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Artists Discuss Complicity in a Changing Climate Jaime Guerrero Confronts Migrant Detention Sally Prasch Navigates Art SS and Science ;~ ~T1à-~ ~ ‘~ass Art Quarterly \ Ii’ The De la Torre Brothers Read the Riot Act I )JJ~r COVER Judith Schaechter: / — The Raw Made Radiant

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8 editor’s letter BY ANDREW PAGE 18 The Raw Made Radiant BY ANDREW PAGE 10 hourglass A Cuba trip co-organized by a museum in With a major museum retrospective and a ravishing new L.A. offers a front-row seat to the relighting ofHavana’s body ofwork, Judith Schaechter reaps the rewards of a neon landscape; Lino Tagliapietra debuts freestanding career rejecting hierarchies and bringing a wildly imaginative “Totem” works at Palm Beach art fair; Charlotte Potter personal vision to light. Kasic returns to Virginia to take on newly created position 28 Burn Rate BY ALEXANDER CASTRO at the Barry Art Museum; Haystack wins $4 million Working with an energy-intensive material, glass artists Windgate gift to endow its campus preservation are modifying their practices to both address climate change 54 reviews Liza Lou at the Whitney Museum, New York; and limit their complicity. the Museum of Glass permanent collection, Tacoma; 34 Boundaries Broken BY JOHN DRURY Joanne Greenbaum at Rachel Uffner Gallery; New York; A conversation with Einar and Jamex de La Torre, the Fred Wilson at Pace Gallery, New York fraternal collaborators who shuffle the visual icons offolklore, 59 urbanglass news Thank you to our incredible individual pop culture, religion, and current events as they incorporate donors and institutional supporters lenticular printing and outrage at the state ofpolitics into new work. 64 reflection BY PAMELA KOSS In Memoriam: Checco Ongaro (1929-2020) 42 CrossingBorders BY D WOOD The glass journey of Mexican-American artist Jaime Guerrero

48 HeartofGlass BYSHANEFERO Rejecting labels and embracing community; Sally Prasch has proven that accomplishment is the best rebuttal to injustice.

ON THE COVER Judith Schaechter, MurderedAnimal, 2019. Stained-glass light box. H 28,W 28, D 3 in. COURTESY THE ARTIST hourglass ‘rrrflrvr r’

not be falling back on the sexy hot-glass demo, which, we have all seen, can be wildly compelling! It’s an exciting opportunity to think more broadly about the ways in which viewers can have interactive and participatory experiences with art—across disciplines. The collection itselfranges from paintings and sculpture to antique e dolls and automatons: There’s a lot ofterritory to explore! q

GLASS Do youforesee yourselfcollaborating with yourformer colleagues at the Chrysler, or do you see this new position as something separate? KASIC As an artist, my practice is about connecting people, and my role here at the Barry is simply a continuation ofthat. I wifi absolutely reach out to my colleagues at the Chrysler, across the ODU campus (everything from the planetarium and oceanography departments to costume design and theater), and throughout the region/nation. My role is to catalyze and foster relevant ii-1’.’~ ~ conversations, connecting seemingly disparate constituencies to engage with our remarkable collection. —ANDREW PAGE

EDUCATION Haystack wins $4 million Windgate gift to endow its campus preservation pnvvp An architectural landmark perched on a granite cliff on Deer Island, Maine, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts has played an outsize role in the history of glass art, hosting classes and workshops by in the early stages of Studio Glass. both studied and taught here, and clearly was THE PATH inspired by the dramatic and rugged surroundings to start Pilchuck in the forests ofWashington State. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006, the Haystack campus was designed in 1960 by noted architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. Using local PARADISE materials such as cedar shingles, and with an extensive wooden Ju€lllth Scha©chter’s walkway fostering a sense of connection, the design won the Staine~=GIass Art Twenty-Five Year Award from the American Institute ofArchitects in 1994, a rare honor shared by fewer than 50 buildings. Recognizing both the importance and the challenge of preserving the landmark FEBRUARY ~6 — MAY 24 campus in a windswept coastal environment, Haystack was recently gifted a $4 mfflion grant by the Windgate Foundation. The Lead support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation with additional funding from the Gallery Council of the largest gift in the school’s history, the money will be “permanently Memorial Art Gallery, the Rubens Family Foundation, Pamela restricted, generating operating support ofthe ongoing preservation” Miller Ness and Paul Marc Ness, Corning Incorporated ofthe unique Haystack Foundation, and the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass. The exhibition is also supported in part by an award from the campus, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. official announcement of thegift. HENRY FOUNDATIONLUCE S ~i!! — —ANDREW PAGE LUIIA

