The Adele and Leonard Leight Series: Art, Design, and Innovation

2023

The Adele and Leonard Leight Series: Art, Design and Innovation presents Susie Silbert

Recorded September 10, 2023

The Speed Art Museum is pleased to welcome Susie Silbert as the 2023 speaker for The Adele and Leonard Leight Series: Art, Design, and Innovation, a program generously founded and endowed in 2014 by Jenna, Jonathan, and Peter Leight in honor of their parents.

Topic: Reflect, refract, encounter, smash: glassy ways to see and know

Artists, designers, and craftspeople use glass as a medium to think about the surrounding world, our place in it, and our ability to affect change. In this talk, Susie J. Silbert will discuss artists using the power of reflection to reanimate Indian craft traditions that have been lost to time, interpreting the movement of the hot shop as part of hip hop, and using the collaborative nature of glassblowing as a way to build community, among other stories.

Susie J. Silbert is an independent curator and writer and the former Curator of Postwar and Contemporary Glass at The Corning Museum of Glass. Her curatorial practice is expansive, constantly seeking to broaden the definitions of what the material of glass is and can be, with the goal of making contemporary discourse on glass reflective of the breadth of artists, makers, and thinkers involved in the medium. Silbert has been described as “part performance artist, part curator” with a lecture style that has been characterized as “half standup comedian and half evangelist.”

2022

Reflecting on his work, Singletary has written, “when I began working with glass in 1982, I had no idea that I’d be so connected to the material in the way that I am. It was only when I began to experiment with using designs from my Tlingit cultural heritage that my work began to take on a new purpose and direction.”

In the years since, Singletary’s work has become synonymous with the relationship between European glassblowing traditions and Northwest Indigenous art. His artworks feature themes of transformation, animal spirits, and shamanism through blown glass forms that incorporate sand-carved imagery.

Recorded live on 9.11.22

2021

Ché Rhodes received his MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Formerly, he was an assistant professor and Head of Glass Art at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Currently he is an Associate Professor and Head of Studio Glass at the University of Louisville, Allen R. Hite Art Institute. He is a former member of the Glass Art Society Board of Directors, and a current member of the Penland School of Crafts Board of Trustees.

He has demonstrated at the 2006, 2010, and 2015 Glass Art Society Conferences and has been an instructor at the Penland School of Craft, Penland North Carolina, the Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, WA; UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, NY, and at Scuola del Vetro: Abate Zanetti, in Venice Italy.

Originally aired March 9, 2021.

Beth Lipman: Remember/Rebuild

Part of the Adele and Leonard Leight Series: Art, Design, and Innovation

Lipman is an American artist whose sculptural practice explores aspects of material culture and deep time through still lives, site-specific installations, and photographs. Ephemeral and intricate, the work addresses mortality, materiality, and temporality. Lipman is also known for site responsive installations that activate the specific history of objects, individuals and institutions. Collective Elegy, her solo exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design, is on view through August 15, 2021.

She has received numerous awards including a USA Berman Bloch Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Grant, Virginia Groot Foundation Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. Recent works include All in All, a large scale sculpture that investigates the nature of time and Belonging(s) a sculptural response to the life of Abigail Levy Franks for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR).

Lipman has exhibited her work internationally at such institutions as the Ringling Museum of Art (FL), ICA/MECA (ME), RISD Museum (RI), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Gustavsbergs Konsthall(Sweden) and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC). Her work has been acquired by numerous museums including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Kemper Museum for Contemporary Art (MO), Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC), Jewish Museum (NY), Norton Museum of Art, (FL), and the Corning Museum of Glass (NY).

Originally aired May 11, 2021.

2019

September 29, 2019
Speed Art Museum

Widely exhibited both domestically and abroad, MacArthur Fellow Dr. Joyce J. Scott is known for producing beautiful, complicated works that address the unpleasant veracities of the human condition including war, racism, misogyny, rape, police brutality, and gun violence. Scott is represented in distinguished public and private collections worldwide and has been the recipient of myriad accolades including three honorary doctorates. Working with beads and glass, Scott’s practice speaks truths as one of the most potent storytellers of our time.

