 Welcome to this very special evening celebrating the pioneering role of the Rhode Island School of Design in the contemporary glass movement. Now told with the publication of Wonder, 50 Years, RISD Glass. It is especially fitting to hold this celebration at America's Design Museum, which has long enjoyed a rich educational partnership with RISD, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious art and design colleges. The two institutions enjoy a dramatic, yes, but dynamic, thriving exchange that fortifies us both through design crits and intimate museum tours. Very pleased that so many of RISD's distinguished faculty and alumni are here with us this evening. Cooper Hewitt's collection of glass is encyclopedic and an important resource for the study of the many techniques for producing glass. Our earliest glass objects date back to the first century, when glass makers in the Middle East and Rome first experimented with glassblowing and include a number of humble yet beautiful free-blown beakers, vials, and cosmetic bottles. In addition to the myriad examples of the processes used to manipulate and ornament glass over the centuries, the collection encompasses the works of major glass houses and designers, from Loebmeyer to Lalique and Tiffany to RISD Grads, Dale Chihuly and Toots Zinsky. Rounding out the collection's comprehensive holdings are rare first-edition folios and textbooks on glass as well as important trade catalogs in the Smithsonian Design Library. This spring, Cooper Hewitt's collection of iridescent Tiffany glass will be installed in the museum's teak room and for our upcoming exhibition, The Senses Designed Beyond Vision, RISD alumna Lily Maya and her creative partner James Revelle will install their glass sound performance with the added dimension of touch so that the museum's diverse audiences may all engage in the material's multisensory qualities. RISD has long been and remains at the forefront of the contemporary glass movement through its radical experimentation with glass's physical properties and rigorous investigation of its expressive potential. More than just a history wonder evokes the material's excitement and the maker's extraordinary breakthroughs since glass studies were first introduced at the college in 1966. The projects and written statements specifically created for the publication of Wonder are testament to the department's impact and the very close community it has nurtured and make the book really close to impossible to put down. I particularly appreciated Francis Richards' observation that quote, Invisibility is not exactly the same as transparency. I was really getting deep into my existential self this afternoon reading this book. Equally compelling are the critical essays and studio history of the department which capture how an ideal education enables RISD students to walk away from the glass program with a sense of empowerment and the understanding that mastery of skill is quoting the head of the department, Rachel Burwick, the gateway to a lifetime of finding and exposing wonder. I would like to congratulate RISD Glass on their 50 remarkable years of advancing and illuminating the beauty and conceptual rigor of glass and close with this wondrous wonder quote, Glass then is one of the foundations that wonder, art and science stand atop. It is a lens through which we see the world as a crystal thin sheet of air to keep air out or to keep it in that bubbles like a crimson sea of fire beneath our feet until we can see right through it inside ourselves. And now it is my tremendous pleasure to introduce the president of RISD, Roseanne Summerson, the first alumna to lead the college. Roseanne has been committed to furthering RISD's mission since she was a student at RISD in the 70s and today she underscores the value of art and design to advancing life in the 21st century. Please join me in welcoming Roseanne. Thank you so much, Caroline. Let me share the welcome. You're so happy to have you here. It's been such a great partnership with the Cooper Hewitt because we share a lot. We share a lot of the same audiences. We share students and faculty that have used this museum for years in their own development as artists and thinkers and representatives of their field. So it's a wonderful collaboration for us here tonight. And we're very grateful, Caroline, and thank you to all of your staff as well. I wanted to just say a few things. I was thinking of starting this with some reflections and then I thought I just can't say that to this audience, right? It's just too corny, a word to use. But in thinking about how the contemporary art fields are manifest in certain forms of material and certain kinds of processes, I'm particularly interested in how this moment in time marks something that's very much at the core of the glass movement and particularly the glass movement at RISD. And that is the intersection between so many different kinds of disciplines, so many ways of thinking, so many bodies of knowledge. And I'm sure as you'll hear more from our luminary panelists who are here in a moment, there's this sense of not just using glass as a medium to define culture or to define research or to define experimentation, but to look at the intersections between the sciences, between architecture, between aesthetics, between what's invisible and what's visible. These are all wonderful intersections that are very much at the heart of the way that artists explore their medium. At RISD we certainly have an investment in materials and what we can learn from materials and process and glass also embodies that in a way that is not just about transforming a material but actually about transforming states of existence and states of being from something that is fluid and hot to something that's cold and hard. And it's just an amazing material for talking about transformation. So I'm delighted to be here. I really also just couldn't stand up here without calling a special shout out to Rachel Burwick, the head of the department of glass at RISD, and to Jocelyn Prince who have been incredible champions of this whole project, the book, the department, the connections with alumni, and the year of programming that's gone on to accompany this. So join me in just giving them a special thank you for a moment before we begin. And I will turn this over to our panelists. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Hello, I'm Stephanie Pender. Thank you for having me. When I talk about my work, I use the word embodied automation. And in my definition, digital workflows and analog workflows are inseparable. I was a student in the RISD Glass Department for my graduate studies. And there I began exploration of embodied knowledge. I went to RISD because of its reputation for conceptual and technical rigor. There I developed an intense discipline to hands on material studies. I dedicated myself to attaining a high level of expertise in traditional glass making techniques. But after a period of time, I felt limited by tools that I felt were outdated and antiquated. So a colleague introduced me to robotics. And I began to integrate computer numerical controlled machine workflows into my process. This video is a documentation of an early 3D glass printer I developed at RISD. And here in the video, you see me ladling a ladle of molten glass into a kiln that has a hole drilled in the bottom. The robot is moving the printing plate in controlled movements and I'm able to build up form. This process allows me a level of precision and repeatability that I wouldn't have been able to attain using manual tools. While developing this process, I observed the phenomena of viscous rope coiling. This is a sewing machine like pattern that's inherent in the material. And it's inherent in viscous fluids like syrup and liquid soap. You may observe these patterns in your daily life. So the robot was able to allow me to cultivate this in really interesting ways. The sewing machine pattern is a result of a combination of heat, gravity, and feed speed. Scientists have been studying fluid dynamics and these viscous rope coiling patterns for a long time. And here is some images that demonstrate the expressivity of the material. And here are two examples of prints. The only difference between these two prints is the lower print is printed at a slightly slower speed. So I use these behaviors to dictate the form of the material. I call it emergent properties and self-organizing behavior. And these self-organizing behaviors create a textile-like material. This is an example of my setup at RISD. And what you see here is an industrial robot, a smaller version of ones that are typically used in manufacturing facilities for industries like car production. And I have to say I'm much more attached to the process than I am to the products. I see the products as mere examples of what the possibilities of the process are. And I often cut them up and manipulate them like sheet material. This print is two and a half feet tall and the tallest print I've made by far. The next iteration I developed and fabricated in San Francisco at the Autodesk Pier 9 facility. And here I didn't have access to a furnace. And I didn't want to be bound to such an energy intensive piece of equipment. So I developed a 3D printer that uses 0.5 millimeter glass filament as stock material. And you can see me charging the extruder every few seconds. So this printer is modeled off after a typical plastic filament deposition modeling printer. Except I have mounted a torch on the end of the printer that can get to temperatures 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and above. I have to print inside a kiln because the prints are susceptible to thermal shock and delamination. So these are examples of prints from that iteration of glass printer. And the obstacle qualities that I'm able to attain are from the coiling effect. And I wouldn't be able to obtain this kind of surface quality if I allowed the print to print in a straight line. So I'm going to get a little technical here. But this is an overview of how the process works. I have universal robot script, which programs the robot to move. And then I have code that runs in Arduino that drives the motor, which feeds filament through the extruder. And then I also manually adjust torch temperature, build chamber temperature, and robot speed. So this is not a plug and play machine. I am an active participant, a collaborator in this entire process. I'm constantly changing the parameters and settings of the printer because every part of every geometry and every different geometry requires a different set of parameters, a different combination of these settings. So this makes me return back to this notion of embodied knowledge. Every time I print something, I become better and my skill is refined by accumulated experience. So I think this is very important to think about when you think about automated processes. That, in fact, it is very much an embodied knowledge. So I'll just close by describing my new position as build space supervisor in Autodesk's new facility in Boston. Build stands for building innovation, learning, and design. It is an incubator where people are doing work like this. And it focuses on the sectors of architecture, engineering, and construction. And it opens, it's open to proposals from academia, industry, and startups. Thank you. Good evening. There's so many things that strike me about the idea of wonder. It makes me think of a quote by the great Bill Withers. He was being interviewed about whether he got nervous every time he had to perform. And he had a very candid response, which was, he's never really stopped by fear. In fact, he described courage as the thing that you do in spite of your fear. And I really love that relationship between this sort of flexibility and one's ability to think about wonder and how one combats fear. Because it's not that you are without fear, it's that you act anyway. And these are some of the rules one may learn when one studies at the Glass Department. Anyone who hasn't tried it yet should sign up for it. So how does an object change one's relationship to it and its community? In 2005, I went to the Arctic, spent eight days there. And the idea was that I would bring a piece of ice back to my elementary school. I'm from the Bahamas. So one can imagine some of the issues that might exist there. After a few months, some logistics and a lot of stories, we moved this piece of ice to my elementary school using FedEx. So again, the question is