An aerial view of the Haystack MAfl Mountain School of Crafts, where MEMORIAL ART GALLERY the buildings nestle in the trees 500 University Avenue Rochester mag.rochester.edu and overlook the Atlantic Ocean. I I

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GLASS QUARTERLY NO. 158 19 k 7 ~ .&L~w ~ and another favorite was Brancusi. She doodled constantly and always knew she’d be an artist. Yet when she was accepted to 1USD, - aa.’~r.iw k she was consumed by a gnawing fear that her figure drawing wasn’t -, ‘S e4~ good enough. “I was constantly having people saying, ‘Your work •~ ‘%..(~.Z..:- H looks stylized;” she remembers. “They’d tell me, ‘You have to get rid .~ p -r1~J 5,3. ofthese distortions.” She honed her ability to render realistically >~s~a, through intense practice, and a figure-drawing class at 1USD perfected it, but then she struggled with another issue as a painting

~ ~k ~ ‘~s_,, -i~~4 y) ~ major—what to do with a blank canvas? G ‘k~I •- -b “Painting was gravitas,” she explains. “Even though I didn’t take ul’ ( ..~‘Nf .,~ r ~A ~~‘>ojjs? ~ t ,—.A —- ‘“ ‘~ ‘ - / anything seriously as a teenager, a part of me knew art was very, very serious, so I was paralyzed with fear and couldn’t function at ~tnV.~~a )J) 4~5~ $%.~ ~ all as a creative person. I was so busy trying to figure out how to b Rape Serenade, 1990. Stained glass. H 22, W 33 in. a genius, I didn’t know what to palnt!” COLLECTION PRIVATE It wasn’t until Schaechter casually enrolled in an elective stained-glass class that something clicked. “I knew a lot about art It’s not a stretch to include late 20th and early 21st century history, and it clearly did not include stained glass at all!” she contemporary artist Judith Schaechter among these major exclaims. Completely unintimidated by this particular medium, innovators in the field. Working alone in her home studio, she she began to turn for imagery to her voluminous sketchbooks, has single-handedly advanced the form’s expressive possibilities, where she archived the constant doodling she’d begun in her producing highly personal works that expand on a process Ireland’s childhood. Cocky (“I thought stained glass was for idiots!”) and Harry Clarke developed in the 1880s, stacking layers to create working from the free-associative drawings that tapped into her figures with painterly shading and complex tonality; achieved subconscious, something profound clicked. Because it took so through composite images with dimensionality and depth. She’s also much deliberate work to render stained glass, unlike pushing pain pioneered a whole host oflabor-intensive but expressive abrading on canvas, she was forced to focus on process and composition in techniques, scratching away at the colored layer of flash glass with ways she hadn’t been able to with brush and canvas. At the same a diamond ifie and other innovative techniques to create subtle time, she was freed from the self-consciousness she felt when tonalities and an extreme level ofpainterly control. The story of painting, and began to incorporate her very personal themes and how Schaechter came to help reinvent the medium is laced with intuitive associations in her artwork. anxiety; humor, and fierce determination—all qualities embodied “The factor ofbeing involved with the glass—the time factor— in her personality as well as her notable body ofwork. gave me enough time to achieve emotional transference;’ Growing up in suburban Newton, Massachusetts, Schaechter Schaechter explains. “Painting was a quick thing—I wasn’t able was taken on regular visits to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts by her to be attached—but the glass took forever. By the time you got the scientist father and her social worker mother, an accomplished glass to do something, you weren’t going to throw that in the trash pianist. As a teenager, she became enamored of Max Beckmann, (and I had thrown a lot of paintings in the trash).”

