The 10 competitors range from 20-something, recent art-school graduates to 50-something artists who have been working with glass for decades and have exhibited and sold their work. It was filmed in the largest glass blowing facility in North America, custom-built to accommodate 10 glass blowers working simultaneously. One of the reasons that the reality competition genre pioneered by the likes of “Project Runway” and “Top Chef” has never touched on the art form is that glassblowers need space, says Gray. Seattle-based glass artist Janusz Poźniak, a "Blown Away" contestant. Maylone hopes that “the show will highlight more than just the process, allowing viewers to learn about the artists and their points of view.” So it’s not just great art, it should make for great television. Glass is hard to control, so, often artists improvise as their works develop organically, bending their creativity to match where the material takes them. Many glass artists talk about how mistakes shape their work. ![]() Using metal tools, they then sculpt the material, perhaps applying color or more glass, and reheat the glass periodically in another furnace called a “glory hole.” At any point, the entire vessel could break off the pipe and shatter. (The Corning Museum of Glass partnered with Celebrity Cruises to bring glassblowing demos to their ships.) Onlookers watch as artists extract molten glass from a 2,000-degrees-Fahrenheit furnace with a long metal blow pipe. The process is mesmerizing, jaw-dropping and nerve-wrecking. Glass art isn’t holding its value well on the secondary market, Maylone says.Īlexander Rosenberg competes on "Blown Away."Īt the same time, glassblowing demonstrations-the “spectacle” of glassmaking, as Maylone puts it-have become a popular pastime. A 2015 report produced by the Glass Art Society and Chihuly Garden and Glass suggested that, despite public enthusiasm for glassmaking, galleries are concerned that young art collectors were less excited about the medium. to teach their techniques, launching a number of successful artists, including Chihuly.īut now things have changed. Then, in the 1960s, the studio glass movement brought Venetian maestros to the U.S. The Industrial Revolution saw increased production of luxury goods, and factories full of artisans working with glass popped up all over Europe and the United States machines made it possible to manufacture glass, and glass tableware became affordable and accessible to the masses. During the Renaissance, Venetian “maestros” perfected the art of glassblowing, making ornate vessels such as dragon-stem goblets. In ancient Rome, glass makers discovered that they could inflate glass by blowing into a tube, making it much easier to create vessels. The first, simple glass objects were made before 2000 B.C., in ancient Mesopotamia. ![]() Glass artists, as well as many art institutions, hope that the show will raise public perception of glassblowing as a fine art-a perception that has been diminishing in recent years, according to Cybele Maylone, executive director of Connecticut’s Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and former executive director of UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, New York. In each episode, artists create a finished piece in a matter of hours, each hoping to avoid elimination and emerge the winner, who receives a $60,000 prize and a coveted artist residency at the Corning Museum of Glass. Premiering this Friday, July 12, the show is the first-ever competition series to focus on glassblowing. This show will showcase the huge range of work that’s being made in glass, and what different generations are doing with it.” ![]() But Chihuly’s work is just one-albeit, very famous-interpretation of glass. Which is not a bad comparison, and I’m glad people know of his work. Far beyond the paraphernalia Gray’s interlocutors ask about, the art form demands incredible skill and produces stunning works worthy of any museum collection.Īdds Gray of the stereotypes she encounters, “Or, they think I make work like Dale Chihuly. A professor of art at California State University, San Bernadino, Gray is the chief judge on “Blown Away,” a new Netflix reality competition centered around the dramatic, sweaty, creative process of glassblowing. “When I say I’m a glassblower, people think I make pipes and bongs,” says Katherine Gray with a laugh.
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