Michael Aschenbrenner

American artist Michael Aschenbrenner (1949– ) enlisted in the U.S. Army after high school and was injured while serving as a paratrooper in the Vietnam War. In 1970, upon returning to his native California, he began attending Chaffey College and studied ceramics. He started working with glass at California State University, San Bernardino, where he earned his BA in 1975. In 1978 he received an MFA from the University of Minnesota and moved to New York for 15 years, creating at New York Experimental Glass Workshop (later UrbanGlass) in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Aschenbrenner is known for sculptural work that combines glass with other materials and explores deeply personal themes often related to his Vietnam experience, such as the fragility of the human body. He lives and works in southern California and, since 2015, has been creating ceramic wall tiles that are biographical in nature.