Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
Providence, RIIntroduction
In 1877, Helen Rowe Metcalf persuaded the Rhode Island Women’s Centennial Commission to found the Rhode Island School of Art and Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. Originally focused on supporting Rhode Island’s booming textile, jewelry, and silversmithing industries, RISD became one of America’s most prestigious art schools, known for providing students with a thorough grounding in fundamentals and for encouraging them to explore multiple disciplines, to experiment, and to take risks in their work. RISD significantly fostered the growth of glass as an artistic medium during the studio glass movement’s first three decades, and many of its graduates went on to shape the glass field as artists, educators, and leaders. RISD alumni appear throughout Voices in Studio Glass History: Dale Chihuly (MFA 1968) helped establish RISD’s glass department and founded Pilchuck Glass School, where Tina Aufiero (BFA 1981) and Benjamin Moore (MFA 1977) held leadership roles. Richard Yelle (MFA 1976) founded New York Experimental Glass Workshop (later UrbanGlass), where Toots Zynsky (BFA 1973) later served as assistant director and hot shop head. Hank Murta Adams (BFA 1978) was a designer for Blenko Glass Company and creative director at Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. The landmark exhibition New Glass 1979, organized by The Corning Museum of Glass, featured works by Moore, Howard Ben Tré (MFA 1980), Dan Dailey (MFA 1972), James Harmon (BFA 1975), and Steven Weinberg (MFA 1979). Finally, Paul Hollister reviewed and wrote about many of these and other RISD alumni, including James Carpenter (BFA 1972), Michael Glancy (MFA 1980), Mary Shaffer (BFA 1965), and Therman Statom (BFA 1974).
This section provides context for RISD’s strong influence in the studio glass movement. It describes the introduction of glass at RISD in the 1960s and the influence of Dale Chihuly as the department head. It also explores some of the work Chihuly produced at RISD in collaboration with his students, particularly James Carpenter, which helped bring attention to studio glass and push the art form in new directions. The section features interviews and correspondence with Hank Murta Adams, Howard Ben Tré, James Carpenter, Dan Dailey, Kate Elliott, Michael Glancy, Flo Perkins, Mary Shaffer, Steven Weinberg, Richard Yelle, and Toots Zynsky conducted between 2108 and 2021. It also includes excerpts from interviews conducted by Paul Hollister with James Carpenter (1991), Steven Weinberg (1981), and Howard Ben Tré (1980), clips from a recording for Hollister by Dan Dailey (c. 1989–1991), full transcripts of Carpenter, Weinberg, and Dailey’s recordings, and highlights from Hollister’s articles concerning glass artists from RISD.
Howard Ben Tré talks about Providence and discusses architectural geometry and the use of copper in his work in an interview with Paul Hollister from 1980.
04:15 TranscriptPaul Hollister talks to Steven Weinberg about a piece he admires in a 1981 interview.
00:57 TranscriptPaul Hollister interviews Steven Weinberg in Weinberg’s Providence, Rhode Island, studio.
(Rakow title: Steven Weinberg interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168607)
“Memories of the Mechanical Age: Gegossene Glasobjekte von Howard Ben Tré / Howard Ben Tré’s Cast Glass.” Neues Glas, no. 3 (1982): 127–33.
“Howard Ben Tré’s Sculptures in Glass.” New York Times, April 1, 1982, C11.
Permalink: https://nyti.ms/2EegX5g
“A Search for Inner Form.” Collector Editions 8, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 42–43.
“Cast Glass by Steven Weinberg.” Glass Club Bulletin, no. 129 (Spring 1980): 5–8.
“Steven Weinbergs Giesstechnik / Steven Weinberg’s Casting Technique: Something New Under the Sun.” Neues Glas, no. 4 (1981): 143–47.
