Mar 9 - Aug 17, 2025
Marvin Lipofsky Blows Glass
California-based glass artist Marvin Lipofsky (1938–2016) helped reinvent the challenging material of glass through experiments in scale, color, and technique. Presenting approximately 40 artworks, Marvin Lipofsky Blows Glass features the Crocker Art Museum’s collection of Lipofsky’s works, including 1960s sculptures from his California Loop Series and groupings of his signature open forms from later in the century and beyond that recall curves, shapes, and colors found in nature. Throughout his six-decade career, Lipofsky traveled to workshops worldwide, engaging in research and crafting new pieces with glass-blowing experts. His artworks serve as a testament to his journey towards deeper personal aesthetic expression and self-discovery. This exhibition will additionally feature his political sculptures and ephemera created in 1968 during the antiwar movement at the University of California, Berkeley.
Marvin Lipofsky (American, 1938–2016), L’viv Group 2001-2002 #2, 2002. Production team: Ivan Karolovich Shumants’kyi, Roman and Taras. Mold-blown glass, cut, sandblasted, acid etched, 8 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 18 in. Courtesy of the Marvin Lipofsky Studio.
While we interact with industrially made glass daily, Lipofsky’s vibrant glass sculptures transcend the ordinary, reminding us of the expressive potential of this material and the handmade. In the five decades since the Crocker’s first presentation of Lipofsky’s work we’ve gained a deeper understanding of the history of studio glass and his commanding presence within it. The exhibition invites us to experience the wonder of glass with every twist, turn, and blow.
Sara Morris
Ruth Rippon Curator of Ceramics
More Info
Marvin Lipofsky helped reinvent the challenging material of glass through experiments in scale, color, and technique. Lipofsky studied ceramics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, before turning to glass in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied with renowned glass artist Harvey Littleton. Lipofsky’s contributions to studio glass during the mid-to-late 20th century can not be overstated. From 1964 to 1987 Lipofsky served on the faculty of University of California, Berkeley and California College of the Arts and Crafts (CCAC). He was a founding member of the Glass Art Society, participating in national and international glass communities and inspiring a new generation of artists working in California.
Fusing humor with homage, Marvin Lipofsky Blows Glass borrows its title from a short archival film of the artist blowing glass at UC Berkeley in 1968. Instead of focusing on finished artworks, the film lingers on various aspects of Lipofsky’s early glassblowing process, conveying the importance of timing, heat, motion, and skill in the creation of the work. At Berkeley and CCAC, he tested the boundaries of studio glass, incorporating copper elements and using mirroring, paint, and flocking to obscure the shiny surfaces of his early sculptures.
Throughout his six-decade career, Lipofsky traveled to glass factories in Europe, Asia, the Soviet Union, and Mexico, where he took photographs of glass from all over the world, led workshops, and crafted new pieces with local glassblowing experts. In this environment Liposky collaborated with a glassmaster and team of glass handlers in a factory work with a team to create larger muti-colored sculptures which were shipped back to his studio in Berkeley, where he finished them using a variety of coldworking processes, such as sandblasting, polishing, and grinding.