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20 GLASS QUARTERLY NO.158 Using the sketchbooks as her source material, Schaechter began to develop a style that incorporated such diverse influences as early 20th century Expressionism and 1980s East Village artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat as well as the artists ofMad magazine and Robert Crumb’s underground comics. With Schaechter, it’s always been a mash-up, cut-and-paste experience that dispenses with pecking orders yet finds transcendence in unexpected quarters. From her earliest efforts, she focused on figurative characters, often tortured, in sometimes grotesque situations, all rendered luminous by the light passing through the image. With increasing frequency, Schaechter incorporated complex decorative patterns, sometimes drawing from historic sources, adding visual complexity and chromatic balance. Her process was improvisatory, pulling together the various elements in the immediate process oftheir making, unsure of how the final composition would go until the very end, but trusting the same intuition that generated the individual elements in the first place. Her inspirations were not just visual. She was taken by the 1980s music scene, specifically the spare sounds ofthe Ramones and

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Talking Heads, whose stripped-down DIY fervor was a bracing counterpoint to the glossy commercial rock on the radio. “One ofthe things that felt authentic to me was I wanted to work from my imagination,” says Schaechter. “I liked that it came from life, but life as generated from my linagination?’ Her doodles were portals

to her subconscious, which, in hindsight, she relates to the automatic r - drawing the Surrealists explored. One can’t help but note a connection to the groundbreaking modernist author VirginiaWoolf, whose ~ stream-of-consciousness prose broke out ofVictorian literary conventions and strove to render the unmediated female psyche. ~~a~•/ Armed with her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Schaechter followed her college boyfriend after her 1983 graduation, setting up a nascent stained-glass practice in the fifth-largest U.S. city. While the romantic relationship wouldn’t survive the volatile ~ first year out of art school, a romance would flourish nonetheless 4’ ;. between an artist burning with talent and ambition and the V

post industrial city ofPhiladelphia, uniquely suited for Schaechter’s —J artistic path. As in many enduring relationships, though, it wasn’t ~: C ~•,: love at first sight. “I hated Philly for a long time,” Schaechter confesses. We are

seated at the dining room table ofthe large Victorian rowhouse ~.:;Z ‘~ - she owns in South , drinking very strong coffee with i... ~ ‘ — soy milk. Taxidermy shares the wall with her friends’ sculpture and palntings, illuminated by the natural light ifitering in through large windows. In the entranceway, decorative stained-glass panels from the house’s original architecture remain in situ, part . ofthe unexpected collisions of period and style. Her artmaking takes place in her upstairs studio, with some additional work being done in the basement, where her sandblaster is situated. Interviewing Schaechter is like watching avirtuosic conversa tional performance as she pings between comedic, self-deprecating personal anecdote and a fiercely held beliefin herself and her artwork her dark sense of humor providing cover, perhaps, for 2 frequent flashes of earnest passion and a willingness to charge at 3; orthodoxies, especially in the art world and academia. Schaechter mentions that it wasn’t until the 1990s, when she herselfplayed in a

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punk band, that she began to finally decode the city: “In Philadelphia, elements, shapes them with grozing pliers, and grinds the edges. the culture is really rude but more honest because people here have Sandblasting adjusts color, engraving defines the lines, a diamond alot ofheart. It is actually illegal to be completely narcissistic here:’ ifie adds nuance, and then the paints come out. These steps are But the city also suited her in practical ways. “There’s a history of repeated and adjusted until a result is achieved. She knows how to craft in Philadelphia, which exists as a dialectical Other to the New work with traditional lead but primarily uses copper foil to join the York art story;” she says. “Here you can get affordable industrial thickly stacked glass elements. Heavy on craft and celebrating space, a supportive craft community; and a rich craft history.” juxtaposition, her early panels prefigured the digital age in their Home ofthe Liberty Bell, Philadelphia became an industrial teeming variety of subject matter and riotous amalgamation of powerhouse by the Civil Waz known worldwide forks textile visual information. Her themes were highly personal, plumbing factories and expert workforce. Unlike single-industry cities such anxieties, fears, doubts, and despair through metaphor, symbol, and as Detroit, Philadelphia was distinguished by its diverse networks portraiture, often featuring an excess ofgravity puffing everything of small- and medium-size independent enterprises, which were downward while her mostly female subjects’ eyes are plaintively able to adapt to changes in the marketplace. With a major port and cast upwards, like the suffering saints in medieval windows. a location between Washington D.C., New York, and Boston, as With her exhibitions at the cooperative Nexus Gallery increasingly well as the rural farmlands to its west, Philadelphia has long well attended, Schaechter’s work began to attract wider notice. functioned as a hub of commerce and exchange for the mid-Atlantic She was juried into Corning’s annual exhibition in print New region. Sprawling outward from ks quaint colonial center, miles Glass Review, in 1988, and the museum acquired one of her pieces upon miles offactory-worker rowhouses extend in every direction. in 1989. The next year she was invited to participate in the In the late 20th century, as factories were closing, an urban Renwick’s exhibition “GlassWorks,” as well as a survey exhibit renewal was underway by those drawn to the city’s inexpensive of local artists at the Philadelphia Museum ofArt. In 1995, a solo real estate, a small but vital cultural scene, and a surplus ofpeople exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of who knew how to work with their hands. ContemporaryArt in Philadelphia, called “Heart Attacks,” From building her first sandblaster from parts she sourced from presented her sketchbooks on tables in the center ofthe room, industrial suppliers and hardware stores, to developing her complex surrounded by her wall-mounted ifiuminated panels. compositions during hours spent at a copy shop enlarging and After Y2K passed and fears of a technological Armageddon reducing her individual drawings, Schaechter’s process evolved proved unfounded, Schaechter agonized about whether to invest rapidly through trial and error. She cuts out her individual glass in a home copier for her extensive image reproduction and