how does an object change community? How does an object change relationships to people? I think these questions are very important to me. In the instance of this object, this neighborhood that this school was in, this object allowed so many children in this neighborhood to participate in not only the installation, the construction of the installation, the observation, but all of these, what do you want to call them, scientific, artistic processes to develop this sort of social dynamic, which for me is exceptionally important. I think it was 2013 when I was asked by the Bahamas government to represent the Bahamas of the Venice Biennale. And again, this question of relationships, what's the relationship that an artist has to his own nationality in 2013? What does Venice think about? What does the Biennale think about artists who come from island nations? And how can we upset these expectations, I think? So the exhibition we had was titled Polar Eclipse. And it had a lot to do with ice. The work that centered here is a piece called How I Became Invisible. And what it is, is Francis here by any chance? Francis Richards, no? Okay, good. So I'm safe. So we don't have to get into the nuances of invisibility versus translucency or transparency. It represents a very great explorer, Mr. Matthew Henson, who at the time when I was doing this research, I didn't know he'd arrived at a North Pole. Matthew Henson looks almost exactly like me or I look like him, as my father would say. And this really changed my relationship to history. And I started thinking, what else in history is like this? So in terms of the technique, and what's happening technically in the work, is there's a patrine sitting in the middle of this photograph. Not in the middle, but off the side. It is probably eight and a half feet tall. And then it's filled with 900 gallons of mineral oil. And on the inside is a glass blown facsimile of Matthew Henson. And only when one moves around the space, one can get a sense of the object that's on the inside. And these are all images from polar eclipse. I decided to bring back a small piece of ice from the North Pole, because I went to the North Pole. I forgot to tell you guys that. That happened. And I took one of the pieces of ice at a laboratory at Yale, and we decided that we were going to clone one of them, and show them right next to each other, and never describe which one was which. This was the entrance of the exhibition. By the way, if anyone's ever been to Venice, this was in a space called Ars Nale, which the space was quite magical in and of itself, specifically because it was for shipbuilding. And so when you walk into this room, you would walk into these sort of exploding neon works, which if you can read broken English, the one straight ahead says, I belong here. The other one says, you belong here. And the other one says, we belong here. This is the evidence of my North Pole trip, in case you didn't believe me. And I think I'll close on this image, specifically because I feel like this work is ripe with misunderstanding. And anyone who knows anything about glass knows that glass is all about misunderstanding. This work is, you belong here. And this was in the Prospect Biennial in New Orleans, Prospect 3. And I was asked to contribute a work to this Biennale. And I'd been to New Orleans seven times before, but I'd never gone to the Mississippi. And on this occasion, I said, why not create an opportunity for me to go to the Mississippi? So I said, I want to install my work on the Mississippi. And we built this work on the Mississippi on a barge. And it would sail throughout the Mississippi during the time of Prospect. What's the most fascinating part of this experience for me, again, is this question about how objects and experiences change people's relationship to these objects and themselves. And in this instance, the work was kind of a situationous gesture in a sense that so many people from all walks of life were able to have access to this work. And every time someone from a different perspective and a different context engaged with this work, the work shifted for me and for them. And the question here was, you know, who belongs where? Who decides who belongs? And where is here? So those are a few things, and thank you. Sure is dark out there. Hi, I'm Jen Berven. Thank you for inviting me to celebrate this gorgeous book. I can't wait to get into it. I'm going to present a few projects, two very briefly and one in a little more depth. I'm here because I am a friend of RISD Glass, and I share a little bit of the philosophical approach. So the works won't have a lot of glass in them just to prepare you for that expectation. So the first image is from a... Whoops. There we go. This first image is from a double-sided embroidery and it's from a collaborative work in progress with Charlotte Lagarde. It's based on a reversible poem written by Sue Wei, a woman poet in China in the fourth century. And it's a poem that has 8,000 possible readings. Its structure is derived from a gauge to chart the movement of the cosmos. So I'm not going to talk anymore about that project, but I'm just going to throw that out there. All right. I'll go into more detail about the silk poems, which is kind of how that other one started. It's a piece that just came down at Mass Mocha earlier this year, and it touches upon many of the themes in the book, so I wanted to focus on that one. It's made in conjunction with material scientists at Tufts, and it's a poem written in a liquefied silk biosensor. The material is reverse engineered from the cocoon, so it involves a little bit of alchemy. It's a textile material that has been used for over 5,000 years in its filament form. The poem is written from the perspective of the silkworm. This looks a lot like your work, all of a sudden. The Addressee of the poem is the person with the biosensor inside of them, and the function of the biosensor is to monitor the health balance of, say, the blood. Blood sugar, blood cell count, something like that. So it plays a pretty important role in someone's health. The themes of the poem have largely to do with living and dying and transformation. The structure is based on the way the silkworm models its filament, and it's also based on