Treasures from the Vault: Therman Statom

Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Research Curator

Therman Statom is a painter, sculptor, and craftsperson, who is a part of the pioneering generation of the contemporary glass movement. He is an artist represented in the permanent collection, whose work was first seen at FWMoA in Clearly Art: Pilchuck’s Glass Legacy, June 3 ‑ July 30, 1995.

Growing up in Washington, DC, Statom spent much of his spare time at the Smithsonian museums. He was a childhood friend of Cady Noland, daughter of the Washington Color School painter, Kenneth Noland. While Kenneth Noland’s work may not have had a direct, stylistic influence on Statom, he was a role model, demonstrating that Statom could become a professional artist.

Statom began his undergraduate studies as a ceramics major and, like so many others, switched to working in glass. He received a B.F.A. in 1974 from Rhode Island School of Design when Dale Chihuly was heading the program (his first class in glass was with Fritz Driesbach). Statom described how Chihuly brought in exciting visiting artists, encouraged experimentation, and empowered him. He remarked that you forgot that you were a student.

Statom studied further at Pilchuck Glass School during its inaugural year and he completed his M.A. at Pratt Institute in 1978. Pratt did not have a glass facility, so he had no access to a furnace for glass blowing.

His early works were made of tinted plate glass. Notable was a fan-like sculpture held in place by blown glass cones in between the sheets, recalling Larry Bell, who was fascinated with light and glass. Toots Zynsky, his longtime friend from school, observed that people weren’t working on that scale in glass at that time. As fellow student Bruce Chao was creating sculptures with large pieces of sheet glass that he suspended with ropes and rubber plungers, Statom realized that this was a viable material.

The artist’s unabashed use of color emerged through his experiences in California, known for its golden light and home to West Coast colorists, such as Richard Diebenkorn. Richard Marquis invited Statom to work in his shop at the University of California, Los Angeles in preparation for their upcoming exhibition Four Leaders in Glass: Dale Chihuly, Richard Marquis, Therman Statom, and Dick Weiss at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in 1980. Statom had created well-crafted blown objects there that he had attached to large screens. He felt dissatisfied, but heeded Marquis’s advice and added paint, launching a new dimension to his art.

Statom began building free-standing forms out of sheets of plate glass assembled with silicon. It was appealing as a medium because he only needed hand tools to cut and the silicon construction was relatively quick. He sandblasted surfaces that became his paint canvas and adhered blown glass elements and found objects.   

In the 1970s, on the heels of the spare geometry of Minimalism, artists, including Jennifer Bartlett and Joel Shapiro, marked a return to figuration by focusing on simple motifs, notably the basic house shape with a peaked roof. Statom also used this shape for purposes beyond traditional representation. He intentionally limited himself to a handful of forms that are easily recognizable: a chair, ladder, table, house, and painting—actually, a shallow box form. Statom’s subjects are simple in design yet rich in possible meanings. Beyond a literal dwelling, a house can signify security. The phrase “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” suggests refraining from criticism, especially if the complaining party could be guilty as well.

Statom provides the viewer with enigmatic titles. He painted playing card aces on a wall in Maison des Cartes [House of Cards] of 1991. The phrase “house of cards” can refer to a situation that is unstable and on the verge of collapse, like the game in which players balance playing cards and stack them higher until they fall. The 18^th-century French artist Jean Siméon Chardin is famous for his moralizing painting of a young man engrossed in the game, alluding to the folly or ephemeral nature of human pursuits.

In Winter Migration a silhouetted figure stands in a glass-plate house with disparate, colorful elements strewn around. The man in the hat recurs in many of Statom’s pieces. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s work Self-Portrait from the Winter Boxes series reveals the artist’s identity, even donning his trademark fedora. Statom painted several black birds on the exterior walls in Winter Migration, which are reminiscent of the imagery in Joseph Cornell’s shadow box assemblages.

Despite using objects that potentially carry meaning, Statom presents us with impressions that are familiar but remain elusive. The artist explained, “I design my work so that anyone, from kids to art critics, can have something to appreciate. The work transcends my own personal meaning. It should be better than that. I hate work where artists use images of symbols that are meaningful to them specifically, because who’s to say it means anything to anyone else? My work is not complete until someone sees it.”[1]

In Doce Pasos (Twelve Steps) from around 1999, Statom built a narrow, plate-glass ladder. Robbing it of its original function, he turns the ladder into something new with rungs that create open spaces to set objects. The artist enjoys exploring the glass material in various states—as a structure, decorative object, and detritus. He scattered glass cane, broken fragments, a constructed house, stacks of plate glass, a pitcher, and an orb around the interior and exterior panels. Their surfaces vary in their treatment whether they are polished for transparency, sandblasted for opaqueness, or painted with vibrant pigments.

Statom treats his glass objects as canvases in three dimensions, but ones that you can see through. Because of glass’ transparency, space becomes an important element in the work. Although Statom says that he never took a painting class, the medium has become integral to his work. The inside and outside areas of the glass ladder, as in most of his works, feature an expressive application of brightly colored paint and gestural lines.

The combination of energetic brushwork and drawn marks with affixed elements creates a dynamic, improvisatory quality that is a record of Statom’s process. While he works on large-scale sculptures and installations, the artist also creates small, pedestal-sized works, like Mar Azul [Blue Sea], which also takes on the ladder shape.

Statom explored glass as a print surface as well, a technique introduced to him by Harvey Littleton. After working on a glass plate during a cold-working glass workshop, Littleton got the idea that a glass plate (rather than wood or metal) could be a matrix for printmaking. As artists visited his glass studio in North Carolina, Littleton invited them to his print shop to make what he called vitreographs. In Statom’s vitreograph, he returned to the playing card theme and focused solely on the queen of hearts. He translated his characteristic, painterly handling of color to the print. Playing cards, dice, and roulette wheels are all games of chance, perhaps suggesting the unpredictability of life.

Noh from 2003 more closely resembles a painting in its format. All the objects are compartmentalized, suggesting less of a narrative. As always, Statom allows the viewers to make their own associations. Statom explained, “Over the years, the medium has enabled me to address my interest and belief that art is not the object itself, but rather one’s individual experience of the object.”[2]

These days Statom’s interests have broadened to using his art for healing, advocacy, and activism by partnering with various nonprofit groups. He stated, “I feel part advocate and I feel part artist. I think teaching is the highest form of advocacy you could do in terms of influencing the world or having a chance to be a part of something that you can change. I’ve evolved towards teaching as part of a process to give what I do more meaning.”[3]

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To see other inspirational, multimedia glass art, plan your next visit to the FWMoA Glass Wing!

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[1] Shawn Waggoner, “There Are No Rules: The Prolific Therman Statom, Glass Art Magazine 8, no. 5 (July-August 1993): 7.

[2] Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Sharon L. Kennedy, Therman Statom, Gregory Nosan, and Ashley Hussman, The Studio Glass Movement: Selections from the Esterling-Wake Collection (Sheldon Museum of Art, 2012), 15.

[3] “Craft in America: Glass Artist Therman Statom,” posted September 15, 2016, by PBS, 13 min. 21 sec., https://www.pbs.org/video/glass-artist-therman-statom-z3st09/.