Photograph by Tim Cross
In his short artist’s statement for Objects: USA, Fritz Dreisbach mentioned early American glass as one of his sources of inspiration. This was a surprisingly rare observation from one of the first generation of studio glass artists: they tended either to emphasize connections to contemporary sculpture, or the inherent qualities of the material. On the latter, Dreisbach also noted: “The play of light as it reflects from the surfaces and refracts in, around, and through the object.” Yet America’s first period of independent experimentation in this medium, during the decades before and after the Revolution, did involve some of the same challenges enterprising makers faced in the 1960s.
Just like historic glassmakers, the new generation learned to surmount the difficulties of setting up a furnace, securing viable materials, and learning the skills of hot glasswork. And they did indeed come up with similar solutions. The prominent trailing polychrome swirls and snipped-off applied elements that Dreisbach employed all find precedents in early nineteenth-century work. Yet his work was also entirely of its era, with visual parallels to counterculture psychedelia and painterly abstraction.