News

Accomplished glass artist and Cleveland Institute of Art graduate Kari Russell-Pool ’90 will give a presentation and slideshow about her intricate, decorative, flameworked glass art at a potluck dinner on Wednesday, Feb. 2 at 7pm in Room 104 of CIA’s Joseph McCullough Center for the Visual Arts. The talk is open to the public and participants are invited to bring a dish to share.

Russell-Pool, who maintains a studio in Connecticut with her husband and fellow CIA glass grad Mark Petrovic ’91, will be an artist in residence in CIA’s Glass Department for the week of Jan. 31. In her public talk on Feb. 2, she will discuss the evolution of her work and describe how she developed her own technique for creating form and pattern, layering color, and manipulating density.

American Craft magazine reviewed the work of Russell-Pool and Petrovic in a May 2008 article. In the artist statement on her website, Russell-Pool wrote, “My overall approach is one of a watercolorist. Coloring with glass powders and pulling my own glass rods allows us an extraordinary control over color… In glass there is often a 'right' way to do things. I am more a proponent of the cowboy way. The cowboy way invites invention...”

Russell-Pool is represented by galleries in Boca Raton, Florida and on Nantucket Island, as well as at Thomas R. Riley Galleries in Cleveland. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Corning Museum of Glass, Seattle Art Museum, Tucson Museum of Art, and the Niijima Contemporary Glass Art Museum in Japan.

Her residency was made possible by a donation from the trust of the late Edris Eckhard, a 1931 graduate of CIA who taught at the college from 1934 until 1964. During her residency, Russell-Pool will demonstrate flamework on equipment purchased by the Glass Department through the generosity of the former Ohio Contemporary Glass Alliance.

The McCullough Center is at 11610 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. On the night of the presentation, free parking will be available immediately east of the building.