The Bay Area’s top artists working in metal, glass, fire, wood and mixed media have donated fine art for the 2013 Fire & Light Auction. The live art auction will take place during dessert. Have your paddle ready and bid generously — good luck! Your artwork will be packaged and ready for you when you leave for the evening.
>> Download the Auction Program (PDF)
 |
1. TAKA polished and painted cast bronze $1,150Alexander Smith was born into a family of educators and craftsmen in Berkeley. His early artistic development was thoroughly encouraged by his parents with gifts of tools and space to work. Alex attended the UC Santa Cruz where he earned his BA in Sculpture in 2000. It was here with the challenges of academia he began to formalize his skills in metal casting and fabrication processes to demonstrate his ability in expression and form. Alex has instructed the tradition of bronze casting at The Crucible for twelve years. He is an Apprentice and Project Manager for Sculptor Fletcher Benton, where he enlarges Mr. Benton’s designs to monumental size, supervises building and installation of these works. Alex’s castings, paintings and fabricated works are inspired by his travels, love of form, nature and technology havebeen featured at the Sculpturesite Gallery San Francisco, in public projects in Tucson, Arizona and are currently featured at the Shidoni Gallery in New Mexico. Website: alexanderthesmith.com |
|||||
 |
2. SPIKE – THE RESURRECTION cast resin and ABS pipe $9,500Billy Hiebert received his MFA for Sculpture in 1965 from CCAC, now the California College of Arts. After a few years of sculpting with metal, carving marble and teaching sculpture and design, he was attracted to industrial processes involving molding and casting. This soon led to a full-time business that offered model making, molding and casting to both artists and industrial clients. His exposure to new methods and materials soon led to a different direction in his sculpture. Billy left behind welded steel and carved marble and embraced a world of molding and casting. Most of his current sculpture is expressed through molded plastic resin. Website: billyhiebert.com |
|||||
 |
3. WALLSCAPE #4 walnut and steel $963Brian Enright likes wood. He really likes metal too. Really he likes the blending of these two mediums in ways that provoke or ask questions or get you to ask yourself questions. He has been at The Cruciblesince 2005, and has been an instructor of sculpture in various mediums and forms of welding since 2000. He has worked in Oakland and San Francisco galleries and boutiques. He has had two artist in residencies: one in remote bush Alaska and one at a radical new K-12 school in San Francisco, Brightworks. He is continually excited to learn with and be a part of The Crucible community, and this year’s Fire & Light Soirée. Websites: 12sticks.com, enrightart.com |
|||||
 |
4. UNTITLED kilnformed and engraved glass panel $900Carrie Iverson’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Glasmuseum Hentrich in Düsseldorf in Germany, Art Santa Fe, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Glenfiddich, North Lands Creative Glass and the KALA Art Institute, and is represented by Bullseye Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Her current focus is adapting and translating her knowledge of printmaking processes into glass. Website: carrieiverson.com |
|||||
 |
5. VANITAS steel and copper $1,900Celeste Flores has been a life long artist. She earned her BFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Art University in 2008. Her portfolio consists primarily of life sized figurative pieces created in clay and steel. She uses traditional techniques to create expressive objects which explore ideas about human nature and daily life. Website: clayandsteel.com |
|||||
 |
6. NOUVEAU CANDLE HOLDER steel $550Cliff Bohm specializes in bladesmithing and decorative blacksmithing. He finds beauty in the juxtaposition of polished steel next to the rough “unspoiled” textures generated by the forging process. He strives to create well-crafted objects with appealing design but which also possess a timeless quality to leave the viewer wondering if they are looking at a rare antique or a newly created object. |
|||||
 |
7. EMBODIED JOY Ceramic $2,000Damien Jones has always had a deep affinity for geometry and mathematics, which clearly expresses itself thru many of his artworks. The unshakable foundation of pure truth that these subjects provide is the basis for all scientific knowledge – all the myriad facets of the universe we have explored and understood, which have yielded an enormous degree of technological sophistication and the ability to direct our lives and world in amazingly complex ways. He often features chaotic, random glazes patterned by geometric series (circles, ellipses, parabolas, etc…) and Fibbonacci spirals, organizing and harmonizing the chaos in meaningful and beautiful ways. Website: damienjonesart.com |
|||||
 |
8. FREE FLOW #8 glass and steel $500Glass tames is Daniel Stauber’s natural approach to art in part because he believes of its unique array of physical properties. It is fluid and static, fragile and strong. It reflects, transmits and diffracts light. It has additive and subtractive properties of color mixing and divides light into spectra. It can be opaque, transparent and span the continuum of translucence. Glass also articulates a sense of the ethereal, magical, sublime. Free Flow #8 was created with this in mind and was accepted in the American Clay and Glass Association National Exhibition of 2013. Website: danielstauber.com |
|||||
 |
9. CELESTÉ bronze and iron $999Daniel Yasmin is a musician that employs sculpture to examine the relationship between sound and matter. His work fuses the detail of machine technology with the fervor of musical experimentation to create unique instruments and sound sculpture. He cultivates his aesthetic through performance and collaboration, both as an instrumentalist and as an instructor at The Crucible. The inscriptions on this piece read: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law; you are the master of your universe; sound matters; magic happens; be who you are; love is the truth; love is the path; trust your ears; love is the answer; love is the law; as above, so below; EX ASTRIS SCIENTIA MMXI (Latin translation: from the stars came knowledge, 2011). |