the six-letter repeat in the silk's genome. The silk membrane is read through a microscope in the show, in the exhibition, and the poem has since been published in book form as well. So that's pretty typical of my work to kind of make things various. I think Frank O'Hara said grace to be born and live as variously as possible. I aspire to that, so. All right. I'm already on to the third piece. River, a piece 10 years in the making, nice pairing with Tavares, is a geocentric scale model of the Mississippi River. It's materials, hands-on silver sequins on Tyvek and Moll, and Moll is used to line the spines of books, so it has a reference to that as well. It's a piece to be installed on the ceiling, and the piece in total is 230 curvilinear feet, so installed it's about 100 by 20. The archipelago in the delta is mirrored, and it is designed to reflect the viewer and the place it's shown. It premieres at the Des Moines Art Center next October. I wanted to talk a little bit about the interactions with RISD Glass, so this image is from a class, a cross-listed workshop that I taught called Writing Glass, and I taught it as a strong word. I basically curated it, and then it was taught by the grads in both programs. Katie Bullock is right there. Basically, it was sort of an attempt at translation in terms between the two fields, what they might share. For example, stress, breath, line, and this was approached through enacted demonstrations in the hot shop, in optics, and through close readings of poems. The poems in the book were inspired by that experience, so I'm just going to read one, and then we'll go to panel. Are you okay for a time? So this one's called Pulling Cane. How a line is made to hold our breath is dipped into slow and molten, batted with wet fruit wood or flat graphite paddles. How it sags legubrious, gravity, taffy. How a line is made finest atop speed with the body. Another membrane that moves then seems to stop moving. Thank you. Is it working? Great. Great to see you. Great to be with you. And I just want to, if it's okay, I just want to preface things a little bit before we talk together to say, oh, by the way, it's my son Max's 16th birthday tomorrow. So this is a good thing. But to say, like, why a heck am I here? And when he was about three, that's what he would say, like, what a heck? So why a heck? I'm here tonight. But first, this is really a fantastic book, a living document animated by serious energy and inquiry. And I have to say I'm so deeply pleased and honored to have had the opportunity to contribute a text to this book. And I bet you all feel that way. Okay, so why a heck am I here? In 2003, I was invited to the great RISD to conduct a joint seminar with sculpture and glass, a critical issues seminar foray into art and ideas. And I have to say I was scared because I knew nothing about glass and was afraid that I would be, like, idiotic. But I was trying to learn more. And of course, I had biases like lots of people have and not really knowing what's afoot in the glass world or by glass students. So in any event, this is my little short story, I showed up at the office on the first day, met with Rachel. And then it's like, okay, seminar starts in two hours, we're going to get going. And then a student came up to me and he was very polite. And he was like Professor Volk. And I was not used to being addressed as, like, Professor Volk. And he was like, I was like, yes, can I help you? And he was like, yes, I want to take your seminar. And I knew that all the students had been totally arranged in it. It was like an ultra grad level second year seminar. And so I was like, okay, who are you and what year are you in? And he's like, I'm a junior in glass. And I was like, this is going to be impossible. But regardless, show me your work. It's just something. And I fully expected to see some kind of glass goblets or plates or some better than others, totally like that. And I was like, fear kicking in, what am I going to say about this stuff? And he just took me into a room where there was a black pedestal and a glass vitrine on top of it and said nothing. So junior says nothing, not trying to talk his way into the seminar, says nothing. And I was like, what? This is getting really weird now. And then all of a sudden I started to hear the sound and it gets louder and louder and it's the crashing sound. And he says nothing. And then I finally figured out, I had to figure out what it was, which was the sound of one ant walking on the pedestal. The junior in glass had worked intensely with scientists, I believe it was Brown, to make this miracle, a miracle happen. And that was a great introduction for me to the questing, adventurous nature of wristy glass. And that would then carry through the whole seminar, not just with that student, who, by the way, Stavara Strahan, but through all the other students in the seminar was such a privilege and joy to work with them. One thing that I totally experienced great about wristy glass was the coupling craft and materials and intense investigation of history of glass and working with glass with ideas, with current ideas, with ranging and important ideas. I think that's something fundamental to the program. Okay, that's the end of my little thing. So it's great to be with you all, love your presentations and I'd love it if we all talk together, but I'm wondering one thing, you touched on it a little bit, but now that you're... I actually have two things I'm wondering, but now that you're deep or deeper into your idiosyncratic, wonderfully idiosyncratic careers and visions, how do you relate this now to your experience at wristy glass? Now that you've gone... I mean, those two of you studied there, one of you is working there as a professor, but what connection do you see now like a couple years later or in whatever capacity you're in? Should I start? Anyone can start, it's like open and everything. I was speaking with Jocelyn about this before the panel and two important notions that were deeply embedded in me during my studies with wristy glass and these notions of lines of inquiry and this notion of being open to discovery and I definitely see that happen in the whole trajectory of my life in wristy and outside of wristy as far as not knowing