History of the Glass Program
RISD’s glass program began in 1966, shortly after ceramicist Norman Schulman became head of the ceramics program. Schulman arrived at RISD from the Toledo Museum School of Art, where he had been the ceramics instructor since 1958 and had helped coordinate Harvey Littleton’s groundbreaking hot glass workshops there in 1962. At RISD, Schulman and his students built the school’s first hot glass studio on private property in nearby Rehoboth, Massachusetts. The studio helped persuade Dale Chihuly, who had studied glass under Littleton at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to enroll in RISD’s ceramics program the following year. After Chihuly earned his MFA from RISD, he was invited back to help build the school’s on-campus glass program. Chihuly became RISD’s first full-time glass instructor in 1969, the same year that Schulman squeezed a glass studio into spare spaces in RISD’s Metcalf Building, which also housed the ceramics and sculpture programs. During his eleven years at RISD, Chihuly expanded the glass program into a full-fledged department. His rapidly growing artistic reputation attracted students and public attention.
“I was at Rhode Island School of Design in graduate school—1974 to ‘76. I was a very exciting time to be there. Dale Chihuly was my advisor. Jamie Carpenter was there, Toots Zynsky, a very long list.”
“In 1976 Glass Art Magazine devoted an entire issue to RISD students. And I think Dale has been quoted as saying at his ten-year period at RISD, he had 15 students, full-time students, and I was one of those. I was pretty surprised at how few there were, but that’s people who were in that department full-time.”
Michael Glancy discusses RISD’s early glass program and the department’s limited resources.
05:44 TranscriptDale Chihuly and RISD
At RISD, Chihuly collaborated with students, gathered groups for stints at blowing, and brought in established guest artists for demonstrations and critiques. His travels in Europe significantly influenced his approach to glass. Supported by a Fulbright grant in 1969, he met Italian glassmakers and had a residency at the Venini factory in Venice. He also visited and learned from artist Erwin Eisch in Germany, and makers Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtová in Czechoslovakia. Chihuly adopted European collaborative approaches to glassblowing, in which teams of artists worked together to produce designs. His preferred teaching method was to ask students to fully immerse themselves in glass, work hard, learn by observing and assisting, and explore their own projects. Several of his students, including James Carpenter, Dan Dailey, and Toots Zynsky, traveled to Venice. In articles written for Neues Glas, Paul Hollister described how Chihuly’s example launched a steady flow of American glass artists traveling to Italy to study. After Chihuly founded the Pilchuck Glass School in 1971, many RISD students moved back and forth between Pilchuck, where they were invited to serve as teaching assistants in the summer, and RISD, where they spent the academic year. In 1976, while recuperating from a near-fatal car accident in which he lost sight in one eye, Chihuly was asked to direct the sculpture department at RISD. There was no official glass department at the time. Because of his difficulties with depth perception, Chihuly began transitioning from glassblowing to directing a team to produce his designs. Kate Elliott, who had first met Chihuly as a student at Pilchuck and later worked as an employee there, took on administrative and teaching roles at RISD also and assisted Chihuly in the studio. To help students learn how to make a living as artists, she and Chihuly developed a “professional practices” curriculum that they implemented on both coasts. Chihuly helped forge a close-knit community that included other RISD faculty and affiliates, such as painters David Manzella, Hardu Keck, and Mary Shaffer. Shaffer, who began working with glass in the early 1970s, went on to become a founding figure in the studio glass movement. The innovative work coming out of RISD’s glass program in these years drew public attention.
Toots Zynsky and Therman Statom reflect on their work, collaborating with each other, and their time at RISD with Dale Chihuly. They also discuss their community engagement projects.
“And so Dale was—and then I think the department—it didn’t become a department until, like, ’74. I mean, it was right at the very beginning of the program. And there were a lot of students who came in and out, but there was this core group, and then this core group would be invited to be teaching assistants and ultimately faculty at Pilchuck. So you did that in the summertime. And that has proven to be—you know, Bruce Chao was a graduate student when I first arrived. He was building pot furnaces at Pilchuck and taking that technology and bringing it back to RISD. And so, you know, Dale—it was all-encompassing, really.”
“And, so for instance, professional practices—what we know of professional practices are classes that are taught around the country. Now Dale created this class called ‘Professional Practices’ at Rhode Island School of Design. What it was, was he would invite his friends who were successful artists to come and talk about their journey. That’s professional practices. And that is what it is today, too.”
James Carpenter talks about learning to blow glass at Venini through RISD’s European Honors Program.
0:44 TranscriptDan Dailey talks about his time at Venini and his tripod-form works in a recording for Paul Hollister (c. 1989–1990).
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“Die magische Anziehung Venedigs / The Pull of Venice.” Neues Glas, no. 1 (1990): 4–9.
