Naturae Mitis

Preston Singletary has become synonymous with the relationship between European glass blowing traditions and Northwest Native art. His artwork features themes of transformation, animal spirits, and shamanism through elegant, blown glass forms and mystical sand carved Tlingit designs.

Singletary learned the art of glass blowing by working with artists in the Seattle area including Benjamin Moore and Dante Marioni. As a student and assistant, he initially focused on mastering the techniques of the European tradition. His work took him to Kosta Boda (Sweden) where he studied Scandinavian design and met his future wife. Throughout his 30+ years of glass blowing experience, Preston Singletary has also had opportunities to learn the secrets of the Venetian glass masters by working with Italian legends Lino Tagliapietra, Cecco Ongaro, and Pino Signoretto. In 2010, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the University of Puget Sound. Now recognized internationally, Singletary’s artworks are included in museum collections such as The British Museum (London, UK), The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), The Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA), the Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, NY), the Mint Museum of Art and Design (Charlotte, NC), the Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ), and the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC).

Singletary maintains an active schedule by teaching, lecturing, and exhibiting internationally. In 2009, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA, launched a major mid-career survey of his work, entitled “Preston Singletary: Echoes, Fire, and Shadows”. In 2018, he launched a new traveling exhibition with the Museum of Glass, titled “Raven and the Box of Daylight“, which pushes the boundaries of glass as a medium for storytelling. Preston Singletary continues to assert himself as a keeper and teller of stories and as a contemporary master of his craft.

Curtis Steiner is an autodidactic polymath based in Seattle, WA. He is a master gardener, calligrapher, and artist. His luminous watercolors cast color and form as abstract protagonists in the midst of transformation. Soft forms swell, breach and accommodate the cavities around them, like lungs filling with air, or aquifers releasing water, in a waltz of scarcity and abundance. Informed by his calligraphy practice, Steiner’s renderings contrast precision and gesture to make the ephemeral concrete, a cloud between blinks, or a cellular exchange hidden from view. Their saturated totemic forms recall Tantric Paintings from Rajasthan, rich elemental voids to contemplate the infinite, suspended bridges to the sublime. Steiner establishes compositional parameters that generate ensuing forms, echoing parametric architecture’s pursuit of complex systems-driven geometry. Despite their meticulous abstract nature, these deliberate and organic forms suggest a human allegory. How do two individuals relate to and transform one another? What energy emerges when a couple collides?

April Surgent started working with glass in 1997, at open-access hot shop studios in her hometown of Seattle, WA. She went on to study at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia where she graduated with honors in 2004. In 2003, she changed her focus from blown to wheel-engraved glass after studying under Czech master engraver Jiri Harcuba at the Pilchuck Glass School. She has been engraving for 20 years, interested in contemporary approaches to the traditional craft of wheel engraving. Notable recognitions for her work include a 2009 Behnke Foundation Neddy Fellowship, a 2016 USA Ford Fellowship, and acquisitions by Iowa State University and the Smithsonian’s, American Art Museum.

Observation and in-depth research inform her work discussing our changing planet. Her interest in natural history, applied science, and climate change have led her from Antarctica to Alaska studying vulnerable species and ecosystems. In 2013, she worked at Palmer station as a recipient of the National Science Foundations’, Antarctic Artist and Writers Program and in 2016 as a volunteer field biologist for the Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program. Most recently Surgent has worked in Southwest Alaska with the US Geological Survey assisting with pelagic food web research. Surgent lives and works on the Quimper Peninsula in Washington state.

Jane Rosen possesses a unique ability to evoke both enigma and precision in her work. Her chosen subjects–animals, wild and tame–are used as vehicles to explore their instincts and natural intelligence. For Rosen, understanding animal nature is a key to understanding human nature. She is fascinated with cultures such as the Eskimos, Native Americans, and Egyptians. Rosen excels across several different mediums including sculpture, painting, and drawing, and traces of all three can be found in each artwork; upon close observation a sculpture has been painted or a drawing has had several layers of wax sculpted onto its surface.

Rosen was born in New York City, where she grew up and began her career as an artist. Despite finding early success in galleries and a prestigious teaching position in the city, Rosen found herself captivated by the accessibility of nature on a visit to the West Coast. She eventually relocated permanently to San Gregorio, California, where she kept her home and studio on a horse ranch frequently visited by the birds you see in her work.

Rosen was recently selected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for inclusion in their prestigious 2014 Annual Invitational in New York. Rosen has taught at numerous elite institutions, including the School of Visual Arts and Bard College in New York, the LaCoste School of the Arts in France, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Rosen’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America, and Art News. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and is in numerous public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Aspen Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Chevron Corporation, the collection of Grace Borgenicht, JP Morgan Chase Bank, the Luso American Foundation, the Mallin Collection, the Mitsubishi Corporation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. She exhibits in galleries around the United States.

