Valentines Grand Opening at IMA with William Morris & Friends

Valentines Day Grand Opening at San Juan Islands Museum of Art (IMA) with William Morris and Friends

Internationally-acclaimed glass master William Morris will cut the red Valentines ribbon to celebrate the Grand Opening of San Juan Islands Museum of Art at 4:00 pm February 14. There will be two shows of glass sculpture in the recently completed modern glass and steel building in Friday Harbor: “Illuminated – Glass by William Morris 1998-2013” and “Glass3”, featuring the works of three renowned Morris’ colleagues from Pilchuck Glass School: Raven Skyriver, Shelley Muzylowski, and Ross Richmond.

The new museum is a work of art in its own right, with a large streetside glass atrium perfect to showcase Morris’ dramatic blown glass sculpture. The Glass3 exhibition will be in the museum’s North Gallery. The exhibition runs through May 12.

Special Valentines Day hours: 4 to 7 p.m. (Regular museum hours: Friday through Monday 11 to 5.)
The artists will be on site for interviews February 14 from 11 a.m. to noon. Admission is free

About William Morris:
William Morris’ extraordinary technical skill combines with a love for cultural history to create a body of work that has captivated art lovers and collectors for more than a quarter century. A teacher from the world renowned Pilchuck Glass School, Morris gathers much of his inspiration from ancient cultures around the world – Egyptian, Asian, Native American – all peoples, he has said, who respected and admired the land they inhabited. Because of this, Morris’s artwork has an intriguing ambiguity: it is culturally distinct and yet familiar to many cultures. His pieces embody a spiritual quality that sharply contrasts old beliefs with those of the modern world.

In a career that brought him to the forefront of the modern Studio Glass movement, William Morris perfected a repertoire of techniques that virtually no other American glass artist can equal. Internationally acclaimed for his compelling work with glass, William Morris approached the demands of glassblowing and glass sculpting with an experimental eye and an innovative hand. For Morris, glass is an endlessly intriguing material, fragile yet timeless, preserving the spontaneity of the creative moment unlike any other medium. William Morris artworks in glass are widely admired by artists, sought by collectors, and praised by critics. (wmorris.com)

Morris’ work can be found in numerous public collections including:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; American Glass Museum, Millville, NJ; Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Hokkaido, Japan; Musee Des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France; Auckland Museum, Auckland, New Zealand ,and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England.
(From wmorris.com)

About the Glass3 Artists:

Shelley Muzylowski
Shelley Muzylowski Allen was born in Manitoba, Canada and has a BFA in painting and intaglio from the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design (Vancouver, B.C.) For eight years, she worked with the William Morris sculpture team as a glass blowing assistant. In 2005, Muzylowski established a glass and sculpture studio with her husband, artist Rik Allen, in Skagit County, Washington. The couple has taught glass art at the Toyama Institute of Glass in Toyama, Japan, the International Glass Festival in Stourbridge, England, the Penland School of Craft, Pittsburgh Glass Center, and Pilchuck Glass School.
Muzylowski, whose work is exhibited in galleries, public institutions and private collections around the US and Canada, was a guest artist in 2012 at Studio Salvadore in Murano, Italy, where she collaborated with Davide Salvadore on a series of large-scale sculptures.

“Glass is a medium that keeps me in the moment,” Muzylowski says. “My background as a painter and an understanding of anatomy form the basis from which I depart toward more impressionistic or contemplative expressions and vignettes…Inspiration comes from a wide variety of cultures, time periods, and artistic mediums, from the long and storied history of the horse to medieval tapestries depicting the mysteries of the unicorn to the miniature sculptural tradition of Japanese netsuke. These different species have occupied many places over time…utilitarian beings associated with magic, legend, divinity, mythology.” Muzlowski.com

Ross Richmond
Ross Richmond is considered one of the top glass sculptors in the field today. Working with glass since 1991, Richmond has worked with some of the greatest glass and non glass artists including William Morris, Jane Rosen, Preston Singletary and Dale Chihuly. Ross’ pieces work mainly with figurative elements and symbolic objects.He graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1994 with a BA in Glass and Metals. His work currently shows at a number of galleries across the country, and he teaches in the US and Canada.

Richmond says, “The inspiration to create these pieces was the idea of expressing movement in a still object, but also capturing a moment, a gesture, a quiet interaction between people or an individual and their thoughts in a contemplative manner. The figure has always played a major role in my work, and in this series I am moving away from replicating the anatomy of the torso, and breaking down the human form into its basic shape represented as a robed figure. This keeps the eye from focusing on the details of the anatomy and lets the viewer follow the sweeping gestural lines of the form, using the energy and sense of motion to create visual tension.” rossrichmond.com

Raven Skyriver
Born in 1982, Raven Skyriver started blowing glass in high school at the age of 16. Skyriver’s mentor, Lark Dalton, taught him how to build glass blowing equipment and trained him in the Venetian technique. In 2003, Skyriver was discovered by the William Morris team, where he worked until Bill’s retirement in 2007. The experience of working with such talented artists galvanized his decision to follow glass sculpting as a profession. Skyriver grew up on Lopez Island, where he developed a focus in the area of sculpture and marine life, informed by the creatures that inhabit this fragile ecosystem as well as cultures around the world. Skyriver now lives near Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, and produces his work in the greater Seattle area. He shows his work nationally and has been featured in group shows internationally.

“It is important that my work reflects not just my own insights or experiences, but that it can also inspire an emotional connection for the viewer,” says Skyriver. “Growing up in the pacific northwest on a small island translated into ample time on and around the water. Some of my most memorable moments in life are those of having my first salmon on the line, or a humpback whale feeding off the bow of my kayak. These unforgettable experiences dictate the work I make today, as I attempt to capture the essence of the animals that I depict, and speak to the viewer’s own understanding of these creatures. I also hope to draw into question the delicate balance of nature that is often taken for granted.”
ravenskyriver.com

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