what's going to happen next, but being completely open to the possibilities and just kind of asking questions and just seeing what happens next. And that has just led me to a place where I never thought I would have ended up when I was in school. Great. Oh, this is just so much. I think there's a certain spirit that's manifested and that permeates people who are wristy people and I think it is a sense of wonder. But I think more importantly is someone who's had the opportunity and the privilege to travel a bit and, you know, to visit other programs. One of the things you learn is at wristy and general in the glass department and program specifically, you're dealing with a group of people who deeply care about what they're doing. Now, that's oftentimes the thing that we want to brush by, but within this caring is rigor. It's consideration for others. It's compassion and there are all of these elements that come out of the spirit of caring. So I think for me, the thing that carries over is this spirit which allows us to do, which allows us to act, which allows us to affect change. Well, as you know, I'm a friend and fan so I could just say they're just some of my favorite people to think with. But have you had, I don't want to get into ranking the schools, but have you had experiences like elsewhere that, I mean, you think that all of these departments are equally fantastic? Well, I think maybe this speaks to Tavares' point that it's a very healthy department. It's composed of actually very complex things. And as someone who's brought in often quickly and you can really tell, you can really tell when you walk into a place, the deeper things that are being communicated, not just the ideas and the work, but kind of how things are structured. And when you joked in your interview with Lawrence Weschler about the transparency department, I really felt like that was on point. It's really special what you have. And I think that your choice to make a living book and new works in a moment when you could commemorate and rest, I think is really emblematic of that spirit and that courage and that kind of questing. So, yeah, it's an extremely special department within the school. It's a special school, but RISD Glass is really a rarity as far as I'm concerned. Also, there's no way she was going to say some other department was better. Well, one thing that's... Once again, your work, your plural work is very distinctive and idiosyncratic from a Mississippi River in sequence to FedExing, a large chunk of ice from Alaska to the Bahamas to working with robots and glass. All of you seem to have done as artists now that you're working artists is to really expand the parameters of what art making is beyond just the gallery system or showing in museums. All of you are deeply collaborating with others, far-flung others, and going really outside the boundaries of normal framework. Do you have any opinions about this? Quickly. Doesn't have to be that quick. When I was a student at RISD, I think there was this sort of pairing of extremely well-knowledged makers with the highest of the highest level of thinkers, all in the same place. And one good example of this is there was a grad student at the time when I was an undergrad student, who I will not name, who was so gifted in terms of making that he made an object, he made this goblet that was almost an exact replica or an exact replica of one that was at the Metropolitan Museum. I don't know if I should say this. I feel like I'm snitching. Okay. So he managed to work his way into the museum, and he swapped his object for the one that was in the museum. Don't be so terrified. They look exact. You won't even notice. And next year, that grad student was one of my professors. And I think this sensibility, this was a conceptual project, so don't freak out too much, guys. This sort of sensibility was this kind of pairing, this really rigorous, intense ability to make with this really intense ability to think and problem-solve, I think underlines the program. Also the subtle observation that he was never checked on the way in. So I think he actually just placed his object next to the museum object and left without it. Can you say anything else about your... Because I think it's really important for all of your work, this collaboration that you've made with others outside the risky collaboration outside the normal constructs of the art world. Yeah, I don't even really... I mean, I don't call myself an artist anymore. I think that I exist within these realms of art engineering and design. And I would say marginalized because I try to hang out with the engineers and they don't quite let me in. And then the art world doesn't quite accept me. So I definitely feel like existing between these realms. I also think that there's something very poetic and beautiful about limitation. And I've been thinking a lot about the side of limitation recently. Because I really think, for me, freedom is understanding one's limitations so well that one can make fun of one's own limitations and be whimsical and playful in the sense of one's limitations. And I think this very rigorous and as lovely guys as as lovelies who are making this program sound, which it is, it's also extremely rigorous and you work very, very hard in an environment that's also very loving but you work really hard. Let's not forget that. And I think this sense of freedom is achieved with this material as one becomes more and more... as one gets deeper and deeper into it, as one understands it better, I think you become freer. In the beginning it's this sort of really... in anyone who's worked with the material is this really intensely foreign thing that's just been placed in front of you and you work with it and you work with it and there's this sense of freedom that evolves from this... I don't want to call it a tug of war, I don't want to call it a fight, maybe a dance. That's really fulfilling. Maybe joining the two ideas together a little bit. Stephanie, your work... To me, when you talk about your work, you talk like a material scientist and I've really come to admire the way that they think because they're able to think through material in such an open-ended way and as artists we often, especially conceptual artists, we have kind of