Lino Tagliapietra & Team

Lino Tagliapietra was born on Murano, a Venetian island which has served as the world’s glass capital for the past millennium. At the age of twelve, the artist apprenticed with Archimede Seguso. Training for glassblowers on Murano is traditionally structured, rigorous and slow; yet, within this system, Tagliapietra was a prodigy. After nine years of assisting, he achieved the title of maestro. Subsequently, he worked at several of Murano’s greatest factories: Galliano Ferro, Venini, Effetre International, and La Murrina (which he founded).

A significant shift in the Studio Glass Movement began in 1979 when Tagliapietra accepted Benjamin Moore’s invitation to teach at Pilchuck Glass School. There, he established many enduring professional contacts and continuing relationships with students. The importance of his teaching to the development of glass as an artistic medium cannot be overstated.

Tagliapietra was the recipient of the prestigious Rakow Commission granted in 1996 by the Corning Museum of Glass, The Glass Art Society Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2004 Visionary Award from the Museum of Arts & Design in New York. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia, and North America and is included in numerous prominent public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York; The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York; The Danish Royal Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark; The Jewish Museum in San Francisco, California; Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France, and Museo del Vidrio in Monterrey, Mexico.

Having firmly established herself as one of the preeminent contemporary artists working in glass sculpture, Nancy Callan’s artistic voice has never been more resonant than in her forthcoming exhibition at Traver Gallery. In her new body of work, Callan celebrates and draws on her early experience as a graphic designer to bring pattern and color to the forefront. Her colorful blown forms become a beautiful canvas for the intricate overlapping, woven, organic, and playful cane and murrine designs she creates.

Building upon the techniques she mastered during her 19-year tenure on Lino Tagliapietra’s team, Callan creates cane-glass patterns that are completely her own. Like drawings in three dimensions, lines rhythmically undulate in and out of the rich glass colors. Nancy Callan’s works are exuberant, energy filled, and delightfully bold. We are proud to be the first gallery to show this new body of work and thrilled to introduce it to you, our collectors.

Nancy Callan earned her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1996. Her numerous awards include the Creative Glass Center of America Fellowship and residencies at the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, WA), The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, Pittsburgh, PA, and The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA. She has offered advanced glassblowing workshops at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, Haystack Mountain School in Deer Isle, ME and Penland School of Crafts in Ashville, NC. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Shanghai Museum of Art, Shanghai, China, The Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA, the Museum of Glass, Corning, NY, the Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, MI, and the Museum of Northwest Art, La Connor, WA, as well as in numerous private
collections.

Jen Elek received her BFA from Alfred University in Metal and Hot Glass sculpture in 1994, after training as a welder in Allentown, PA. She was a student of Michael Scheiner, Dante Marioni, and Ann Wahlstrom at Pilchuck Glass School, and studied with Lino Tagliapietra at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. In addition to doing her own work, the Seattle-based Elek has assisted glass artists such as Dale Chihuly, Kiki Smith, Preston Singletary, Lino Tagliapietra, and others. A vibrant contemporary glass artist, Elek exhibits alongside artists of other mediums, breaking some of the barriers that have kept glass in the realm of craft and offering it as a worthy medium of contemporary art.

American, b. 1973, Seattle, USA, based in Seattle and San Francisco, USA.

John Kiley, a renowned artist at the forefront of contemporary glass sculpture, is known for his groundbreaking exploration at the intersection of sculpture, blown glass, and architectural forms. With a unique blend of technical expertise and artistic vision, Kiley’s work transcends boundaries with a dynamic interplay of light, structure, and spatial relationships.

Kiley’s affinity for glass was evident from an early age. As a teenager, he experimented with painting on glass. Later, he refined his skills through formal training and apprenticeships with master artists, including 16 years with Lino Tagliapietra, developing a deep understanding of traditional glassblowing and fabrication techniques.

Kiley’s sculptures frequently incorporate individual elements into larger frameworks, showcasing his meticulous attention to detail and risk-taking approach. Whether creating towering structures, intricate blown glass orbs, or delicately assembled shattered blocks, each series exemplifies his ability to seemingly defy gravity. Through this creative process, he explores the inherent tension between chaos and order, strength and fragility, resulting in works that evoke metamorphosis and the intrinsic beauty of imperfection.

