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Except for a few afternoon clouds, mainly sunny. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 63F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph..
Clear skies. Low 37F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph.
Ice Tong, 2017, slumped glass & metal 30 x 17 x 13"
Light Catchers, Marfa Gallery, Marfa TX
Windblown, 2017 hot glass & metal, 13 x 8 x 7"
Water-Wheel, Boise Art Museum 2019-2022 hot glass, 28 x 14 x 6"
Wind-Curtain as seen at the New Mexico Museum of Art Santa Fe, 2008 cast glass, 79 x 32x 9"
Ice Tong, 2017, slumped glass & metal 30 x 17 x 13"
Light Catchers, Marfa Gallery, Marfa TX
Windblown, 2017 hot glass & metal, 13 x 8 x 7"
Water-Wheel, Boise Art Museum 2019-2022 hot glass, 28 x 14 x 6"
Wind-Curtain as seen at the New Mexico Museum of Art Santa Fe, 2008 cast glass, 79 x 32x 9"
“Light is the magic word,” says internationally-renowned glass artist Mary Shaffer, now of Taos. “Working with glass is like holding light in your hands.”
First drawn to Taos in the early ’90s for the skiing, the mountain called her here permanently shortly thereafter, teaching at Taos Ski Valley adult and children’s ski schools; and also drawing and ceramic sculpting at University of New Mexico–Taos. Besides UNM–Taos, she has taught drawing, painting, sculpture, woodworking, art history, contemporary art, glass and more at Wellesley College, New York University and California College of the Arts, among others.
Born in South Carolina, and raised in South America and Europe, her first language was Spanish, second was English and she was educated in German. She ultimately learned English at age 6 when the family moved to California. Once she found fairy stories about dual universes she couldn’t stop, choosing the thickest books she could find, and reading every book written by an author she loved, “like all of Faulkner.
Shaffer was a full-time artist by the mid ’60s, while she was living in Rome, which ultimately led her to being a world-famous multimedia glass artist. But her first love was painting.
“I first knew I wanted to be a painter when I ran home from first grade and put my watercolor on the floor and stood on the table to look at it,” Shaffer told Tempo’s Local Color columnist Betsy Carey in 2007. “From the table I saw that, indeed, I had managed to capture the feeling of floating. I knew then, without a doubt, that I would be a painter.”
Painting progressed to glass in the ’70s, she said, when, as a mother of two babies in diapers, she didn’t have time to sit for hours fine-tuning images and space. Amazingly, since her mid 30s, she said she lived exclusively from the sale of her work and raised her girls, Saarin and Maiya — a single mother creatively revolutionizing male-dominated glass art.
A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1965, she started out as an educational consultant for universities and the government, finally turning to glass as she sought a backdrop for her paintings.
She says she “accidentally” came to glass by “wanting an undulating glass surface on which to paint,” then fell in love with glass and invented “mid-air slumping,” which is opposite to the auto industry in which plate glass is placed on molds to make auto windshields.
“Shaffer works mid-air, allowing for some naturally-occurring yet controlled shapes to form.”
In the Harwood Museum 2018 exhibit “Harnessing Light,” J. Matthew Thomas, then Harwood collections manager, told Tempo, “I selected these three New Mexican artists who, by different paths, converge on a common focus: light on surface … Working with glass and other media such as found objects, stone, clay and graphite … Mary Shaffer’s works, culled from her collection aptly named ‘Tool Wall,’ is a whimsical exploration of the idiosyncratic character of discarded tools juxtaposed with the clarity of liquid glass.”
Pivotal to removing glass art from the commercial and industrial arenas, Shaffer affords artists “freedom” — freedom to design one-of-a-kind works. In her Taos studio, she takes “lovingly-crafted, hand-forged tools — the epitome of American invention” — and recycles them in her work, Shaffer explains. "The challenge is to make the glass look as honest and straightforward as the original tool.”
Her work is featured in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan, and museums in France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Bolivia and Denmark. Shaffer has lectured worldwide and taught at New York University and California College of the Arts.
Her honors include receiving a USA Fellow Grant and a 2010 artist award by United States Artists, three National Endowment for the Arts awards, and the Glaspreis from the Kassel Competition in Germany. Shaffer was among the first group of four to receive the Visionary Award from the Museum of Arts and Design in 1995.
As to the success of her decades-long career, Shaffer thinks her work “involves a strong element of play, of losing oneself in another world not unlike the one we knew as children.”
Since moving to Taos in the mid 2020s, she says she became a political activist because, in Taos, she has more time to volunteer. In 2022, she worked for groups such as “For the Love of Reading,” where some 60 to 120 first-, second- and third-grade students are tutored by Zoom in breakout rooms. “Sharing what I love to do, like skiing and reading, is important to me,” she says.
Behind the Curtain: The Glass Art of Mary Shaffer
Behind the Curtain: The Glass Art of Mary Shaffer
Mary Shaffer; Foreword by Jane Adlin, Commentaries by Lucy R. Lippard & William Warmus; ISBN13: 9780764360527 | Binding: hard cover
A must-read book that illustrates Shaffer’s innovative mid-air slumping technique using gravity to create flowing, organic shapes from glass. Nearly 200 photos covering four decades feature her iconic slumped and cast glass art, as well as large outdoor sculptures, conceptual installations, and commissioned pieces. Personal stories shed light on integral figures, moments and developments in studio glass art throughout her career, giving rare insider insight to artists, students, and collectors. A foreword by Jane Adlin, a Metropolitan Museum of Art curator and contributions from art critics Lucy R. Lippard and William Warmus delve further into Shaffer’s artistic philosophy and legacy – one rooted in dissolving the binaries of liquid/solid, female/male, intangible/tangible, personal/political.
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