a parameter in mind or an endpoint in mind even as we're thinking through something new and I think it takes a really special mind to suspend that fixity or that kind of endpoint of I know at the end I will do X but just to say that when you're demonstrating your building process, you said I think of it as material and I break it apart so even the end use of it exemplified that I really admire it. Maybe it points to freedom in thinking. I agree and I think this also underscores what Tavares was saying about rigor and sensibility because just out in the world working with a lot of these extreme mechanical scientists and engineers, I notice that there's a sensibility that is different with RISD. It's almost ineffable. You can't really articulate what it is but yet when you see it, you know it and you feel it and it's this understanding of material and form and surface and all of these really special things and it's this thing that's so fleeting but it's like every person I've met from RISD, I'm like they have it and it's just cultivated from just rigor and like a relentless dedication to discipline. But aren't there also habits and traditions that are happening in the world of glass that can also hamper young artists? Absolutely. Among those are. They're also in other disciplines and other mediums as well. Again, speaking to what I think Tavares said earlier the amazing thing about the glass department is yes you study these traditional techniques that have been around for centuries yet every day you have to contend with how your work exists in a contemporary realm and it's all about context and we have to reconcile the context of our work today. I also think I think one of the glaringly important things one sort of absorbs when you're in this program is how to negotiate for one's own autonomy and how to earn that and I think that's really significant specifically because we're no longer in the Baroque period for example and we're not in the Iron Age. I think it's important because I think we all have this really lovely freedom that could also be dangerous but this lovely freedom to stake our own terms creatively and so whether that means you really like to make and you want to spend 20 hours in a glass shop or whether that means you like books and you want to research you learn how to negotiate for yourself and I think this is the most crucial skill because I think you then make to make again. Can I give you one of my favorite because the RISD is from in New England so I have a favorite which I quote from New England or Ralph Waldo Emerson and his great essay The Poet for Me like the first great radical statement about art making produced in this country and you read it and it's so easy to skip over this one thing written in 1844 early Victorian America all of a sudden Emerson writes art is the path of the creator to his work or to her work I mean wait a minute I thought art was the glass object that the glass maker makes or the painting that the painter makes or the poem that the poet makes or the sculpture that the sculptor makes but this is Emerson back in 1844 like totally detonating that in such a remarkable way and that's something that's nutrition for me something I certainly teach to my students but I can you comment about Ralph Waldo Emerson but also because it's so in this is so in your work you know any all of you I mean to be making poems from a silkworm's perspective the training he didn't mention but like really grueling rigorous training as a cosmonaut at Star City Russia that's also what Tavares Strachan did or to be like venturing out and making by the way I think your sculptures are really gorgeous and I mean like yes the procedure the process is great but it's resulting in some really bedazzling elegant yet ungainly sculptures that I think are really thrilling so what about art is the path of the creator to her work this is tough to teach in a university but this is like something fundamental to art making in my opinion especially questing bent as an artist I didn't mention it when I was talking about writing the poem but I went to seven countries 30 different sites to research it so I guess when thinking about path that was kind of a randomizing part of the research to make sure that I wasn't that I would net more than I could net in a library or online that a big part of it would be experiential and I see that as perhaps another connection here I think that there's something about the RISD program that feels like being in the world too it's a very international program it really thinks in a less local way than a lot of programs think it's really special I'm just going to keep turning it back to that's great yeah for me there's something that I became really aware of autonomous and kind of self directed study and learning somehow that's aligned with being put in a space with this crucible of goo and figure it out and there's something about being in that space and dedicating so many hours to trying to trying to reign in this unbridled crazy material to trying to manage things out in the world and all of a sudden everything just becomes little steps and everything becomes much more attainable so for me it was really about learning about everything that you need to do you would just have to go out and figure it out and that really came from my time there I always had this idea that whatever drew a creative to particular creative practice was going to be that thing that they would make work about and for me it was it was the fact that I had left home and I always find myself coming back to it as this kind of subject matter how do I find this place that I left and how does one contend with that idea when people are increasingly more displaced so I think as a mode of, and this is where I go back to this idea that the program, RISDU is really a place where one found one's voice and one became self empowered to be able to negotiate for oneself and negotiate one's own terms and I think this gift, this tool is significant because it allows you to have these kinds of revered conversations to begin with Did you know did you have an inkling that RISDU Glass was like that when you went into the program? Don't a lot of people go because they want to become really great glass makers Yes And you