Not a member of GAS? Here’s what you’re missing in our latest issue of GASnews. Focusing on mixed media and how material intersects with identity, the newest issue of GASnews features:
- “Ben Beres: Multilingual Multifaceted Art Evangelist” by Debra Ruzinsky
- “Takano Sano: A Portrait” by Debra Ruzinsky
- “Ordinary Miracle” by Vanessa German
- “Welcome Into the Room: An Account of Disclosure” by Pearl Dick
- “Spotlight On: Layo Bright” by Robin Babb
Read the profile on Layo Bright for free below and become a GAS Member to access the rest of the exciting content in GASnews!
Layo Bright, a Nigeria-born artist who works primarily in glass, was recently awarded the 2023 Ron Desmett Memorial Award For Imagination With Glass, an annual award granted by the Pittsburgh Glass Center. The award includes a $2,500 cash award as well as a ten-day residency at PGC, which Bright intends to complete in 2024. Of the award, Bright says, “It means that [I] can take the work to the next level. Otherwise, it’s just really hard to be encouraged to continue in that trajectory … It’s quite an expensive medium, so I’m glad that these opportunities exist for me and my colleagues.”
The Ron Desmett Award is presented to a glass artist who shows extraordinary creativity in their work, pushing the boundaries of the medium with imaginative pieces. Bright’s striking and memoiristic works in glass, which draw heavily from her Nigerian heritage and family history, certainly fit this description. Many of her artworks feature kiln-formed glass masks that depict the faces of women in her family or circle of friends, often surrounded by stylized foliage that brings to mind the bay laurel leaves used in ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. These larger-than-life masks also clearly reference the traditional bronze and terracotta sculptures of Nigeria—many of which were looted during colonial-era British invasions and missionary excursions, and which remain in European institutions or private collections to this day. The choice of glass as a medium brings a sense of transparency, in all the implications of the word, to these culturally potent artworks.
Bright says that taking a glass casting course at UrbanGlass in early 2020 is what made her gravitate towards glass as a medium. “It was a really great program, because it was an intro to glass casting, so I was making molds … I expanded from casting to slumping to fusing, and I became interested in how it all comes together to make a portrait of navigating identity and migration, for people with my experience, and my identity.”
The UrbanGlass scholarship she had been awarded was supposed to cover student hours in the studio as well as the costs of some materials, but, of course, the pandemic quickly put an end to group studio work. Still, enamored with the new medium and wanting to continue practicing in it while she was taking the (now virtual) class, she took the step to buy a bench for her own home studio.
“I had a fulltime job, but it became virtual too. So it became an ideal time for me to experiment and find my own voice. It was just me with the instruction manual, trying not to burn my studio down! It was this experimental phase of not knowing what would happen, but being very excited about the discovery.”
Currently, Bright is completing a fellowship at UrbanGlass, where she’s taking classes in
glassblowing and imagery in glass. Residencies like this are a core part of Bright’s larger
process, not only because it defrays the costs of working in such an expensive medium, but
also because of the expertise and creative feedback available to her in a communal studio space. And residencies offer some less tangible, but equally crucial benefits to working artists, too: “I like having the mission and focus and structure [that a residency offers]…” she says. “It helps me write about my work, because I usually have to write a statement, and that makes me think about my work more holistically.”
In recent years, Bright has participated in Art Basel Hong Kong 2023, EXPO Chicago 2023, and
Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, and her glass work has shown in numerous solo and group shows
around the world. Next, she will show her work at Between the Seams, a group exhibition at
PM/AM Gallery in London, September 22nd through October 31st. The theme of the exhibition
is ‘interstices,’ or the spaces between; creating “a forum to interrogate notions of hybridity,
memory, migration, colonialism, culture, identity, personal narratives and the seen and unseen,”
according to a press release from PM/AM. Bright’s work will also be featured in the upcoming
exhibition A Two-Way Mirror: Double Consciousness in Contemporary Glass by Black Artists,
which open October 21, 2023.