“Die magische Anziehung Venedigs / The Pull of Venice: Part 2.” Neues Glas, no. 2 (1990): 82–88.
Dan Dailey discusses working for Venini, in Venice, and his collaborative work with Lino Tagliapietra.
(Rakow title: Dan Dailey self-interview [sound recording] / for Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168376)
“At the end of the summer of ‘74 Dale got an NEA grant for a bunch of us to stay on at [Pilchuck] for a few weeks in the fall. I think it was for the month of September. And that’s when Jamie Carpenter came up with the bending of threads technique to marver into the glass. I took over the thread work at the torch while everybody else blew glass. Everybody was very excited about this technique. We didn’t know that it had been done a bit at Venini 25 years earlier. After that NEA session, Dale and I went on the road and did a couple of workshops, one being at Madison, and one being at Illinois State University….[then] Dale said, ‘come to RISD, you can be my assistant. You don’t have to pay as a student, but you’re going to have to try to find a grant to help pay you,’ which I did. We got the first Master Craftsman Apprenticeship Grant issued by the NEA in 1975. That was the year Dale began the Indian blanket cylinders with me laying out the thread drawings on the marver at the glass shop. The next year Flora Mace joined him [making thread drawings] at Snowbird in Utah, as I started working more in the background on Dale‘s career, finding galleries, etc.”
“I had two small children…and we were paid once a month….so I went and got a job with the government, but I cooked, so all these people would come over for dinner. Dale [Chihuly] probably ate at my house—I mean, everybody says they fed Dale all the time—so I remember him eating with us at least three times a week….and actually that’s how I met Toots [Zynsky]. She was at the door, and she came in, and Toots was just so wonderful. And she started babysitting for me; she was great. She said, ‘Mary let’s have a show at Woods-Gerry [Woods-Gerry Gallery, RISD].’ So she organized it, which was terrific. And then, as I said, she would sometimes regulate the kilns for me at RISD.”
Mary Shaffer discusses how she got involved with slumping through a suggestion by Fritz Driesbach at RISD.
02:20 TranscriptMary Shaffer recalls Dale Chihuly inviting her to critique glass artists’ works at RISD.
01:24 TranscriptCollaboration: Chihuly and Carpenter
When Chihuly returned to RISD as a faculty member in 1969, he and one of his students, James Carpenter, embarked on a series of collaborative pieces that explored the material properties of glass, such as transparency, luminosity, and capacity to reflect light and images. Working at RISD and, in summer, at Haystack School of Crafts and Pilchuck, Chihuly and Carpenter combined dripped or blown forms with neon, ice, and/or dry ice in dramatic installations both indoors and outdoors. In the early 1970s their work was exhibited at RISD and in several major museum shows, including the Toledo Glass National III (Toledo Museum of Art, 1970), the 1st National Invitational Hand Blown Glass Exhibition (Tacoma Art Museum, 1971), and Dale Chihuly / Jamie Carpenter / Glass at New York City’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts (MCC, later the Museum of Arts and Design, 1971). At MCC they installed Glass Forest, a 500-square-foot environment in which scores of tall, white, organic-looking blown glass forms were illuminated with argon and mercury gases. The work was featured on the cover of Craft Horizons magazine in December 1971; it anchored the issue’s feature article on Chihuly by fellow RISD faculty member David Manzella. Glass Forest was exhibited in different configurations both at the RISD Museum and the Museum Bellerive in Zurich in 1972. Throughout this period, Chihuly and Carpenter effectively pushed glass as a medium away from functional objects and toward conceptual sculpture; their works garnered worldwide attention and placed them at the forefront of the studio glass movement. In 1972, Chihuly and Carpenter began a series of doors and windows made from assembled blown or cast glass pieces, drawing on Chihuly’s earlier training in interior design and Carpenter’s interest in architecture. Carpenter later founded his own firm to focus on architectural commissions in glass.
James Carpenter discusses innovation rather than glass history being a focus in his early days with Dale Chihuly.
0:42 TranscriptJames Carpenter discusses learning equipment construction at RISD and building special annealing ovens with Dale Chihuly.
01:07 Transcript“James Carpenter: Adventures in Light and Color in Space.” American Craft 51, no. 3 (June/July 1991): 28–35.
