Mary Shaffer

(http://www.maryshaffer.com 7-3-08)

MARY SHAFFER Public Collections and Commissions Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art; Kyoto, Japan; Museum of Art & Design; New York, NY; Smithsonian Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art; Washington, D.C.; Blumenthal Performing Arts Center; Charlotte, NC; The American Craft Museum; New York, NY; Huntington Museum; Huntington, WV; Museum Bellerive; Zurich, Switzerland; Museum of Decorative Arts; Lausanne, Switzerland; The Detroit Institute of Arts; Detroit, MI; The Toledo Museum of Art; Toledo, OH; Musee de Verre; Sars-Poteries, France; Corning Museum of Glass; Corning, NY;

Sculptor, glass artist; Rhode Island, New York, N.Y., and Maryland. Shaffer is recognized worldwide as one of the founding artists of the American Studio Glass Movement. In the 1970s and 1980s Shaffer taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Wellesley College, and New York University where she was Director of the Crafts Program in the Department of Art and Art Education. She also managed the Art Center at the University of Maryland in the 1980s. From 1975 on, she exhibited her work at O.K. Harris Gallery in New York, and other glass-specific or craft venues.Mary Shaffer is known for her slumped glass sculpture. Her training and sensibility is in painting, but she is considered one of the innovators of using slumped glass in art. She had been working with imagery of light coming through windows. Her contact with early studio glass movement artists at the Rhode Island School of Design caused her to work with the virtual window-pane glass. She slumps the glass by heating it and catching it in the process of melting.

-Hot Color: Cool Glass May 2008, curator, Anne Gochenour