American Craft - The 1960s and The New Glassblowing Movement

The 1960s and The New Glassblowing Movement

The culture of the 1960s was even more conducive to the development of studio crafts. This period saw a rejection of materialism and exploration of alternative ways of living. For some, the creation of handicrafts provided just such an outlet. In 1962, then-ceramics professor Harvey Littleton and chemist Dominick Labino began the contemporary glassblowing movement. The impetus for the movement consisted of their two workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art, during which they began experimenting with melting glass in a small furnace and creating blown glass art. Thus Littleton and Labino were the first to make molten glass feasible for artists in private studios. Harvey Littleton extended his influence through his own important artistic contributions and through his teaching. Over the years, Harvey Littleton trained many of the most important contemporary glass artists, including Marvin Lipofsky, Sam Herman (Britain), Fritz Dreisbach and Dale Chihuly. These Littleton students in turn developed the new movement and spread it across the country. Marvin Lipofsky, for example, is credited with being one of the founders of the Glass Art Society and introducing studio glass to California. In 1967, Lipofsky founded the glass program at the California College of Arts and Crafts, which he headed for two decades.

In 1971, Dale Chihuly began the influential Pilchuck Glass School near the rural town of Stanwood, Washington. Influenced by the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (the first school to have a glass furnace), and the Penland School of Crafts, Pilchuck Glass School has become a center of the contemporary American studio glass movement, of which Chihuly is a leading figure. Artist Toots Zynsky, a Pilchuck pioneer, observed that the choice of a Western location for the school reflected a conscious rejection of the Eastern art establishment. The naming of the school also reflected the founders' countercultural attraction to Native American culture. Chihuly chose the name "Pilchuck," derived from the Chinookan words for "red" and "water," alluding to the iron-rich waters of the nearby Pilchuck River.