Elvehjem exhibit features glass artist Littleton

His gift was the hot-glass fire and enthusiasm that ignited the studio glass movement and its unprecedented spectacle of form and color.

American studio glass movement founder Harvey Littleton spent a lifetime lighting fires as a teacher, glass artist and studio craft advocate.

The exhibit “Harvey K. Littleton Reflections, 1946-1994” at the Elvehjem Museum of Art presents these achievements in the context of his glass production at UW–Madison, the university where he first gained renown. Littleton is expected to attend the artist reception opening the exhibit Friday, Nov. 17, 6-8 p.m.

Organized by the Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte, N.C., the exhibit features 60 artworks, photographs, exhibition catalogues and correspondence on loan from the Archives of American Art.

Littleton’s career as an artist began as a potter following studies at the University of Michigan and under potter Maija Grotell at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He first became active nationally with the American Crafts Council as a successful ceramic artist and teacher at UW–Madison.

Littleton believed glass would become an art medium if artists in small studios could perform the hot-glass technique of blowing. Littleton mounted two workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art that involved building a small glass furnace and annealing oven and melting glass cullet at a temperature suitable for blowing. News and interest spread quickly after the galvanizing event.

Littleton’s enthusiasm for the medium attracted broad support. He established a graduate course and glass studio at UW–Madison in 1963, the first university-level classes in the country. Through speaking at craft associations and his writing, he spread the gospel of working hot glass and shared rapidly evolving techniques and new tools.

Littleton left the UW in 1976 to relocate to Spruce Pine, N.C., to devote his energies to creating a body of work in glass. His exploratory pursuit of the medium is shown in works that transform industrial materials such as plate glass, optic glass bars and cullet into artists’ materials through hand-blown techniques, such as slumping, and hand processes that include cutting and polishing, cold working, fusing and casting.

Littleton’s signature works are his bars of encased color that have been pulled like taffy, the relationship of the concentric paraboids remaining the same with each twist and stretch.

Littleton’s latest efforts to expand the forum for glass is vitreography, prints produced from glass plates. Techniques in preparing the plates range from sandblasting, hot glue resists, etching and caustic solutions applied free hand or even by computer design.