Texas Contemporary Glass at the Nave

You might remember that we were recommended for a curated museum show, Texas Contemporary Glass, and had one of our pieces reluctantly selected (our work was too small to suit him and, in his words, 'literal' where he was wanting to focus on 'conceptual') except that that piece had sold years ago. I won't bore you with the entire exchange, suffice to say that he failed to respond to my last email with images and suggestions.

Anyway...

Our friends Dick and Kathy the glassblowers stopped by to visit and pick us up on their way to Victoria to see the show on Saturday. We had a great visit and a pleasant drive down and back. The Nave Museum in Victoria is a small but lovely venue with the reception desk situated between the two galleries.

image via: https://www.traveltexas.com/attractions/nave-museum

The show is small because it's a small venue and we had seen some of the work before, been shown with some of the work before. Some names I recognized, some were new to me. Over all it was a curious and uninspiring collection of work. There were many multi-media works but some of them, the glass part was just an element like one piece that included 5 tiny vials that held the more important contents imbedded in an open dictionary with a little alcove carved into it. I don't see how that particular piece gets to be considered 'glass' art. But then there was the arch shaped thick glass slab that had an early iPhone embedded in it with activity on the screen. Most the work was all glass, most the multi-media works were mostly glass, there were also 4 or 5 pieces with neon as an element and a video which was just downright puzzling. I didn't take any pictures in that room and there are two corners of the front room that I missed but you can get a sense of the show with these, a little less than half of the work on display.

There were a few pieces I liked. I love Judy Jensen's work (on the wall on the right in the above photo), her multi-media constructions with her beautiful reverse paintings on glass.  And I really like Polly Gessell's work. She does these incredibly detailed small sand carvings and had two pieces in the show. Each glass block that makes up the totem pole is incredibly ornamented (free standing in the corner in the above photo).  And I've always liked Michael Crowder's butterflies, a pate de verre technique different from mine, that was hanging in one of the corners I didn't photograph though you can see it in this post from 3 years ago.

(you can see the book on the wall on the right and the black piece in the foreground on the right is the curator's piece.)

So while we weren't represented in the show, we did get our name on the wall that detailed the progression of the glass art movement in Texas (down near the bottom) though the placement is a little misleading since we established our studio in the mid-70s.

participating artists: Bale Creek Allen, Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend, Jim Bowman, Shannon Brunskill, Michael Crowder, Jayne Duryea, Polly Gessell, Justin Ginsberg, David Graeve, Chad Holliday, Judy Jensen, David Keens, Jason Lawson, Christian Luginger, Peter Mangan, Neal Paustian, Wade Schmitz, Mary Shafer, Patrick Wadley, Robert Wilson, Nathalie Houghton, Charlyn Reynolds.