[calm guitar music]
- Beth Lipman: The way that I work in glass,
the process itself is capturing a moment in time.
[glass snapping]
For me, it's absolutely about mortality.
I mean, that's what makes me make art,
is, you know, death, essentially, in a nutshell.
That's why I'm nonjudgmental with the objects,
is because who am I to judge whether they're good or not?
They're here, they're existing, they've been made by someone,
they have that person's mark, that hand.
[gentle music]
Well, for the past 10 years, I've been focused
on working in the still life tradition.
I was trying to find that place of, almost disgust,
that role reversal where it goes from desire to repulsion,
or you know, desire to consequence, that kind of thing.
One way that I approach the work that gives me a beginning.
I usually end up doing something
that is very repetitious, like glass cutting,
or I'll go blow glass for the day
and I'll just make objects that I know that I'll need
that I can use; I call that a vocabulary of objects.
And then when I feel confident in the things that I have,
I'll start to really quickly add things to a table.
That's kind of nice.
[gentle music]
My compositions are three-dimensional drawings,
that's how I work.
As I'm composing, I'm looking for form, line, texture.
I'm also looking for reflection or density of materials.
I don't even know what I would draw on a piece of paper
before making a glass still life
because it would completely negate the process
of drawing in the material for me.
So the vines on this particular piece
are actually going to start on the ground,
they're gonna be trailing in from here,
wrap around this particular leg, come up,
and kind of crawl over here,
really massive bundle of vines at this point,
and then shed almost over
and come down off the tablecloth on this side.
The larger works in this particular table
were made by a scientific glassblowing company
in south Jersey.
They are my design,
but they were made with borosilicate glass.
I came to still life probably because
of my fixation on food, [laughs] initially.
And I was actually working with food conceptually
prior to working with the still life tradition,
so it was kind of a natural evolution.
I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
My mother pursued craft from when I was about age nine,
so I was exposed at a pretty early age
to painting and folk art.
We'd travel around a lot, she would do craft shows,
and we would definitely find
the best spot for food wherever we were.
We absolutely planned our days around food. [laughs]
[upbeat quirky music]
Essentially, we're gonna try to make two topiaries today.
The topiaries are basically fused together.
I'm thinking like grapes, bananas, pears, peaches,
and maybe we'll make like a melon for the bottom.
Or I was also thinking maybe I'll make
a quick dead bird or something
that goes kind of on the bottom of the piece.
So we'll build this piece, just for your information,
we're gonna be using an oxyacetylene that may,
in fact, like scorch the glass in places,
and I'm totally okay with that, I think that's awesome.
[torch hissing]
All right, let's try this.
Head towards the, yes, thank you.
- Dawn Bennett: Urban Glass was founded in 1977.
We serve all of the creative community artists
who work primarily in glass
and also artists who have never worked in glass before.
Beth Lipman came to Urban Glass in the late 1990s.
I think she was here for about four years.
She started out as a teaching assistant,
eventually became a teacher herself,
and then went on to become the Director of Education.
- Beth: I always, until very recently,
had a job as an arts administrator.
That really fulfilled this need of being involved in community
and coming together with a community to get something done,
and that's very similar to working in glass,
working in hot glass, you need a lot of people, sometimes,
to make things that you can't make on your own,
and that's really a humbling experience, really wonderful.
That's nice.
So Leo, I'm gonna shape after this.
- Leo: Okay.
- John Perreault: One of the projects that gave me the clue
that Beth was somebody really special.
I invited 15 artists that I knew
who were connected in some way or another with Urban Glass
to choose an artwork on public view in the Brooklyn Museum
and make a work in glass that commented on that artwork.
And Beth was one of the artists
that I chose to be in that exhibition.
- Beth: I was just naturally drawn
to the Severin Roesen Still Life With Fruit painting
that they had in their collection.
[gentle music]
So I just really intuitively
just started responding to the objects within his painting.
