Mark Peiser will deliver The Paul and Irene Hollister Lecture on Glass on Tuesday, February 25, at 6 pm. His talk is entitled “Reinventing the Wheel: And Then Some.”
This talk will illustrate the development of world-renown artist Mark Peiser’s oeuvre and include his personal reminiscences about the postwar studio glass movement. Peiser reflects:
In 1967 the craft world knew almost nothing about this “new” material. In that ignorance, my approach, continuing to this day, became to imagine a piece that gave voice to some place in my soul, and then figure out how to make it. My initial responses to glass were mixed. Blowing seemed to come easily. However, that part of me that was aware of standards for performance, music for example, was aghast at the lack of discipline and vocabulary in the young glass movement. That part of me from engineering was astounded at the lack of technical information implemented in the small studio. The aesthetic part of me saw practically nothing of consequence being done. It was the perfect chance to reinvent the wheel. I liked that. A lot. I felt it appropriate to devise pieces that needed to, or could only, or best be, made of glass. In the beginning I was drawn to glass blowing by the directness of the process. But with time, I was drawn into considerations of imagery related to vessel forms, and then the implications of transparency upon the world of objects, and my mind’s eye began to perceive the volumes of things differently. With more time, I began to see glass as not transparent, but as atmosphere, and light, and started to compose works of that.
Mark Peiser received his Bachelor of Science in Design from Illinois Institute of Technology in 1961 and attended the DePaul University School of Music from 1965 to 1967. In 1967 he took five weeks of glass classes at Penland School of Crafts and became the school’s first Resident Glass Artist. He has exhibited worldwide and received honors from the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, the Glass Art Society (of which he was a founder), the Japan Glass Artcrafts Association, the American Craft Council, and many others. His work is featured in museum, corporate, and private collections around the globe, including the Ashville Art Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, Glassmuseum Ebeltoft (Denmark), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Italy), the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Lucerne Museum of Art (Switzerland), and the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art. Peiser lives and works in Penland, North Carolina.
This event will be livestreamed. Please check back the day of the event for a link to the video. To watch videos of past events please visit our YouTube page.