Biography:

MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellow, Joyce J. Scott (b. 1948, Baltimore, MD) is best known for her figurative sculpture and jewelry using free-form off-loom bead weaving techniques similar to the peyote stitch, as well as blown glass, and found objects. As an African-American, feminist artist, Scott unapologetically confronts difficult themes as diverse as her subjects which include race, misogyny, sexuality, stereotypes, gender inequality, social disturbance, economic disparities, history, politics, rape, and discrimination. Born to sharecroppers in North Carolina who were descendants of slaves, Scott’s family migrated to Baltimore where Joyce was born and raised. The artist hails from a long line of makers with extraordinary craftsmanship adept at pottery, knitting, metalwork, basketry, storytelling, and quilting. Over the past 50 years, Scott has also established herself as an innovative fiber artist, print maker, installation artist, vocalist, and performer.   Her art leverages its impact with her wry, subversive humor, and engages hardened stereotypes that demand honest examination.

In 2017, Scott and her primary gallery, Goya Contemporary, opened her largest exhibition to date at Grounds For Sculpture in New Jersey. In addition to historic and recent objects, Scott realized 2 large-scale site-specific works focused on the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, created at the Johnson Atelier.  Of the two, Araminta, a 10 foot tall avatar of Harriet, traveled to  the inaugural Open Spaces Kansas City, whereas Graffiti Harriet, a 15-foot earthen work made of mixed media—including beads, compressed soil, clay, and straw—stayed onsite at Grounds For Sculpture, intended to disintegrate over time.  Other projects include glassworks made on the Italian island of Murano, Italy, which were exhibited in the 2013 Venice Biennale collateral exhibition Glasstress, and a major exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2000 and again in 2019).

Scott has been the recipient of myriad commissions, grants, awards, residencies, and prestigious honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, American Craft Council, National Living Treasure Award, Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, Mary Sawyers Imboden Baker Award, and MacArthur Fellowship (2016), among others.  In April of 2019 she was honored by the Smithsonian receiving the Visionary Artist Award.

Joyce J. Scott earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and a Master of Fine Arts from the Instituto Allende in Mexico. In 2018, she was awarded an honorary fellowship from NYU, and an honorary doctorate from MICA.  And in 2019, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from CalArts.  Scott’s work is included in many important private and public collections including: the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Detroit Institute of the Arts, MI; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Museum of Art and Design, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Smithsonian, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, MD; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Yale University, New Haven, CT; The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; Johns Hopkins University; the Toledo Museum;  among others.

Represented by Goya Contemporary Gallery in Baltimore, as well as Mobilia Gallery in Boston, and Peter Blum Gallery in New York, Scott opened two companion exhibitions this year in Baltimore at The Baltimore Museum of Art and Goya Contemporary, which will combine and travel to LA in 2020.

Quote:
“I’d like my art to induce people to stop raping, torturing, and shooting each other. I don’t have the ability to end violence, racism, and sexism. But my art can help them look and think.”

—Joyce J. Scott

Image: Photo Courtesy Goya Contemporary/Glenwood Jackson

2018

Jeffrey Gibson discusses his artist practice and his exciting recent commission I WISH I KNEW HOW IT WOULD FEEL TO BE FREE, 2018. Known for drawing inspiration from his Choctaw and Cherokee ancestry, Gibson was celebrated in 2018 with two major traveling solo exhibitions organized by the Denver Art Museum and the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College. Photo by Kevin Miyazak.

October 21, 2018
Speed Art Museum

2017

Artist and art educator Hank Murta Adams uses glass and metal to explore the space between the personal and the universal, often working with the human figure. For the Adele and Leonard Leight Series, Adams will review his evolution as an artist and his creative intersections with communities. Adams received his undergraduate degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design with further study at Tennessee Technological University, the Penland School, and the Pilchuck Glass School. A 2016 Fellow of the American Crafts Council, he currently serves as Creative Director of WheatonArts in Millville, New Jersey.

October 20, 2017
Speed Art Museum

2016

Norwood Viviano’s work is about change. Utilizing digital 3D computer modeling and printing technology in tandem with glass blowing and casting processes, he creates work depicting population shifts tied to the dynamic between industry and community. By showing how landscapes and populations move and are modified as a result of industry, his work creates a 3D lens to view that which is invisible or forgotten. His use of glass forms and cut-vinyl drawings are micro-models of macro changes at the regional, national, and international level.

November 2, 2016
Speed Art Museum

2015

Judith Schaechter will speak on her perspective as an artist whose work exists at the exact crossroads of art and craft. Schaechter, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, has work in the Speed Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and numerous other public and private collections.

Presented in partnership with the University of Louisville Hite Art Institute.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015
5:30 – 8:00 pm

Cressman Center for the Visual Arts
100 East Main Street
Louisville, Kentucky 40202