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.”

World-renowned artist Mark Peiser will present his reflections on the postwar studio glass movement and chart the development of his oeuvre in this context and beyond. Peiser first engaged with glass in the 1960s. He and other artists explored new ways to create pieces in this medium in their own studios and workshops, outside of factory settings. Peiser notes the complexities of this milieu and its changes over time. Having studied engineering, design, piano, and music composition, he strives to foster disciplined technique, expand aesthetic vocabularies, and build and share sophisticated scientific knowledge of the medium. Peiser has explored a wide range of practices of making, including blowing hot glass, torchworking, layering, molding, and multiple casting techniques. He also has meticulously developed, recorded, and shared his glass formulas, as new intellectual inquiry for his own work and for the benefit of other practitioners. In this talk, Peiser further considers the implications of transparency and opacity in the world of objects, including perceptions of glass as volume, atmosphere, and light.

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 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 internationally, 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.

Paul Hollister (1918–2004) was a pioneering critic of contemporary studio glass and glass historian. Irene Hollister (1920–2016) was a philanthropist, advocate for glass scholarship, and founding administrator of the Association for Computing Machinery. The Paul and Irene Hollister Lectures on Glass were established at Bard Graduate Center in 2007.