Michael Glancy

Michael Glancy was a glass artist born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950. He began working with glass in 1970 as a student. Glancy received a BFA from the University of Denver in 1973 and a second BFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977. He earned an MFA in glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1980, where he studied with Dale Chihuly.

He first encountered glass in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and built his own hotshop soon after. A chance encounter with Dale Chihuly during a visit to the Native American Taos Pueblo community had him apply for graduate studies at RISD, where Chihuly headed the glass program. Discovering a little-used lab in RISD's jewelry department, Glancy stumbled upon electroplating, a metalworking technique of using electricity to apply precious metals, which he incorporated into his glass practice. This would come to be his preferred method perfected in his four-decade career as a sculptor. Alongside the late Howard Ben Tre, Glancy graduated from RISD in 1980 with his MFA, and soon rose to prominence as part of the Studio Glass movement.

Glancy was a member of the Adjunct Faculty and a Senior Critic, in the Jewelry & Metalsmithing Dept. at the Rhode Island School of Design for nearly 40 years, He was also a recurring guest faculty member at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City acquired their first Michael Glancy object in 1980 from the inaugural exhibition of Heller Gallery on Madison Ave. Curators returned 27 years later to acquire a major work for the 2007 exhibition ONE of a KIND: The Studio Glass Movement.

Glancy’s superbly designed and crafted glass and metal forms defy their compact format and make grand statements rewarding viewers with unexpectedly dynamic shapes and intricate patterns, which typify his opulent and singular style. Spanning the realms of alchemy and art, his exquisite vessels have been alternately described as geological and organic, architectonic, and thoroughly modern, intricately materialistic, and metaphysical. Glancy’s works begin as sketches. Lines, circles, spirals, and grids are drawn on paper. His works are one-part geometrics, one part nature, and one part science fiction. Imitating mountain ridges, sand dunes, glacial flows, and constellations, his sculptural vessels, which are posed on landscape-like planes, are futuristic abstractions of natural forms.

In 2003 Glancy was included in the exhibition “Fire and Form,” curated by William Warmus for the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. In the book accompanying the show, Warmus wrote: “Michael Glancy magnifies nature in order to reveal its underlying structure…the flat glass panels that form sculptural bases for his artworks…unfold into and inspire the vessels that sit astride them.”

Glancy lived and maintained a studio in Rehoboth, Massachusetts with his wife Robin of 43 years. Glancy was also an avid gardener, sailor, and raced a wooden Beetle Cat sailboat out of the Edgewood Yacht Club in Edgewood, RI.

Glancy’s career included numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently in private galleries and art fairs in New York City, Paris, London, Brussels, and Basel. His work has been acquired by major museums and public collections, across the USA and worldwide.

In 2020, Glancy passed away at the age of 70 at his summer home in Harwich Port, Massachusetts.