No medium captures the dance of color and light more fully than the luminosity of glass.
Archaeological evidence suggests glass-making dates at least back to 3,600 B.C. in Mesopotamia, Egypt or Syria. Stone Age societies used naturally occurring obsidian glass for cutting tools and weapons.
“Raven Steals the Sun,” Preston Singletary (Tlingit), 2017. (Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico Press))
Venetian glass artists have produced glass from the island of Murano for more than 1,500 years.
Glass gestated in Indian Country in the 1970s. And the legendary glass artist Dale Chihuly played midwife.
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When Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts rose from high school to a two-year college, its co-founder Lloyd Kiva New turned to the Rhode Island School of Design to help develop an art center. RISD sent Chihuly, who had created the glass program there, to New Mexico to set up a glass-making hot shop and to teach for one semester. Faculty member Carl Pon