Jiyong Lee is a studio artist and educator who lives and works in Carbondale, Illinois. A professor of art at Southern Illinois University, Lee has headed the glass program there since 2005. Lee was born and raised in South Korea and earned his MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, and taught there for several years. As an instructor, he also has taught at the Pilchuck Glass School, the Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, Penland School of Crafts, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, the Domaine de Boisbuchet in France, Canberra Glassworks in Australia, Fire Station Artists’ Studios in Dublin, Ireland, and various other art institutions and universities nationally and internationally. Lee has served as a member of the board of directors for the Glass Art Society from 2009-2015. He has won a number of honors, including 2021 Finalist of Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, Bavarian State Prize from International Trade Fair, Munich Germany, and the Emerging Artist Award from the Glass Art Society. His work has been featured in American Craft Magazine, Neues Glas (Germany), New Glass Review of Corning Museum of Glass, and American Art Collector. His work has been exhibited and collected nationally and internationally with recent highlights including the Translucency exhibition in Tallinn Applied Art Triennial in Estonia, Loewe Foundation Craft Prize exhibition, and KOREA NOW exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, an acquisition by the Barry Art Museum, Corning  Museum of Glass, and Chanel France.

One of Japan’s leading figures in glass art, Hiroshi Yamano is known for his diverse skills and innovative surface applications. Drawn to nature, specifically near his home in the countryside, Hiroshi uses the fish as his personal symbol to describe his journeys from Japan to America, traversing the oceans. Most recently he has been focusing on his homeland and has included native birds to complete his his Scenes of Japan. Hiroshi is co-founder of Ezra Glass Studio in Japan and chairman of the glass department and head of the craft department at Osaka Art University. Mr. Yamano’s work is exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad and is included in many museum and public collections.

“Japan is a country that has four distinct seasons, and the seasons have traditionally been a popular subject in Japanese art. An appreciation of the changing seasons also permeates popular culture, as people take the time to enjoy scenes of natural beauty at different times of the year, to eat seasonal foods and to decorate their homes with objects that reflect the changing seasons. I, too, have a strong awareness of the natural world that surrounds me. As I grow older, I find myself wanting to spend more time in nature for the peace of mind that it brings to me. I value the simplicity and quiet that I encounter there, surrounded by the beauty of the Japanese landscape. My art is a reflection of that beauty; nature is the source of my creativity. In my work, I want to interpret the feelings and sensations of having a close connection to nature, and through it share the beauty of the changing seasons in Japan with the viewer.”

Jiro Yonezawa has been a bamboo craftsman and artist for almost 40 years. He trained at the Beppu Vocational Arts Training Center in 1981 and spent a year as an apprentice to Masakazu Ono. He continued his training at the Oita Prefectural Beppu Industrial Art Research Institute. In 1989 he moved to the United States and lived and worked there for almost 20 years. While in the US, his work became bolder and larger, and he started making sculptural pieces influenced by art he saw there. In 2008 he returned to his hometown in Japan and built a new studio in Saiki City, Oita Prefecture. Since his return, he has been active in the Japanese New Art & Craft (Nihon Shinkogei) organization and has received several national awards. He has also shown in Nitten, the annual National Fine Arts Exhibition.

He has had numerous solo exhibitions and has shown in group exhibitions internationally. His work is in many public and private collections such as the Microsoft Corporation in Seattle, the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, and the Musée de Quai Branly in Paris. He is one of the bamboo artists selected to participate in an exhibit of Japanese bamboo art at the Musee des Arts Asiatiques de Nice in France in July 2024.

Jamie Walker is a professor at the University of Washington where he holds the Wyckoff Milliman Endowed Chair of Art and was appointed Director of the School of Art + Art History + Design in 2014. He was the recipient of the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2008. Walker studied at the University of Washington where he received a BA/History and a BFA/Ceramics before receiving his MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been featured in 24 one-person exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and Europe. Collections include the Seattle Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Racine Art Museum, International Museum of Glass, and the Museo del Vino, Torgiano Italy. Reviews of his work have appeared in Ceramics: Art and Perception, Sculpture, New Art Examiner, Ceramics Monthly and American Ceramics. In 2005 he was honored with a Flintridge Foundation Artist Grant and in 2010 completed a three-piece outdoor commission for Vulcan Inc., located at the Amazon headquarters in Seattle.

“My recent studio work has been directed by materiality, perception and chance and has included participatory installations, wall bowls and spherical accumulations rendered at both an intimate or large scale. I am intrigued by the plethora of ever shifting information, both real and imagined, that can be observed from watching clouds, viewing cellular structures, studying landscape paintings or taking a walk on the beach. I am interested in the metaphorical potential of exploiting the somewhat uncontrollable nature of the ceramic process with the conscious and technical control I try to exert with the glazed surfaces. These sources serve as gateways to my studio endeavors where I create work that eventually becomes stationary and permanent, but may still allow for an imaginative, even meditative, perceptual experience.”