VAM galleries including this work:
The Owensboro Museum of Fine Art | Do You See a Pattern? | How’d They Do That? || VAM Home

Jon Kuhn assembles his sculptures around a core cube, composed of pieces of thinly ground and polished clear glass layered with colored powders and gold and silver leaf. The resulting stacks are fused and cut through, and these striped cross-sections are then laminated together to form a checkerboard block. Finally, this block is sliced, and the pieces are then polished and laminated so that colored and colorless pieces alternate at various intervals. Kuhn’s works often include thousands of pieces of glass. Children visiting the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art enjoy seeing how the reflection of the colors from their clothing can change the way Star Cluster appears.

About the Artist

Jon Kuhn was born in 1949 in Chicago. He was a potter and furniture maker before developing an interest in glassblowing in the 1970s. Since 1978, he has been an independent studio artist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He received his B.F.A. degree from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, and an M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

In much of Kuhn’s early blown-glass work, he cut a section out of the piece to reveal several multicolor strata. The surfaces were often treated with acid to give them a rough, eroded, earthy finish. These early pieces stand in stark contrast to the smooth, mathematical, laminated finishes of the artist’s more recent works.

By 1988, Kuhn had developed his distinctive laminated glass process. Some of his works rotate to allow the viewer to see how they change color and radiance when viewed from different angles. You can find examples at more than 30 museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the White House Permanent Collection, and the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian.

Classroom Ideas

Discussion: Vocabulary terms relating to this piece include three-dimensional and abstract. Compare the one-plane stained glass windows by Emil Frei with the multiple planes and self-perpetuating reflections and refractions created in this sculpture. Compare the infinite patterns in this work of art with the patterns in Pamela Lynch Kngwarreye’s Aboriginal dot painting.

Links

Jon Kuhn’s own excellent artist’s web site includes photo and video galleries, a description of his process, and additional biographical information.
[www.kuhnstudio.com]

Read more about Jon Kuhn and other glass artists at the Smithsonian’s White House Collection of American Crafts site.
[americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/whc/glass.html]