Jon Kuhn

Jon Kuhn is an American artist best known for his glass sculptures composed with trapped shards of colored glass within their centers. Regarded as one of the leading glass artists in the world, with works featured in over works featured in over 40 international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Vatican Museums, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the White House Permanent Collection, the National Museum of American Art and hundreds of private residences and public spaces. Born in 1949 in Chicago, IL, Kuhn received his BFA from Washburn University in Topeka and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 1978. Although still uncertain about pursuing a career as an artist, he had learned a great deal about the vocabulary and processes of art and had focused most consistently on ceramics. It was during graduate school that he made the transition from ceramic sculptures to glass.

Graduate school for Kuhn was invigorating – although he had learned much about how to make art at Washburn, it was at VCU that he was challenged to articulate the ideas and concepts behind that art, to think more deeply about the messages he was trying to convey. Simultaneous with that experience were Kuhn’s first efforts in glass – he took to the medium immediately, and he has never looked back. The resulting refracted light in his works creates a sparkling, stellar-like space within each object. Kuhn uses a cold-working process of grinding and polishing rather than glass blowing process utilized by Dale Chihuly. “My philosophical expression in glass has always been a reflection of my interest in eastern mysticism,” the artist has said of his work. “For specific subject matter, I make reference to my interests in architecture, music, mathematics, and textiles, as well as the formal considerations of structure and color.” The result is a sculpture that takes in surrounding light, then reflects and refracts it back into space much like a fine diamond. No two are alike, and once created they appear to change color and radiance when viewed from different angles and lighting. His desire is to continue creating beautiful works, everyone unique, bringing light and joy to those who experience them. 

What first excited Kuhn about glass was his creation of some core element within it, some curious bit of concentrated pictorial incident that would be encased in subsequent layers of clear glass. His objects would have a kind of interior life, a central drama into which we peer, a condensed area of activity that would draw us ceaselessly in. Kuhn’s work stands out for its complexity, its geometric forms and for its presence which has almost a spiritual quality. 

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kuhn was working in hot glass and sometimes encased these blown, irregularly shaped globes in pebbly and crusty exteriors. He would then cleave off slices of these raw-looking exteriors to reveal the glistening glass within, to provide windows into their inner selves. Only after moving to Winston-Salem in 1985 did Kuhn begin to focus on the method that has subsequently brought him such consistent acclaim. What engrossed him in the earlier work was the interior drama of his pieces, and he realized that for him blown glass was not the best way to achieve the detail and complexity he was seeking to install inside his work. Instead he began to concentrate on cold-working, on building his pieces up out of seemingly countless bits of laminated optical and colored glass. The labor-intensive procedures of grinding, polishing, and adhering would become the methods by which to create the explosive and dazzling effects he desired.

A mature work by Kuhn begins with some of the purest glass fabricated anywhere on the planet. Schott Glass, produced at a highly specialized factory in Pennsylvania, can reach the state of 99.8 percent transparency. A piece by Kuhn is an aperture into infinity – it changes every moment; its exterior may be stable and conform to the procedures of sculpture and objecthood, but the insides certainly do not. There are no rules for the core; it will take light and lead it on a dazzling chase, in and out of the piece, projecting the light outward, extending its scale onto nearby walls and viewers. A sculpture by Kuhn moves at the speed of light, never knowing a static moment, never remaining at rest. Light is life, and Kuhn’s sculpture is finally a dramatic stage for a contemplation of its potential, physical and metaphysical. Sometimes there seems to be a contradiction between technology and spirituality, as if those two systems are not reconcilable. His work, in which technology strives for perfection, testifies that they are reconcilable, and that they can become one.