Seattle Art Fair 2022

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.

Born in Seattle in 1956, Dingus attended Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia (BFA, 1980) and San Jose State University (MFA, 1985). She has received a Visual Art Fellowship from Artist Trust (1994), a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship (1999), and the Morrie and Joan Alhadeff PONCHO Artist of the Year Award (2005).

Dingus has had solo shows at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and The Stenersen Museum, both in Norway (2002, 2006), as well as the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA (2005 – 2006). Her work has been included in Nature/Culture organized by The Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh (2006 – 2008), Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC (2006 – 2007) and 21st Century American Women Artists at the Residence of the United States Ambassador to NATO in Brussels, Belgium (2006 – 2010). Her work is in many regional museums and corporate collections. Dingus currently lives and works in the state of Washington and is represented by Traver Gallery in Seattle.

“I consider myself an African-American Feminist and environmental artist. My approach to producing art is environmentally and politically infused: neither waste humanity nor the gifts of nature. I am primarily a mixed media sculptor who uses discarded materials. My art draws upon relics from the African Diaspora. The discarded materials represent how people of African descent were used during the institution of slavery and colonialism then discarded, but who found ways to repurpose themselves and thrive in a hostile world. I seek to use recovered materials, reconfiguring and incorporating them into pieces of art where possible and appropriate, and to mitigate waste and pollution in all my work. This is a creative challenge, but a commitment I incorporate into my professional and personal activities.”

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.

Morisawa combines disparate and incongruous materials to form beautiful and disorienting designs that reflect a series of visual paradoxes in her mosaic-like work. Although she has done representational images in the past, Naoko’s current work is focused almost exclusively on abstraction. For her, these abstract compositions are a visual representation of feelings that cannot be adequately expressed through language or traditional figuration.

Morisawa’s methodology for creating boldly colored mosaic paintings is both highly technical and entirely intuitive, layering thousands of meticulously cut and oil-stained wood and paper pieces to create dynamic textures, shadows, color fields, and patterns. With a background in traditional Japanese marquetry (or intarsia) – a technique in which images are created using carefully cut and glued slivers of wood – Morisawa sees the natural textures and patterns of the wood grain and paper fibers as fundamental elements in her pieces. Naoko makes art that is natural, playful and lifts people’s spirits. She also wants her artwork to be about herself, like a diary. Each piece is created with the care one would use writing a letter to a loved one or friend. Bright, fun, and unusual subjects attract and inspire Morisawa to work in new directions.

Naoko Morisawa was born in Tokyo, Japan, and studied art at Japan’s Tama Art University. She has worked as a commercial product designer for Godiva Chocolate and Twining Tea and taught art classes in Tokyo, Yokohama, and the Canadian Embassy before moving to the USA in 2004. She has exhibited her work in more than 30 states across the US, in Japanese museums, the Dublin Biennale, National Weather Center Biennale, Bellingham National at Whatcom Museum, and Tokyo Art Olympia Biennale at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Japan. Her artwork is included in the Permanent Collections of City of Seattle, City of Portland, City of Bellevue, Kent and Shoreline, Seattle Public Utilities, and Seattle International Airport. Her studio public art exhibitions / installations have been selected by The Metro, City of Seattle, Seattle Center, Washington Convention Center, Macy’s Seattle, Seattle Children Hospital, Seattle Salmon Bay Park, Lake Sammamish State Park, Amazon, Nordstrom Inc. General Electric HQ Exhibition, and Facebook- Meta (TBC).