24 GLASS QUARTERLY NO. 158 manipulatioll needs, or to get a home computer with a scanner. ‘5’.’. Her relatively late entry to the digital age was pivotal in two ways. flrst, she discovered the graphic design program Photoshop, which ~k ‘J ‘qji’,i ‘•‘~,R t;—.~~ 4.’;tf. ~‘L~’_..-, opened a new world ofdigital manipulation and helped intensify kk the kaleidoscopic intensity of her imagery and compositions. 5econdly, the computer gave her access to the burgeoning *~ r~ %A~0~r Internet as a bottomless well ofvisual source material. From L t~h’i’~)~ N ff t~≥Th~!44~’ ~4- ~\~1 literally cutting and pasting paper to manipulating images with a computer mouse, the shift helped solidify her appreciation for and ~ embrace ofthe ornamental and decorative as critical elements in 1 ~ ~n,,is ‘~A,,4 ~-~4~r \~, her work. She also became a prolific blogger, generously sharing — ~•, not only her h?.rd-won technical breakthroughs, but also her irreverent but highly informed musings on art. Schaechter has always demonstrated a defiant streak, such as when her RISD painting professors tried to dissuade her from her C buddingfocus on stained glass, orbywholehea.rtedly embracing her role as a media-specific artist despite the shift away from craft Ia, the Cow-Faced Maiden, 2017. Stained-glass light box. H 26, W 29 in. in the early aughts, best symbolized by the American Craft COURTESY CLAIRE OLIVER DALLERY NEW YORE Museum renaming itselfthe Museum ofArts and Design in 2002. (She participated in a 2010 Glass Art Society panel discussion I In 2012, she exhibited a partially crowd-funded work: a site- organized tkled “Should the term ‘glass artist’ be abolished?” as a specific installation at Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary; staunch advocate ofthe term.) She unabashedly celebrated her role where she unveiled her most ambitious work to date. Referencing as a hands-on maker and an appreciator ofthe decorative, even as Bruegel in the title, The Battle of Carnival and Lent features the studio crafts field sought ways to align itselfmore squarely 96 individual figures engaged in an elaborate interchange that with the wider art world. She demonstrated how adeptly she could seems to encompass all aspects of human relations. Writing about occupy both worlds when her work was selected for the 2002 the work, curator and critic Glenn Adamson observed: Whitney Biennial, an unquestioned arbiter ofart-world currency. “Schaechter is about as Bruegelesque an artist as it’s possible to There would be other milestones in the early 21st century; be today. Like the great Dutch master, her imagination does more including an architectural commission for the new bullding ofthe than brim over. It positively gushes, in an unending geyser of aforementioned Museum ofArts and Design, and her representation creativity. Also like him, she seems almost desperate to tell a story by Claire Oliver, a -based fine-art dealer. as vividly as humanly possible.” Adamson’s essay appears in the just-published catalogue that accompanies the latest high-water mark in Schaechter’s ifiustrious career: a major museum retrospective that will travel across the U.S. The Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, recently acquired The Battle ofCarnival andLent as part of its multi-year project of organizing the first major retrospective of Schaechter’s N ‘Sn’. V work. The fact that it hadn’t already been done was astonishing to the museum’s curator in charge, Jessica Marten. In 2014, when she I’ met with the newly appointed director ofthe Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, Marten was tickled that Jonathan Binstock not only knew Judith Schaechter’s work well from his time at the Pennsylvania Academy ofthe Fine Arts, but whole heartedly endorsed organizing a major career retrospective. One of Marten’s first tasks was to survey the museum landscape to make sure another institution wasn’t ahead ofthem. “It was shocking to me the project wasn’t already in the works,” Marten said in a telephone interview. “It was clear as day to me that A Judith is such an engaging artist and has such a wealth of source New Ghost, 2014. H32,Wlgin. materials, connections, and historical traditions of crafts—not to COLLECTION: SPEED mention the way she thinks about her practice and the connections MUSEUM. LOUISVILLE. KENTUCKY between the history of art and craft.”

