Benjamin Moore

Benjamin Moore was a prominent glass artist born on February 2, 1952, in Olympia, Washington. He is considered one of the most influential American glassblowers of the 20th century, not only for achieving a rare level of skill, but for helping to connect the nascent American Studio Glass movement with esteemed European masters via his influential role as the longtime creative director of the Pilchuck Glass School, a title he held until 1987. And the studio he established in Seattle, Benjamin Moore, Inc., quickly became an essential crossroads where a new generation of glassblowers learned their craft and connected with established elders.

After high school, Moore – ever ready to learn, travel, and connect – left his native Washington state to study ceramics at California College of the Arts, where he went on to earn his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1974. There, he learned about glass through Professor Marvin Lipofsky. The summer after he graduated, he headed to the newly formed Pilchuck Glass School, where he would meet his mentor Dale Chihuly, who was also the chair of the glass department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Enrolling in the graduate program at RISD, Moore would earn his MFA in 1977, after which he took off for Murano, Italy to learn from the masters he had heard about from Chihuly. Moore spent two years sweating alongside the Murano factory workers, developing personal relationships, and accessing some of the technical secrets kept from most outsiders. Moore returned to the U.S. with an extraordinary level of skill, and with ideas inspired by two legendary Venini designers – Napoleone Martinuzzi and Carlo Scarpa – from which he developed his own distinctive blown-glass aesthetic.

Inspired by Scandinavian ceramics of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Moore’s objects in glass possess a timelessness achieved by the artist’s focus on color, shape, and proportion. By altering the way light interacts with the work through opacity, translucency, and transparency, he created different impressions for each series of his work. The fundamental concern and focus of his own work was to achieve simplicity, balance, and clarity of form.

Moore was eager to share his connections with the glass world, and his position coordinating the educational offerings at Pilchuck allowed him to do just that. He tapped his Murano network to invite Checco Ongaro to teach at Pilchuck in 1978, Moore was also instrumental in recruiting other high-profile glass artists from around the world to lend their talents to Pilchuck. Moore would continue to serve the school that he loved as a member of the Board of Trustees for the next 30 years.

Impressed and inspired by the possibilities of a year-round studio that would foster the kind of collaborative spirit he had helped shape at Pilchuck, he founded Benjamin Moore, Inc., in 1985. There, collaborative fabrication took place for Chihuly, Lipofsky, Fritz Dreisbach and Dick Marquis early on. Known for his infamously steady hand, his exacting demands of those who worked for him, and his unshakeable love for the material glass and those who manipulate it in pursuit of art, Moore’s mark on the glass world is indelible.

Moore has been represented by many of the top galleries in the field, including: Schantz Gallery in Stockbridge, MA; Holsten Galleries in Santa Fe, NM; and Butters Gallery Ltd in Portland, OR. His work can be found in major museum collections such as: the Cantor Visual Arts Museum, Stanford University; Cincinnati Art Museum; Corning Museum of Glass; Frauenau Museum, Bavaria; Glasmuseum, Denmark; J&L Lobmeyr Museum Collection, Austria; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Niijima Contemporary Glass Art Museum, Japan; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; Venini Collection, Murano-Venice, Italy, among many others.

On June 25, 2021, Moore passed away at the age of 69. In the wake of Moore’s death, Paul Marioni of Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet wrote: Benjamin was especially important to the community of Pilchuck, and, as one of the dedicated educators who built Pilchuck into the institution it is today, his loss in the school’s 50th-anniversary year is particularly devastating.”