Mike Glier

Mike Glier is a professional drawer, painter, and educator who primarily focuses on landscape. He received his Master of Arts in Studio Art in 1979 at Hunter College, New York. He was the Alexander Falck Class of 1899 Professor of Art at Williams College located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, retiring in May 2024. Glier considers his work as an educator to be "a happy, satisfying, and dematerialized part of his creative output." [1]

His drawings, wall drawings, and installations have since been featured in solo exhibitions at the N.A.M.E. Gallery (Chicago), The Kitchen (New York), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Williams College Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The San Jose Museum of Art, and The Philbrook Museum (Tulsa), among many others. His work has also been shown at the American Graffiti Gallery in Amsterdam and at the Galerie Tanja Grunert in Cologne. The Drawing Center (New York), The Tyler Gallery at Temple University, and the Opalka Gallery at the Sage Colleges (New York) have also sponsored national touring exhibitions of his work. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting and his work is represented in many public collections including The Addison Gallery of American Art, The Albright Knox Museum, The Clark Art Institute, The Minneapolis Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The San Diego Museum of Art.

With Glier's early work being politically focused, he has shifted to spend the last two decades exploring the human relationship with the land. “My landscape projects are propelled by a number of things, including the love of paint and abstraction, but most importantly, by a desire to do my part to help make the changes in philosophy that are required if humanity is to create a sustainable future. By studying the land and responding to it freshly, I hope to demonstrate attachment, respect, and engagement. And if the paintings are good enough, they will find their way into public life to do their job of representing the joy of living in the world and the wonder of perceiving it, and if they succeed at this, to evoke the will to create balance within it.” [2] Glier’s artistic process begins with full immersion in the living world. As he pursues each new work, he submerges himself in nature and creates through careful and attentive observation as he uses all his senses to fully understand his creation. He seeks to capture the natural world with vibrant energy and imagination through the technique of “en plein air” painting.

It has been noted that some of Glier’s influences include Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Burchfield, among others. Like Burchfield, his work demonstrates a love of painting, abstraction, and a reverence for nature. Glier shares a poetic interpretation of Burchfield's work:

“Charles Burchfield had a love affair with the living world. And like any intimate relationship, he saw himself reflected in their eyes and heard his voice in their mouths. It was a wonderfully reciprocal relationship in which the living world gave gifts of wind and seeds and puddles full of sky to which his body responded with pulsing arcs, sine waves, arabesques, and scuffs and stabs of paint. Burchfield understood the vulnerability of his mighty partner to the poisonous aspects of his kind and tried to protect his marriage as best he could by making its intimacy public, as if a cry of love could save the day.” [3]

Fittingly, the Burchfield Penney Art Center announced that Glier is its 2022 Artist-In-Residence. Visit Mike Glier's Instagram to see his latest thoughts on Charles E. Burchfield and more.

For more news on Glier, visit his website.

 
[1] https://www.mikeglier.net/about/

[2] https://www.mikeglier.net/about/

[3] https://burchfieldpenney.org/about/news/article:welcome-artist-in-residence-mike-glier/