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Josiah McElheny (born in 1966, United States) is an artist and sculptor, primarily known for his work with glass blowing and assemblages of glass and mirrored glassed objects (see Glass art). He is a 2006 recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program "genius grant". He currently lives and works in New York City.
McElheny grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. While attending high school in the early 1980s, he was part of Boston's underground music scene, and worked as a sound engineer at Radiobeat Studios. He holds production credits on records by the Proletariat, Sorry, and Death Wish, recorded in 1983 and 1984.
McElheny went on to receive his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1988. As part of that program, in 1987 he trained under master glassblower Ronald Wilkins in London, England, and also studied at Rome, Italy in the Rhode Island School of Design European Honors Program.
After graduating, he was an apprentice to master glassblowers Jan-Erik Ritzman and Sven-Ake Caarlson (in Transjö, Sweden) from 1989–1991; and an apprentice to master glassblower Lino Tagliapietra (various locations: Seattle, Washington, New York, New York, Switzerland) from 1992-1997.
Career
In earlier works McElheny played with notions of "history" and "fiction". Examples of this are works that recreate Renaissance glass objects pictured in Renaissance paintings and modern (but lost) glass objects from documentary photographs (such as works by Adolf Loos). McElheny has mentioned the influence of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges in his work.
Overall his work addresses history, modernism, cosmology, reflection, infinity, purity and utopia, and has clear links to the work of the American abstract artist Donald Judd. His work also sometimes deals with issues of museological displays and one's attempts to derive inferences about historical peoples from their household possessions and objects. He draws from a range of disciplines like architecture, physics, and literature, among others, and he works in a variety of media.
McElheny has also expressed interest in glassblowing as part of an oral tradition handed down generation to generation. He has used the infinity mirror visual effect in his explorations of apparently infinite space.
One of the artist's ongoing projects has been characterized as an "investigation into the origins of the universe." "An End to Modernity" (2005), a twelve-foot-wide by ten-foot-high chandelier of chrome and transparent glass modeled on the 1960s Lobmeyr design for the chandeliers found in Lincoln Center, and evoking as well the Big Bang theory, was commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. "The End of the Dark Ages," again inspired by the Metropolitan Opera House chandeliers and informed by logarithmic equations devised by the cosmologist David H. Weinberg was shown in New York City in 2008. Later that year, the series culminated in a massive installation titled "Island Universe" at White Cube in London and in Madrid.
He has exhibited his work at national and international venues including the Museum of Modern Art, Orchard, and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Donald Young Gallery in Chicago, Institut im Glaspavillon in Berlin, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, White Cube in London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Teaching and professional experience
1998 – The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Massachusetts – artist-in-residence
2000 – University of Nevada, Las Vegas – artist-in-residence and visiting faculty
2001-2003- Yale University School of Art – visiting critic
2003 – Dia Center (Chelsea, Manhattan) – Artists on Artists Lecture Series featured speaker on Donald Judd.
2004-2010 – Yale University School of Art – Senior Critic
Solo exhibitions
1990 – Jägarens Glasmuseet (The Hunter's Glass Museum), Arnescruv, Sweden,
1993 – originals, fakes, reproductions, William Traver Gallery, Seattle
1994 – Authentic History, Robert Lehman Gallery, Brooklyn, New York
1995 – Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
1995 – Installation with Ancient Roman Glass, Ancient Mediterranean and Egypt Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle,
1995 – Donald Young Gallery, Seattle
1996 – Barbara Kraków Gallery, Boston
1997 -Non-Decorative Beautiful Objects, AC Project Room, New York
1997 – Three Alter Egos, Donald Young Gallery, Seattle
1999 – The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle
1999 – The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
2000 – Christian Dior, Jorges Luis Borges, Adolf Loos, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago and Brent Sikkema, New York
