SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Crocker Art Museum is pleased to announce Marvin Lipofsky Blows Glass on view from March 9 through August 17, 2025. The exhibition celebrates the Lipofsky Estate’s most recent gift of eleven artworks, including two blown and flocked sculptures from his California Loop Series and five of his later signature open forms. This gift significantly deepens the Museum’s existing holdings of American studio glass, which includes Lipofsky’s early blown-glass pieces acquired by the Crocker in the 1960s, and the large bubble form Chico Spring Series 1988 #10 acquired in 2014.

This is the second solo exhibition of Lipofsky’s work organized by the Crocker. In 1967, the Museum held Marvin Lipofsky: Glass/Sculpture, breaking ground in presenting a contemporary body of work entirely in glass. Marvin Lipofsky Blows Glass takes a longer look at Lipofsky’s career through a survey of artworks and select ephemera.

“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,” notes Sara Morris, the Crocker’s Ruth Rippon Curator of Ceramics. “In the five decades since the Cocker’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.”

Berkeley-based artist Marvin Lipofsky (1938–2016) 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.

“I denied the quality of the glass material for a long time because the quality of the glass material that we were using wasn’t very good, but that wasn’t important to me” he explained. “It was just important to use the material to make shapes and forms in an organic sense and abstract.” Inspired by the ceramics of Peter Voulkos, the psychedelic colors of the hippie era, and the visual politics of activism at the time, Lipofsky’s early series of California Loops and antiwar pieces showcase his ability to confront the historical moment through movement and action—tenets also central to the art of glassblowing.

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.

The exhibition is curated by Sara Morris, the Crocker Art Museum’s Ruth Rippon Curator of Ceramics.