Linda Tesner – författare

Keiko Hara offers a detailed exploration of the prolific artist's unwavering commitment to painting, and her unique form of Japanese woodblock printmaking. Rich with metaphorical imagery, Hara's visual universe encompasses references to water, fire, skies, and verdant lands, all the while investigating the poetics of space. Born during the Second World War in North Korea to Japanese parents, Hara moved to Japan in 1945 and was raised and educated there. As a young woman, she attended art school in Tokyo at the Oita prefecture. In 1971 she embarked on a lifelong endeavor seeking greater artistic freedom in the United States. Separated from her cultural surroundings, memory and longing became overarching themes for this deeply poetic artist. Hara's journey took her to Mississippi State University for Women, Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and ultimately to Walla Walla, Washington, where she taught at Whitman College for 21 years until she retired in 2006. She has shown at numerous one-person and invitational group exhibitions throughout the United States, and her work is part of permanent collections at the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Racine Art Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The Stroemple Collection boasts more than five hundred vintage Venetian vessels that illustrate the height of Venetian glassblowing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 2012, George Stroemple commissioned James Mongrain—Dale Chihuly’s current gaffer and an exceptional glass artist—to make a series of ten vessels to replicate major examples of vintage Venetian glass in the Stroemple Collection. The finished pieces exemplify Mongrain’s extraordinary ability to re-create traditional Venetian mastery in glass.Since then, the Stroemple Collection has commissioned Mongrain to make more series, all based on the historic works in the Stroemple Collection. For these, Mongrain uses traditional techniques and imagery to reimagine the Venetian style, working on a large scale to create monumental and sculptural pieces that reference tradition but are firmly within contemporary glassmaking. This book documents each of the James Mongrain commissions and will also include various examples of historic Venetian glass that inspired Mongrain in the making of these series.