know what's funny? So you get waylaid by all of this crazy stuff or something? It completely flips you upside down I would say People who go in and come out not the same So it's a transformative Okay sorry But also many, many, many really good glass makers that come out of RISDU which is also significant So I think this is what I mentioned earlier that I kind of quickly maybe hopped over and when I was doing my little presentation was that misunderstanding is really beautiful. There's so much opportunity in misunderstanding you get away with so much more when people don't really understand what you're coming from in the beginning and this is sort of slow working up to getting figuring out what you're actually up to I mean I think to me the closest representation of a Bauhaus style education is the glass program How could you elaborate a little bit about that? I think in this era when like I said earlier there's so many layers of displacement and we're confronted with so many different kinds of issues where we have evolving perspectives on gender what we have evolving perspectives on what it means to be from a place what it means to be international When a particular program is arming its students with the ability to negotiate to me that's the top of the top and I think to me is this kind of Bauhaus style thinking because it exists within a community and you're allowed to negotiate for oneself within this community and I think this is a very important detail I'm not an expert on the Bauhaus but following that line of thought I can say something about where there's just this incredible kind of technical virtuosity and then you pair this with philosophical thinkers and that's really what my education was having a class like critical issues with something like technical glass blowing really makes you question and think about everything differently Were women allowed to study glass at the Bauhaus? I know it's a simple question I mean I know Ani Albers best and I think she wasn't allowed to that's why she went into textiles so that seems like an important advance You just brought that up but do you want to say a little bit more about your work with Ani Albers? It's really good for people to know So there are a lot of artists I work for Emily Dickinson is one Ani Albers is another so I feel like I'm often working in honor of other artists Are you talking about the weaving piece? So the thing that when I started out in art I don't want to learn how to make paper and I don't want to learn how to weave I have a figure ground relationship I'm not doing I draw the line there and I've since done both but it was Albers type studies that made me want to study weaving there was something she really understood about the typographic page and how we construct space within the grid that seemed essential to understand as a writer so I went through and what I was reading really because every time I read a book on the loom it was just so complex I couldn't quite put it together in an abstract way and then I've I think I might have finished that circle so I've been at the Albers foundation a couple of times as an artist in residence and I recently made a piece for the center for creativity, craft and design I think that's its acronym using an IBM typewriter in which I re-typed a quote by Annie Albers from on weaving but the IBM typewriter is kind of this mid computer mid typewriter typewriter so you can program memory into it and with program memory it'll type from left to right right to left right and so forth so when you hit play on an Annie Albers quote it'll type it just like the weaving would weave it so it felt like it came full circle in a in a totally geeky way that suits me it's great which reminds me of your word design we are at the esteemed museum like it seems to me that like elements of design are really crucial in all of your work do you have any thing you'd like to say about that I mean it's obviously well I was just shocked at the connections I was making between our work I mean we were extremely different I think this is also exemplary of what comes out of the glass department the kind of wide net of paths but just the formal quality that you're pointing out with the silkworm and the way it was looping just like my work and the similarities between yours and just the formal kind of yeah the formal the way that was aligning was very surprising I love the piece that you wrote about by Tavares in the book the replicating a cracked window exactly in replacing it I mean that kind of use of pattern to me is just thrilling can you talk about that work I think one of the maybe one of the first things you learn when you start to work with glass specifically is the relationship the material has to order and chaos and what's that you know how does one work around those relationships the material is a phenomenal material it's a phenomenal material to work with it's a phenomenal material to to learn from and I think the study of this material can be applied to every other material and specifically how glass breaks the strength of it the fact that it is 20 times stronger than concrete under pressure I mean there's so many beautiful details about how this material functions that is the perfect way to learn about concrete or metal or how the sun works the project you're referring to is these windows when I moved to Rhode Island I saw these broken windows and I went into these abandoned buildings took these windows out took them back into the studio and started to reproduce them putting back the ones I reproduced next to the original ones that was more or less it I think it was more or less it but it had more like repercussions than that no that's okay anything else? I was thinking that I've used pattern as a way to have a conversation in public weaving at grid space was it was also Albert's space where I was using her white coveralls there's always that photo from Black Mountain that cracks me up where Annie Albert is in her coveralls with her pearls I love it I got the exact same pair of white coveralls and I embroidered the word weaver because I feel like people will talk to a person in a uniform and then I was making a weaving directly on the fence at grid space which was a community based art space in Crown Heights and