Joyce J. Scott: Repositioning Craft as a Forceful Stage for Social Commentary and Activism
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Release Date: 03/26/2025
Jen Elek: Reflecting, Magnifying and Representing Bold Color in Hot Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Investigating interpersonal themes and the notion of community, Jen Elek is a studio artist and educator based in Seattle, Washington. She creates objects and installations of colorful glass and neon light employed as a form of non-verbal communication. Her most recent glass series titled Doliums is inspired by large Roman clay storage containers. Elek received her BFA from Alfred University in Metal and Hot Glass sculpture in 1994, after training as a welder in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was a student of Michael Scheiner, Dante Marioni, and Ann Wahlstrom at Pilchuck...
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Ariana Makau and Nzilani Glass Conservation: At the Intersection of Equity, Preservation and Art
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Ariana Makau, founder of Nzilani Glass Conservation, was the second person in the world – and the first woman – to receive a Master’s Degree in Stained Glass Conservation from the Royal College of Art in London. Equally comfortable on a job site, at a board meeting or in a museum, Makau has over 30 years of experience with art and architectural preservation. Her work is most fulfilling at the intersection of equity, preservation and art. Nzilani Glass Conservation is an award-winning firm and one of the few companies in the United States qualified to create new or preserve...
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Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend: Stretching Concepts and Pushing Processes of Traditional Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend is an artist for whom ideas have always been more important than media, and possibly more integral to her work. It’s interesting then that her art has been consistently viewed through the lens of glass. In the creation of her early X series to more recent Calendar Notations, she has pioneered techniques such as non-traditional, unfired painting on glass, mixing glass with other media, and presenting painted, decorated glass on the wall in reflected light. Throughout her career, the artist distilled her own life experiences in the creation of...
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Nadine Saylor: Telling Stories Behind the Objects, Places, and Lives They Touch
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Recently, Nadine Saylor has been creating a series of gas and oil cans featuring imagery of her local surroundings. These more “masculine” objects remind her of the things her grandfather had in his shed. In thinking about gender and how it relates to the objects with which we surround ourselves, she investigates what role gender plays in our world writ large. Assistant Professor of Glass and Sculpture at University of Nebraska, Kearney, Saylor is originally from Hershey, Pennsylvania. She received her BFA in Photography from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and her MFA in Glass...
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Rick Beck: Casting Large-Scale Industrial Objects and Figural Forms in Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Rick Beck’s modern cast and carved figurative glass sculptures are inspired by industrial and architectural works as well as the human form, with an emphasis on formal aspects. Interested in playing the volumes of mass against the rhythm of the lines, Beck enjoys the interplay of the visual versus the verbal, creating art that challenges the eye as well as the mind. Beck states: “My wife, Valerie, got me a book about the competitive relationship between Picasso and Matisse. Their artistic dialogue about the figure has fired my imagination, especially the way they shared and borrowed images...
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The Pain and Pleasure of Karisa Gregorio’s Stained Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Karisa Gregorio’s autonomous stained glass panels explore themes of sex, death, God, the Devil, pleasure, temptation, intimacy, love, lust, and indulgence. The relationship between glass and light in stained glass allows her to create works that feel alive. Using traditional processes as well as techniques developed by modern stained glass master Judith Schaechter, the depth and intimacy of Gregorio’s materials create a world in which the pleasures of the flesh and emotions of the heart are equally illuminated and illuminating. Having received her BFA in Craft + Material studies, with a...
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Stephen Dee Edwards: Studio Glass Pioneer, Glass Caster, Educator
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
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Derek Hunt: Inspiring the Next Generation of Stained Glass Artists
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Derek Hunt is an award-winning glass artist and educator, a Fellow of the British Society of Master Glass Painters, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an accredited stained glass conservator. He designs and makes glass artworks for public spaces, private homes and churches using methods to include traditional stained glass as well as working with new techniques such as screen and digital printing to push the creative boundaries of the medium. In addition to creating and restoring stained glass works, Hunt hosts specialist Master Classes throughout the year at his studio in...
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Gemma Hollister: Narrative Structure and Divine Light
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Upon graduation from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture with a BFA in glass, Gemma Hollister was awarded the Windgate-Lamar fellowship from the Center for Craft, which allowed her and her partner to start a small studio in Philadelphia, Antolini Glass Co. While balancing her personal artistic practice and work as a production glassblower, the artist recently appeared on Netflix’s Blown Away: Extreme Heat. The show inspired new work, which she made both in her own studio and during a residency at Monterey Glassworks. States Hollister: “Blown Away gave me a chance to...
