Seattle Art Fair 2024

Mel Douglas is one of the most celebrated artists working in glass today. Douglas’s refined and detailed work employs a minimalist aesthetic along with considered mark-making to engage a dialogue of how line and form can define and defy our understanding of space and volume. Douglas’ work explores the potential, versatility, and flexibility of glass as a material for drawing, and with it, expands our view of glass as a sculptural medium.

In Douglas’s words, “objects and drawings are often thought of as two separate entities. my pieces explore and interweave the creative possibilities of this liminal space, where the form is not just a support for drawing; but a three-dimensional drawing itself. Using the unique qualities of the material and the rich potential of mark-making on and with glass, I am using line as a way to inform, define and enable dimensional space”.

Mel Douglas has worked as an independent studio artist since graduating from the Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, in 2000. In 2020 Douglas was awarded a Ph.d. for her practice-lead research investigating how we can understand studio glass through the aesthetics of drawing. In addition to winning the 2020 and 2014 tom Malone Prize- a prestigious award through which a work is acquired each year into the collection of the National Gallery of Western Australia – Douglas has received several major awards, including the Ranamok Glass Prize in 2002 and the International Young Glass Award in 2007 from the Ebeltoft Museum of Glass.

In 2019 her work was the inaugural acquisition for the Australian National Gallery of Art’s Robert and Eugenie Bell Decorative Arts and Design fund. Douglas’ work is held in the private collections and public institutions internationally, including the Corning Museum of Glass, The Chrysler Museum of Art, the Ebeltoft Museum of Glass, and the National Gallery of Australia.

I was born in Seattle in 1955. We moved around a lot: Honolulu, Lake Oswego, Vancouver, Seattle again, Pasadena. In 1975, my first real studio was a one car garage in Santa Cruz. Next, in 1980, a large bedroom in Berkeley. Both had stupendous views!

On a visit to Seattle when I was 14, my Aunt Helyn brought me to the Francine Seders Gallery, where I saw the works of Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and others. She also brought me to the studio of her older sister, Aunt Ruth. This day had an enormous impact on me. I never saw them again; they both died the following year. Once, years later, as I was leaving my Aunt Mary’s home, I pointed to one of Ruth’s paintings and said I think about this painting all the time. A large watercolor of rock and water, loose, abstract and yet real. “Well, you’d better take it then!” It’s still on my office wall.

I studied drawing and painting in California through the 1970s, held extended residencies in Barcelona and Paris in the 1980s, and since the mid 1990s have engaged in a passionate study of Asian art. I began using encaustic around 1983, having seen an encaustic painting by Joseph Goldberg. This was before there were any books or classes on it. I looked it up in Ralph Meyer’s Handbook of Artists’ Materials and Techniques and did the best I could with it. I made up my own methods, some of which failed. With encaustic, I can bring together all of my other methods: oils, papers and inks, fabric, tar, and gold. In any medium, my work draws on multiple lineages of art, culture and spiritual meaning. I finally got around to earning a BFA in 2005, and had a show that year at Traver Gallery, Tacoma.

My first show with the Traver Sutton Gallery was in 1990. From that show, the Quarter saw Gallery in Portland took an interest and I showed there until they closed in 2000. I became familiar with many in the Portland art community and moved there in 1998. In September 2006, I curated “Impulse,” a national show of encaustic painting and sculpture at the Portland Art Center. I’ve participated in group exhibits at the Art Gym (Marylhurst University) and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and had a solo show at Oregon State University in 1995. I have taught painting and drawing in Seattle and Portland since the middle 1990s. In 2007, I led a group of artists on a tour of museums, galleries and artist studios in Barcelona. I was nominated for the 2013 Northwest Artist Awards. You can see my paintings at the Traver Gallery in Seattle, at i.e. gallery in Edison, WA., at Cedar Street Galleries in Honolulu, and at Augen Gallery in Portland, Oregon. And soon, at Gallery MAR in Carmel, California.

Masami Koda (Bothell) was born in Kobe, Japan and works primarily in glass with elements of jewelry fabrication. She explores the relationship between human beings and nature that exists on the outskirts of awareness and perception. Her pieces serve as a magnified impact of human presence upon a delicately formed representation of nature.

Masami was educated at the Pilchuck School of Glass and Cleveland Institute of Arts. She earned a BFA in art from Osaka University of Arts, and she received an MFA in ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, both with full scholarships. In 1996, Masami was awarded three separate grants from the Japan Foundation, Consulate General of Japan, and Japanese Association of Northeast Ohio. She is represented by the William Traver Gallery and has solo exhibitions there dating back to 1998.

As part of her Fellowship’s Meet the Artist requirements, glass/jewelry artist Masami talked about the importance of volunteering in the art community during a slide lecture to art students at the Department of Art at Western Washington University. She showed works produced from her school years to the present and talked about her experience and struggle to become an artist. After the slide lecture, there was Q&A and a student shared that he is having the same struggles and expressed relief after hearing of her experience. The connection with students, Masami noted, brought her back to her original intention of artmaking.

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.

Bronson Shonk, born in Atlanta, Georgia, studied Environmental Science and Studio Art at the University of Vermont. After graduation, he moved to Seattle and worked in Data Visualization for four years before studying with artist Michael Schultheis in 2017. Since then, he has been a full-time artist, exhibiting his paintings and sculptures in galleries throughout the United States. His artwork is included in numerous private collections including The Haskell Collection, and has been featured in Luxe and White Hot magazines.

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.

Dharma Strasser MacColl explores a variety of mediums to create mixed media works on paper and ceramic sculpture. Her most recent work investigates the intersections between our built and natural world. Strasser MacColl grew up in Portland, Oregon.  She studied painting and drawing in Italy and went on to receive her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in ceramic sculpture. She has taught at Mills College, California College of the Arts and City College of San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, and she is represented by Traywick Contemporary in the Bay Area.  Her work is included in public and private collections including The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum, the Fidelity Collection, Microsoft, and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

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?

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.