Maria Sheets: Stained Glass, Conservation and Vitreonics

In her summer 2024 exhibition Trial By Fire at Core Art Space, Lakewood, Colorado, Maria Sheets exhibited a series of colorful, sculpturally dense, illuminated glass panels of portraits and landscapes created in a unique process that combines the mediums of traditional stained glass grisaille/enameling with fused glass “painting” known as Vitreonics. The technique was documented in Justin Monroe’s award-winning documentary Holy Frit. The movie traces artist/designer Tim Carey’s journey through making the world’s largest stained and fused glass window with the help of Italian glass maestro Narcissus Quagliata.

Says Sheets: “Our family experienced a major loss in late 2023 that inspired a radical shift in what I was producing. In an attempt to address this swing of emotional intensity, I found I desperately needed to break some sh#t. Inspired by the project created in the new film Holy Frit, I began to learn Vitreonics. The process, particularly the intense smashing, layering, and heating of glass, gave me the change I needed. Vitreonics brought balance to my creative world and reminded me that though I can and do use my skills to make art that is highly technical, I can also relax into flexibility and levity.”

With a conservation and glass studio located in Evergreen, Colorado, Sheets is a senior conservator of Foothills Art Conservation and a master glass designer, painter and fabricator. She was Chief Conservator of a fire recovery project with the Museum of Biblical Art, Dallas from 2005-2018. A partial list of additional clients includes the Ross Perot Collection, George Bush Family, Gerald Ford, Dallas Museum of Art, Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Samurai Collection. She served as President of the Conservators Private Practice Group of the American Institute for Conservation and holds a Professional Associates status. 

Signed commissioned works in architectural glass include large-scale projects presently housed in museums, universities, houses of worship, businesses and private residences internationally. In 2021, Sheets designed and painted the Legacy Window for Tulsa’s Vernon AME in Greenwood, illustrating 120 years of the church’s history and survival from the Tulsa Race Massacre. Her own work was included in recent juried exhibitions such as American Glass Guild NOW 2016 (juror, contemporary artist Judith Schaechter), Texas National 2018 (juror Jed Perl, international art critic), and Materials Hard and Soft International Craft Exhibition 2019 (2nd place of 1100 entries). She is a resident artist for Valkarie Gallery in Lakewood, Colorado, where her work will be exhibited in a solo exhibition from November 13 through December 8, 2024. 

In 2022, Martin Faith, Scottish Stained Glass, Centennial, Colorado, approached Sheets with a project that involved reproducing an artist’s pieces made in the 1970s onto glass. Sheets explains: “He showed them to me, and I gasped, recognizing the work as Judy Chicago’s. I had read her early biographies while I was in college in the ‘90s. My feminist art teacher taught us about her work and the famous piece The Dinner Party, which congress was crucifying along with a number of artists trying to get funding through the National Endowment for the Arts.  I even wrote her fan mail.”

Sheets and Chicago met and spent several years working collaboratively in Chicago’s Belen, New Mexico studio. There they created complex airbrushed/masked pieces onto glass. These took five months of research and development as the technique/design would be some of the most unforgiving yet enlightening of Sheet’s life. Last year Chicago had a blockbuster show of the work at New Museum in New York accompanied by a four-page spread in the New York Times as well as an exhibition at Serpentine in London.

Occupying a rare niche in the art world, Sheets was inspired by her great-uncle, a Russian Orthodox priest and iconographer to apply old-world art materials on stained glass to create both traditional religious imagery or modern portraits and scenes rife with politics. Her work Motherboard Madonna was recently exhibited in AI Love You at Niza Knoll Gallery, Denver, Colorado. 

Says Sheets: “The gallery got blackballed, but the whole point of show was to discuss the ethical concerns and use of AI as a tool. One could say creativity was used in the creation of this technology and that “paint” is not the only medium. Adapt or die…”