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December Issue 2003
Mint
Museum of Craft + Design in Uptown Charlotte, NC, Offers Major
Works by Joh Kuhn
Because Kathleen Bryan Edwards' intuition was right, glass artist Jon Kuhn can lay claim to being Winston-Salem, NC's poster child for urban renewal. Arts patron and collector Edwards convinced Kuhn in 1985 that the North Carolina city was the place to be. Confirmation of her linking the right artist and community is amply evident in the exhibition Spectrum: The Sculpture of Jon Kuhn, on display Dec. 6 through Mar. 21, 2004 at Charlotte, NC's Mint Museum of Craft + Design.
Then 36 year-old Jon Kuhn closed up his Staunton, VA, studio, where he had already earned national notice for his work in blown glass, and began anew in an abandoned auto shop in a state to which he had no previous connection. As an artist, Kuhn felt he had already created the seminal piece in his career, Little Rock River, which was featured in the Corning Museum's 1979 New Glass exhibition. Kuhn's Carolina move, however, turned out to be the first of a series of personal changes soon reflected in a new body of work.
It was also in 1985 that the Chicago native dropped by the Beauchamp Frame Shop, where he worked as a Washburn College (Kansas) undergraduate. Instead of reminiscing with his former fellow framers, Kuhn was smitten with current employee Sharon Gill. Make that bitten. Less than six months later, they married and began transforming an auto shop into a glass studio.
"I liked what I had to say in my work, but wanted a new way to say it," stated Kuhn later. "I experimented with pâte de verre and settled on making pâte de verre sections that were laminated together."
Kuhn's work began evolving from the inside.
"I've practiced meditation daily since my 20s," explained Kuhn (doubtless a challenge with four children). "Through meditation we can find the universe within. The interior of my work, once revealed through a small window, is now the focus. The surface has disappeared and become less significant. This inside is abstract, complex. There is explosive energy and color. Where there was once only one component (blown glass), there are now hundreds, thousands."
Quite literally. Highly intricate, geometrized glass sculptures emerged from an inner core of precisely cut, fused, polished and assembled cold glass, thousands of pieces 1/8 inch square. Once the core is laminated and finely polished, it is encased in high quality borosilicate glass, unparalleled in clarity. Additional layers of leaded glass for different light diffusing effects may also be added.
"As my work became more complex and time consuming, I added assistants specializing in gluing, grinding, polishing and a metal smith," credits the artist of his current team of 27 craftsmen.
The smallest of the works stands approximately six inches high. A typical cube in 14 inches high by 10 inches square, typically weighing 50 pounds, and taking as long as 18 months to construct. Larger commissions can weigh as much as 150 pounds. On display in the Charlotte exhibition will be a diptych entitled Double Ribbon, c.2003 with each half weighing 350 pounds.
"I begin each piece with lots of drawings," Kuhn explained. "Sometimes it's something I see in a building or textile piece or a picture in a book. My wife and I have a small collection of fiber and textile art, often the source of inspiration. The glass pieces are very interesting to me because they are about color and pattern, almost like musical composition or three dimensional weaving."
Collectors and museum curators around the globe agree that these sculptural landscapes hold a power beyond the merely reflective properties of glass. Jon Kuhn's glass sculptures are in collections including: the White House Permanent Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Museum für Kunst and Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany, the Eeltoft Glass Museum, Ebeltoft, Denmark, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Lausanne, Switzerland.
"This retrospective exhibition illuminates the artistic evolution of this internationally recognized studio glass virtuoso," stated Melissa G. Post, Curator at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design. "It reveals Kuhn's skill at transforming a rigorous science into kinetic, optically mesmerizing sculptures and environments."
For information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the museum at 704/337-2000 or on the web
at (www.mintmuseum.org).
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