it just as a way to talk to people about weaving in public just to get people to stop and talk but I was weaving the same pattern that I was wearing so it became a way of looking and then looking again and looking at the microphones they're weaving I saw it as a space of communication and just a way to start a conversation really How do you keep things fresh and vigorous now after you're developing such an approach to art making? Stunt me I'm trying, I guess it's collaborating I'm trying to figure out how to get involved in other people's projects A lot of the work now I do is working within collaborative networks where I always felt limited by my limitations that I couldn't be able to wear all the hats that I needed to for my work and many of my friends didn't want to work for free anymore so figuring out how to get these various kind of specialized technical things done that I need I've been looking a lot at like startup culture and how and how they pursue it and so yeah I would say collaboration is a way that I'm kind of keeping things fresh and continue to learn things There was a when I was a student at RISD we went to I believe it was we would take these field trips I think it was to Corning or I don't remember where it was but we had an artist presenting I think his name was Fred Cheetah and one of his first slides I found it so funny one of his first slides was Fred Cheetah making the same art since 1950 and so I'm sorry when you said this I thought what does it mean to think about pioneering what does it mean to think about creating enough space so one can freely move in that space one creates and I think I think you really it's a continual renewing of one's commitment to one's practice and I think keeping one's head up et cetera et cetera et cetera but the Fred Cheetah thing I thought was great I mean for me teaching is really one of the main ways that I test ideas and learn so I'm looking forward to a class at Northwestern next spring called Advanced Materials where I'm looking at the continuum between traditional craft and cutting-edge technology and another way in which craft and art have been separated out and one privileged the other less privileged and culturally why that happens and who it omits what swaths of time it omits and so forth so looking forward to those explorations but also just getting to visit lab after lab after lab with a great group of people Can I say one more thing? Of course you can For those people who don't know about RISD Glass so go to the website go to the website and I'm not saying this because I'm getting paid to say it or I don't know I'm not sure I don't think I am but I'm saying it specifically because I think there's really an interesting group of kinds of artists coming out of this very particular program so if you have some time and you know how you're wasting time on your cell phone just check out RISD Glass Great point. Okay so do you want to have some questions if you have questions? So we have time for just a few questions before we head upstairs for the book signing and reception so raise your hand high right now if you'd like to ask a question Anyone? Hi Stephanie I had a question for you about your work Have you visited the Yorah Slarman show upstairs? I have not but when I was at my residency in Pier 9 Autodesk is one of the sponsors of that work they were working on computer vision system for printing and so I worked next to that the MIG welder that was mounted to the robot in printing steel and that was really I modeled my printer off of that so I've been following that work for quite some time and I'm a big fan of his but I will check out the show upstairs. I know it's just amazing how linked the and when we listened to him speak he talked of himself as sort of not as a he didn't think of himself as a creator of things he didn't like that he just wanted to keep messing around with the stuff so it sounds like you have a lot in common I would agree printing metal and printing glass very similar of course because of the high temperatures the issue with glass is that you have to deal with thermal shock and all these other things that metal printing doesn't have to deal with and a MIG welder has been around for a while It was amazing to see the stainless steel extrusion come out at a 90 degree angle out of a little tiny what he's doing with machine learning and computer vision and all of this cutting edge stuff it's on the edge of everything that we're hearing about and seeing and it's going to completely change the game as far as using these really technically difficult materials with emerging technology is your mind like a computer scientist algorithms and things like that? I would say that I began enjoying doing this kind of work when there was a physical thing there was feedback I never could code because it was all within the computer but as soon as there was material involved and I could respond to something in real space that's when it got really interesting to me what are you working with architectural? Can you talk a little bit about some of the collaborations specifically architecture or what is it more materials people that you work with what would be an example of working with an architect? Thanks and I'll be quiet I would say that the space that I'm working in right now is an incubator a research and development center for projects like this some examples of projects would be like a composite braiding machine where again it's kind of these really cutting edge materials but people figuring them out outside of industry but they have the help with software engineers and experts I would say it's a lot of figuring out how these things can exist in the world because we all make things in our studios and you know they exist as objects or models but here it's really about reconciling how these things exist in the world and it's usually with architecture and construction. Great I think we have time for one more question down here. How many glass programs are there in other universities? What are the competing universities in glass? No I'm just curious. No in the US? Not many Alright so we're going to look that up Well thank you all for joining us and we hope you join us upstairs for the book signing and reception Thanks so much Real pleasure