Marvin Lipofsky

We are thrilled to announce an exhibition of work by the late Bay Area-based glass artist, Marvin Lipofsky. 


Marvin Lipofsky
September 1, 1938 – January 15, 2016
born: Elgin, Illinois  

Education:
University of Illinois, 1962
University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1964


Was an American glass artist who helped reinvent the challenging material of glass through experiments in scale, color, and technique. Lipofsky studied ceramics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before turning to glass in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was one of the six students that Studio Glass founder Harvey Littleton instructed in a program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 1962 and spring of 1963. He was a central figure in the dissemination of the American Studio Glass Movement, introducing it to California through his tenure as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California College of Arts and Crafts.

Lipofsky was an instructor for seminars and workshops at art and craft schools, including the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington; Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio; Southwest Craft Center in San Antonio, Texas; Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine; San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California and the Art Department of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Throughout his six-decade career, Lipofsky traveled to glass factories in Europe, Asia, the Soviet Union, and Mexico, where he took photographs of glass worldwide, led workshops, and crafted new pieces with local glassblowing experts. In this environment, Liposky collaborated with a glass master and teams of glass handlers in various factories to create larger multi-colored sculptures, which were shipped back to his studio in Berkeley, where he finished them using a variety of coldworking processes, such as sandblasting, polishing, and grinding.

Many of Lipofsky’s works are colorful “bubbles” of glass. Often semi-translucent, they allow the viewer to examine their depths. He is best known for the organic form of his pieces. Lipofsky is well known for having devoted his career in glass to endless variations on the turbulent, broken bubble form. Corning Museum of Glass curator Tina Oldknow has written that she admires Lipofsky “for his devotion to material and form. His non-objective vessels break apart and rearrange the blown glass mass while retaining the breathy, ephemeral quality, one of the medium’s most intriguing characteristics.”

Notable awards garnered by the artist include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass in Chicago, Illinois, in 2005 and a Masters of the Medium Award from the James Renwick Alliance, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, in 2003. He was named an Honorary Lifetime Member of the Glass Art Society in 1986 and a California Living Treasure in Sacramento, California, in 1985. The artist was the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1976 and 1974.

Lipofsky’s work can be found in the collections of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Oakland, California; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Philadelphia Museum of Art and Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio. Overseas, his work is in Glasmuseet Ebeltoft in Denmark; Frauenau Glass Museum, Germany; Museum Bellerive in Zürich, Switzerland; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Holland; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; and Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in Sapporo, Japan.