That was the beginning of the series
that I've been working on now for the past 11 years.
[gentle music]
My primary gallery is Heller Gallery in New York City,
and I've been exhibiting with them since 2000.
After this, you should be able to just let it rest here.
Oh great, yeah, this, yes.
- Man: A little surgery at the moment.
- Katya Heller: Beth has a command of her medium.
For me, it touches on issues that are very close to my heart.
Things that have to do with material culture,
things that have to do with history,
questions of feminism and other issues,
commenting on the history of art itself.
- One of the most seductive qualities of glass making,
utilizing hot glass, is this great visual performance.
There's the choreography involved,
there's the danger, the molten glass,
this creation from a primordial soup.
But too often, you know,
people who gain command of that process
get caught up in the sound and fury
without knowing why or what else it could lead to.
I think Beth epitomizes the artist
who knows how to make all of that signify something.
- Beth: It's a nice pear.
[upbeat music]
The arts industry coordinator position opened
for the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
I had a done a residency in 2003,
so when the position became available,
I pretty much jumped at the chance to come here.
- Ruth deYoung Kohler: Kohler Company,
where the arts industry program is located, is world-famous
for its beautifully designed plumbing ware.
And we have been thrilled to have a partner
that recognized the importance of artists to this world.
Beth Lipman brought a kind of legitimacy to the program.
We had not had that kind of well-known artist.
Also, because she was a glass artist
and was working in clay, in the pottery,
it gave other artists the sense
that they could be a part of this.
- Beth: I did have some mold-making experience
working in glass, but I had never worked in clay.
I made several swags out of shells,
and the shells are shells that I hand-carved
and then took molds of,
and there were like 300 or 400 shells
that would make up each swag.
The residency definitely changed my life.
I'd never been in an industrial environment
that was remotely anything like Kohler.
So my whole perception of like, my identity,
what I was doing, changed.
So yeah, it was a really incredible experience.
[bright music]
And the bowl of fruit.
For the past year, my husband, Ken Sager, and I
have been working full time in the studio.
So Ken is the studio and business manager.
Thinking about a vertical photograph.
He's an incredible maker himself,
but has really no interest
in pursuing art in the public realm.
- I make strawberries, raspberries,
everything chain, leaves, flowers.
I did a whole trillium thing, dead birds,
Beth does a lot of still lifes with dead birds.
Beth will actually start to design the still life
and put it together,
and she'll come to me and she'll say,
"What do you think, how does this read?
Walk around it," and she'll tell me what she's looking for.
[glass clanking]
- Beth: Working in this tradition, I have chosen to work
in an already established vocabulary of meaning.
The objects historically were very,
kind of supporting roles in the painting
for primarily religious iconography.
During the Dutch Golden Era,
when the still life really took off,
those figures and those narratives,
religious narratives,
were completely eliminated from the paintings,
and all that remained were the objects.
The transience of life is really a huge...
It's hugely important to me.
I think that's what keeps driving me to use the objects
because they will exist when we do not.
[calm guitar music]
You ham.
You want blueberry?
- Hey, let's get that from in front of you here
before you get it all over you.
- Having my girls forced me to choose.
Actually, it's bizarre to say, "Okay, I'm gonna try this.
"I'm gonna stop working in a day job
and just make my work and see what happens."
It really was the absolute opposite decision
of what I thought I would possibly have to make.
The thing that I think about a lot
is I never want to be too comfortable in what I'm doing.
I always want the work to be moving forward.
So I guess for me it's like that, it's a fundamental belief.
If I'm just true to the work,
and as long as I keep being given opportunities
to make the next thing,
which is not exactly like the last thing I've made,
it's really a, it's, it's...
It's unbelievable to me.
So I don't trust it in some ways.
I'm not quite sure what's happening here.
It's the Bermuda Triangle effect of Wisconsin.
[laughing]
I'm in that spot, I don't know how I got there.
So I can't move, I have to stay right here.
[gentle music]