Books published by Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art

Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Zuni and Tlingit) is an independent curator based in Seattle. She has taught at Northwest Indian College and the University of Washington. She is enrolled at Zuni Pueblo and a member of the Takdeintaan Clan of the Tlingit Nation. John Drury is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. He has taught glass art Pilchuck Glass School, UrbanGlass, and the Glass Furnace in Instanbul. His writings have appeared in Raw Vision and ArtNet, among other publications.

Complementary Contrasts: The Glass and Steel Sculptures of Albert Paley highlights the significance of glass in the work of the celebrated sculptor Albert Paley. Though best known for his large-scale metal sculptures, Paley has incorporated glass in many works for over a decade.After beginning his career as a jewelry maker, Paley soon transitioned to furniture and freestanding sculpture. In the 1970s, Paley delved into large, site-specific works that blurred the line between sculpture and architecture. Despite disparity in size, PaleyΓÇÖs collective artworks display a synergy of forms and philosophy, favoring natural curves and lines that defy their rigid materials.In 1999 Paley was invited to Pilchuck Glass School to collaborate with artist Dante Marioni. His experience utilizing fire to manipulate metal translated naturally into his glass design and allowed him to embrace the new material with ease. Since this initial introduction, Paley has collaborated with a number of glass artists and created over a hundred sculptures incorporating glass.The first book to focus on PaleyΓÇÖs glass and steel sculpture, Complementary Contrasts includes approximately forty new sculptures created at the Museum of Glass in collaboration with Seattle-based glass sculptor Martin Blank. These sculptures will be supported by earlier works from PaleyΓÇÖs personal collection. Thirty works on paper that illuminate PaleyΓÇÖs process of incorporating glass in his sculpture are also illustrated. Collectively, the objects in this publication demonstrate a culmination of PaleyΓÇÖs talents as a sculptor.

The need to describe the world around us is an impulse as old as the earliest cave wall depictions of running horses and wounded bison. In this descriptive enterprise we have consistently found nature to be a valuable and inspiring companion, and over the centuries, as we moved beyond simple narrative to the complex, exhortative inventions of allegory, nature has reciprocally grown with us, giving us a crucial and familiar framework to help us to know our place in the universe. As a consequence of this evolution, the human imagination can claim innumerable--often epic--accounts built on the marriage of nature and allegory.Fresh! Contemporary Takes on Nature and Allegory features the works of fifteen artists from the United States, Europe, and Asia, encompassing pieces that vary tremendously in medium, technique, and scale--not to mention subject matter. It does not pretend to cover all of the allegorical tendencies in contemporary art, but nevertheless does represent several significant strains in the use of this mode in examining our relationship to nature.