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Hana Hastings, Sand and Fire Works: Using Social Networks to Successfully Market Stained Glass Patterns, Classes and Artwork
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Using Etsy for pattern sales, Patreon for teaching classes and Instagram for promoting her artwork, Hana Hastings, Sand and Fire Works, Grimsby, Ontario, Canada, has acquired a substantial following for her offerings in stained glass. Wanting to differentiate herself from the more traditional glass designs and commonly seen pattern work, Hastings brought nature and natural subjects into the homes of her patrons by experimenting with 3D sculpture and unique textures and colors of glass. Mastering her marketing efforts on social media, the artist grew a following significant enough to dedicate...
info_outlineFor more than three decades, trailblazing artist and activist Joyce J. Scott has elevated the creative potential of beadwork as a relevant contemporary art form. Scott uses off-loom, hand-threaded glass beads to create striking figurative sculptures, wall hangings, and jewelry informed by her African American ancestry, the craft traditions of her family (including her mother, renowned quilter Elizabeth T. Scott), and traditional Native American techniques, such as the peyote stitch. Each object that Scott creates is a unique, vibrant, and challenging work of art developed with imagination, wit, and sly humor.
Born to sharecroppers in North Carolina who were descendants of enslaved people, Scott’s family migrated to Baltimore, Maryland, where the artist was born and raised. Scott hales from a long line of makers with extraordinary craftsmanship adept at pottery, knitting, metalwork, basketry, storytelling, and quilting. It was from her family that the young artist cultivated the astonishing skills and expertise for which she is now renowned, and where she learned to upcycle all materials, repositioning craft as a forceful stage for social commentary and activism.
In the 1990s, Scott began working with glass artisans to create blown, pressed, and cast glass that she incorporated into her beaded sculptures. This not only allowed her to increase the scale of her work, but also satisfied her desire to collaborate. In 1992, she was invited to the Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington. Continuing her interest in glass, Scott has worked with local Baltimore glassblowers as well as with flameworking pioneer Paul Stankard and other celebrated glass fabricators. In 2012, Goya Contemporary Gallery arranged to have Scott work at Adriano Berengo’s celebrated glass studio on the island of Murano in Italy, creating works that were part of the exhibition Glasstress through the Venice Biennale.
Scott has worn many hats during her illustrious career: quilter, performance artist, printmaker, sculptor, singer, teacher, textile artist, recording artist, painter, writer, installation artist, and bead artist. Her wide-ranging body of work has crossed styles and mediums, from the most intricate beaded form to large-scale outdoor installation. Whether social or political, the artist’s subject matter reflects her narrative of what it means to be Black in America.
Scott continues to live and work in Baltimore, Maryland. She received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Selected solo museum exhibitions include The Baltimore Museum of Art (2024); Seattle Art Museum (2024 – 2025); and Grounds for Sculpture (2018), Trenton, NJ. She is the recipient of myriad commissions, grants, awards, residencies, and prestigious honors including from the National Endowment for the Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, American Craft Council, National Living Treasure Award, Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, Mary Sawyers Imboden Baker Award, MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2016), Smithsonian Visionary Artist Award, National Academy of Design Induction, and Moore College Visionary Woman Award, among others.
In March of 2024, Scott opened a major 50-year traveling Museum retrospective titled Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and Seattle Art Museum. Also in 2024, Scott opened Bearing Witness: A History of Prints by Joyce J Scott at Goya Contemporary Gallery. Her latest exhibition, Joyce J. Scott: Messages, opened at The Chrysler Museum of Art on February 6, 2025 and will run through August 17, 2025 at the Glass Projects Space. This exhibition is organized by Mobilia Gallery, Cambridge, MA.
Says Carolyn Swan Needell, the Chrysler Museum’s Barry Curator of Glass: “We are thrilled to host this focused traveling exhibition here in Norfolk at the very moment when Scott’s brilliant career is being recognized more widely, through a retrospective of her work that is co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Seattle Museum of Art.”
In Messages, 34 remarkable beaded works of art spanning the artist’s career express contemporary issues and concepts. Included in the show is Scott’s recent beaded neckpiece, War, What is it Good For, Absolutely Nothin’, Say it Again (2022). A technical feat in peyote stitch, infused with color and texture, this multilayered and intricate beadwork comments on violence in America.
Embedding cultural critique within the pleasurable experience of viewing a pristinely crafted object, Scott’s work mines history to better understand the present moment. The visual richness of Scott’s objects starkly contrasts with the weight of the subject matter that they explore. She says: “I am very interested in raising issues…I skirt the borders between comedy, pathos, delight, and horror. I believe in messing with stereotypes, prodding the viewer to reassess, inciting people to look and then carry something home – even if it’s subliminal – that might make a change in them.”