-sized objects and tiny sterling silver or gold people that evoke a surrealistic time and place. In well-known series the artist calls Monuments in a Park, Pear in a Chair and Wedding Pair, glass, wood and precious metal combine to tell a story. These works are made in collaboration with her husband, John Martner, who fabricates the tiny wooden chairs and love seats.   Wrote James Auer, Art Critic, The Milwaukee Journal: “By combining pieces of hand-blown fruit, in particular apples and pears, with tiny, hand-cast silver figures, (Audrey Handler) creates bizarre, Lilliputian landscapes that evoke universal human emotions and experiences. …this universality – combined with a neat sense of humor – is Handler’s principal strength. It permits her to invest her work with a cutting satirical edge, to the point where her miniaturized depictions of conventional household scenes and cliched gender role models become winning little exercises in small-town surrealism.” Handler was a board member of the Glass Art Society, an international organization she helped create in 1971. She holds a BFA from Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts and a MS and MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Department of Art. Her work was represented in the New Glass 1979 and New Glass Now 2019 exhibitions and published in the Corning Museum’s survey of cutting edge-glass art, New Glass Review, in issues 5, 16 and 43. In 2014, Handler was awarded the Wisconsin Visual Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, joining fellow honorees Frank Lloyd Wright and Georgia O’Keeffe. The artist currently serves on the Glass Advisory Board of the Bergstrom Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah, Wisconsin.

Handler’s sculptures can be found in collections and museums worldwide. During 2023 and 2024, her work was exhibited at the Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin, in two separate group shows: Women in Glass and Wisconsin Artists: 1960 – 1990: A Survey. Her work is on view now at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, in 60 Years of Studio Glass, 2022 to present, and at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin, in Recent Acquisitions, 2021 to 2023, and an ongoing exhibit of her work from 1965 to present. Her latest endeavor involves creating new mixed media sculpture and painting with low-fire glass paints on tiles and glass, creating landscapes of the prairie seen from her studio window, areas around Wisconsin and visions of landscapes from her many travels. These glass paintings are an extension of her work with blown glass – an endeavor which spans more than 50 years – as well as a return to her roots as an oil painter.