In addition to his solo work, Kiley is known for his collaborative projects with architects, engineers, and other master artists, pushing the boundaries of what is possible within the realm of glass in sculpture. His willingness to experiment with scale, materials, and techniques have earned him widespread acclaim and recognition, with his work featured in galleries, museums, and public spaces worldwide.

Dante Marioni burst onto the international glass scene at the age of 19 with a signature style that has been described as the purest of classical forms executed in glass by an American glassblower. His amphoras, vases, and ewers are derived from Greek and Etruscan prototypes, yet they are imaginatively and sometimes whimsically reinterpreted. His impossibly elongated, sinuous shapes are made with bright and saturated contrasting colors.

Marioni’s sophisticated glass objects evoke the rich tradition of classical Mediterranean pottery and bronzes, and of Marioni’s training in centuries-old Venetian glassblowing techniques with some of the greatest masters in contemporary glass.

The son of American studio glass pioneer Paul Marioni, Dante was raised in a family of artists that includes two well-known uncles, painter Joseph Marioni and conceptual artist Tom Marioni.

Marioni first held a blowpipe at the age of nine. By the time he was 15, he was working after school at one of the first cooperative hotshops and showrooms, The Glass Eye, in Seattle Washington. Although he loved glassblowing, making production studio glass felt limiting.

“The prevailing aesthetic [in American studio glass in the 1970s] was loose and free-form” observed Marioni, “I personally had no interest in that.” Around the same time he met up with Benjamin Moore, another studio glass pioneer, and watched Moore make a perfectly symmetrical, on-center glass form inspired by Venetian glass. It had a dramatic and lasting effect on Marioni, who had not previously seen this type of glassblowing.

Moore soon became a great mentor and friend. “I worked with Benny any chance I got and still use his studio to this day to make some of my really large pieces,” Marioni says. He also studied with other well-known studio glass pioneers, such as Fritz Dreisbach and Richard Marquis, who is widely recognized for his unique interpretations of Venetian decorative techniques.

In 1983, Moore introduced Marioni to Lino Tagliapietra, the legendary maestro who traveled from Murano to teach young American glassblowers at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington state. “I took classes with Lino throughout the 1990s, and because of him, I received a very classical education in glassblowing. I never missed an opportunity to be around him.”

At the age of 23, Dante Marioni had his first sell-out gallery show in Seattle that featured his Whopper vases. This series introduced his signature, monumental forms and two-color style, and earned him a prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship. After two decades of experimentation, Marioni now creates a diverse range of tall, iconic forms with surface treatments such as murrine (mosaic) and reticello (air bubbles within a net pattern) in an ever-changing array of vibrant colors.

His most recent works are sculptural vessels inspired by the leaf. “Not the leaf in nature, but the stylized forms found in the decorative arts,” Marioni notes. The new vessels are beguilingly intricate, inventive, fresh and tradition-breaking. While his earlier work was about “form, conceived and executed from a design point of view,” his newest works focus on the exploration of color and pattern.

For Dante Marioni, making objects is about the art of glassblowing rather than the creation of glass art, the process rather than the result. Marioni’s elegant works are the brilliant record of his on-going relationship with and exploration of this material.

David was born in Central Pennsylvania in 1968 and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1989-93. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1993, he moved to Seattle to work for Dale Chihuly and many highly regarded artists in the Puget Sound area and beyond. He has worked most closely with the maestro Lino Tagliapietra over the past 26 years. David has been traveling teaching and demonstrating nationally and internationally for the past 18 years.David began using glass enamels in his work during a fellowship at the Creative Glass Center of America in 1995 and again in 2004. His work has been included in many distinguished private collections and several museum collections as well. He uses the forms he creates to serve as a reference, as well as a virtual canvas, to the stories he illustrates on them. His incorporation of sound fundamental glass skills with a less than conventional approach to vessel making has enabled him to create a series of interesting and original forms on which to paint. He works mostly with characters from fairy tales and children’s stories, primarily for their familiar associations. He tries to incorporate into these cautionary tales a sense of his own history or personal experience in an effort to give them a more contemporary and personal relevance.