Paul Hollister Interviews with Edward Larrabee Barnes and James Carpenter, c. 1991.
Paul Hollister interviews Edward Larrabee Barnes and James Carpenter, in their respective New York studios.
(Rakow title: James Carpenter interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168555)
James Carpenter at RISD’s Nature Lab
Carpenter’s interest in natural history led him to explore organic forms in glass in his collaborations with Chihuly, and to undertake his own experimental projects with photography and film. As an undergraduate student at RISD (1968–1972), Carpenter frequented the school’s Nature Lab. Founded by RISD faculty member (and alumna) Edna Lawrence in 1937, the Lab has enabled students to explore natural forms, patterns, structures, and processes through a natural history collection of more than 80,000 specimens; imaging equipment, including powerful microscopes and high-speed cameras; and a small collection of living plants and animals. As a student, Carpenter undertook paid work making botanical drawings. He also spent two summers in the Amazon collecting plants and animals for zoos and scientific study; occasionally, he brought things back for Lawrence and the Nature Lab collection. When Lawrence retired, she asked Carpenter to return and run the Lab, which he did for several years beginning in 1973.
James Carpenter discusses historic, nature-based lampwork with Paul Hollister and gives Hollister a book he illustrated on herbs in a circa 1991 interview.
Faculty Interconnections
Many RISD graduates have returned to become RISD faculty. After Chihuly resigned from his teaching post in 1980 to pursue his own studio work full time, one of his former students, Richard Harned (BFA 1973, MFA 1977), briefly succeeded him as head of RISD’s glass program. Another former Chihuly student, Bruce Chao (BFA 1973, MFA 1975), took over the position in 1982, following a successful early academic career building the glass program at Ohio State University. Chao formalized RISD’s glass curriculum and established the Degree Program Workshop, which, with its regular schedule of invited artists and group interaction, has remained a foundation of the school’s glass program. Michael Glancy (BFA 1977, MFA 1980) pursued graduate studies at RISD in glass, with Chihuly, and metals, with Louis Mueller. Glancy embraced both of these interests in his own work, using electroforming to fuse copper and other metals onto blown and sandblasted glass forms. Paul Hollister wrote several articles about his distinctive approach. Glancy taught in RISD’s Jewelry and Metalsmithing program for nearly forty years.
“Michael Glancy’s Glass and Metal Objects: Prunkstücke fürs Kuriositäten-Kabinett / Treasures for the Cabinet of Curiosities.” Neues Glas, no. 1 (1982): 38–44.
“The Matrix Transformed.” American Craft 42, no. 4 (August/September 1982): 24–27.
Full issue: https://digital.craftcouncil.org/digital/collection/p15785coll2/id/16745/rec/223
American Craft Council, Digital File Vol42No04_Aug1982
“Elegant Glass Made by Masters.” New York Times, December 13, 1984, C7.
Permalink: https://nyti.ms/2V5r0z7
“Review of Exhibitions: Michael Glancy.” Glass, no. 48 (Summer 1992): 50.
RISD: 21st Century
Two other RISD alumni have led the School’s glass program since Bruce Chao stepped down as head in 2001 (Chao continued teaching at RISD until 2018). Rachel Berwick (BFA 1983) served as department head from 2001 to 2020, and in 2016–17 she oversaw the program’s fiftieth anniversary, marked by a year-long series of public events and a commemorative book, Wonder: 50 Years RISD Glass (RISD, 2017). Jocelyne Prince (MFA 1994) succeeded Berwick as program head in 2020. RISD’s glass program remains a highly regarded training ground for glass artists, and new generations of alumni continue to make significant contributions to the field. In 1979, the Corning Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition New Glass: A Worldwide Survey, included work from ten RISD students and alumni at the forefront of the studio glass movement. Forty years later, an equal number of RISD alumni were represented in New Glass Now (2019), Corning’s follow-on exhibition of contemporary art glass, which included work from ten students who had earned RISD degrees between 1990 and 2014. The cover of the New Glass Now catalogue, which doubled as the fortieth-anniversary issue of Corning’s New Glass Review, featured a work by the recipient of Corning’s Rakow Commission for 2018, RISD graduate Rui Sasaki (MFA 2010).