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Schaechter’s career may check off many contemporary art experience;’ in recognition ofher embrace ofthe grotesque, and, concerns, but Marten was first drawn to the artist’s stained-glass finally, 2012-2015 is themed “preposterously breathtaking panels for their lush visual presence, powerful explorations ofthe inspiration;’ which Marten concedes was a bit of a catch-all to female psyche, and fierce originality. “She has followed the thing discuss many other strands in her work. that brings her the most satisfaction, regardless ofwhat is trendy, What fascinates Marten about Schaechter is an “in-between-ness” regardless ofwhat is getting the exhibitions,” says Marten. “Every and how easy it has been for the artist to “code-switch” throughout choice she’s made along the way distinguishes herselffrom many her life. Raised by parents of mixed religious backgrounds (Jewish other artists. She’s anticipated this place we’re at right now, with and Episcopalian), navigating the art and crafts worlds equally, craft moving from the margins to the mainstream.” this ability to easily cross boundaries fascinates Marten, who feels Marten explains that for the exhibition, she divided Schaechter’s that it informs the work. “One ofthe ways I really see that coming career into discrete chapters that are explored in the assembled out in the work is in her empathy, and how acutely she feels works: 1983-1994 is “a new vision for stained glass;’ as the artist empathy,” explains Marten. “Judith has that side where she’s very delves into a new material and brings her own unique approach; subversive, irreverent, transgressive, and all ofthose things, but 1995-1999 is “unruly women” as she examines the interior lives of absolutely one of the things that draws me to her work is the female figures in greater depth; 2000-2002 is named “20th-century counter to that—her warm, squishy, empathy side that is there toolbox” to mark Schaechter’s discovery of Photoshop and under every image you see.” embrace ofthe Internet; 2003-2005 is titled “plugged in” and While a museum retrospective is finite, and by necessity stops investigates illumination in literal and metaphysical terms; at the most recent work available to exhibit, Schaechter herself 2006-2008 is a period of“militant ornamentalism,” when continues apace, her technical facility and themes carrying on Schaechter revels into pure pattern; 2009-2011 is “extra-special their relentness evolution and maturation. Her January 2020

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exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery featured work made between the flowers have become the main characters, and what is usually 2017 and 2019, and was notable for Schaechter’s broadening the background has become the foreground—a row ofbeautiful subject matter and further compositional complexity. If one had but unsettling plant species, sprouting from the rich terrain of to add another chapter heading to this newest period, “widening Schaechter’s fertile imagination, crawl upward like various strains the lens” could work. ofmutant vines. A bravura touch is the 15 glass vessels from which Inspired by Robert Sapolsky’s 2018 book Behave, Schaechter they have sprouted, rendered complete with reflections, glass borrowed his concept of “almost better angels” as the title for her portrayed on glass, the decorative gallery exhibition. As she explained in her artist’s statement: flowers becoming the subject. “I am deeply concerned about our world and see a dire need for There seems no better spot to S empathy and compassion. I am specifically concerned with our place the bookmark in the

environment—climate change, habitat collapse, and the treatment continuing story of Schaechter’s - £ of animals, and much ofthe work in this exhibition was inspired remarkable career.. by those feelings and concerns.” The paintings themselves are ravishing, employing colors, ANDREW PAGE is the editor textures, and patterning that take your breath away. It’s notable that of Glass. not every panel includes human figures—sometimes botanical forms are the subject, as in Cross Pollination, which she confesses she almost titled “15 Proposals for Post-Apocalyptic Plants:’ It’s not only The artist pictured on a stained-glass an example ofmilitant ornamentalism (from a distance it looks like field trip to the Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel in Philadelphia. a floral pattern), but, upon closer examination, a viewer sees that PHOTO ERIN MURDOCI(

GLASS QUARTERLY NO. 158 27