|||||
 |
10. GREEN LIQUID VESSEL blown and ladled glass $3,200After delving into everything from cabinetry to event production to yacht construction and repair Dawson R. Kellogg received his associate’s degree from Palomar College in the San Diego area. He received a BA in Art Education from San Francisco State University in 1993. A full scholarship offer from Kent State University secured his MFA studies and graduation in 1997. Along the way he received three Pilchuck Partners scholarships. Recently he was granted a solo show at the Newark Museum of Art. He has completed numerous commissions in the Ohio area. This fall Dawson begins his fifteenth year of service as glass faculty of the Columbus College of Art & Design. Website: omgglass.com |
|||||
 |
11. COLLECTION copper $1,250A Wisconsinite by birth, Metalsmith Greg Hessel works his magic on hammer forged copper in the San Rafael-based Hessel Studios, which produces over sixty different hammer forged copper candlesticks designs. Each design has its own distinctive personality, and each is given a mythical or romantic name, like Callisto or Flirtation, which is engraved on the underside of the base. The polished surface can be maintained, though some prefer to keep the surface un-polished, so that over time it develops a rich warm color, reminiscent of a fine antique. Website: hesselstudios.com |
|||||
 |
12. RED FOOT blown glass $500Gregory B. Tomb grew up in the northeast. As a child in upstate New York, his family often used Corning as a fun and educational break from their frequent road trips. These brief visits sparked Greg’s interest in glass from a young age. Nationally, Greg has displayed his glass and photography in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and California. He studied at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. As an Art major and Religious Studies minor, Greg focused on sculpture and glass graduating in 2000. Greg has worked as an Assistant and Studio Rental Artist at Urban Glass in Brooklyn and Goggle in Reading, Pennsylvania. He worked as a Production Glassblower for Simon Pearce from 2002 to 2004. Greg moved to California in2006. He participated in the Palo Alto and Marin County Glass Pumpkin Patch in 2007. Greg hadn’t stepped into a glass hot shop since 2007 until this January when he began blowing glass again. Greg now lives in Santa Cruz, spending his time creating functional and decorative glass and e joying the surrounding Bay Area. |
|||||
 |
13. PRESSURE iron $1,000Japanese Metal Sculptor, Hiroki Fukushima, has been creating metal sculptures and functional objects withiron, copper and aluminum since he graduated from National Tokyo University of the Arts with an MFA in Metal Hammering in 1974. He recently moved to live in San Francisco and joined the CREATE Program at The Crucible to continue his exploration as an artist. His works are exhibited at The Asian Art Museum store, insite antiques and design and Kappa Zakka. |
|||||
 |
14. ART NIGHT, ART LITE blown and cast glass $2,600Jeremy Scidmore earned a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later returned there for an MA in Arts Administration and Policy. While in Chicago, he owned and managed a public glass-arts resource center, completed numerous private and public sculptural and architectural art commissions and taught glassblowing and kilnforming. Scidmore joined Bullseye Glass Co. in 2011 and is now an Instructor and Studio Coordinator for Bullseye Resource Center Bay Area. |
|||||
 |
15. RED AND BLUE FRIT BOWL cast glass with glass frit $1,250As a graduate student in architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, John Lewis was introduced to blown glass by professor Marvin Lipofsky. John founded the first private hot glass studio in California and later received his MA in design in 1970. His early work in blown glass led to an interest in glass casting. With the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, he built an experimental facility to explore the possibilities of cast glass. At his state-of-the-art casting studio in Oakland, Lewis designs and produces cast glass sculpture, tables, vessels and site-specific architectural projects. He has completed numerous commissions for private and corporate clients and is represented by galleries internationally. Website: johnlewisglass.com |
|||||
 |
16. BEGINNINGS copper, stainless steel, bronze $1,900Jonathan Hyman started as a Sculpture at the College of Marin and went on to do TIG welding professionally for aircrafts, restaurants and pharmaceutical companies, but always making sculptures. For the past forty-one years, his pieces have reflected his spirituality and his domain site is Spirit to Metal. Most of his work is in stainless and copper. He has been shown at Elsewhere Gallery and at the Davies Symphony Hall, as well as many private collections throughout the United States, England and Canada. His work can be seen publicly as the sculptures spanning Highway 880 near University Avenue. He also produced the stainless work on Scott Donahue’s statues on the pedestrian walkway. |
|||||
 |
17. EVOLUTION FIRE SCULPTURE recycled steel with patina and clear powdercoating $500Kristen Hoard’s journey with metal sculpture began in 1999 when a friend suggested that she take metal art classes. Having always loved metal art, she enrolled in her first class at The Crucible, and has been hooked ever since. Working in Sacramento for over eleven years, Kristen has been building her talent and skill with metal sculpture. She regularly participates in art festivals throughout Northern California. Kristen’s work is often featured at local galleries like the Kennedy Gallery, The Artisan Gallery, 2110 Gallery and Patris S12. Recentlyinspired by her trips to Burning Man, Kristen has begun to explore sculptures that incorporate fire, flames or LED lighting. She has also completed several large corporate sculpture pieces in metal that can be seen in office lobbies around the Bay Area and just recently finished a public art sculpture in Midtown Sacramento. |
|||||
 |
18. THE CRU BOT blown and hot sculptured glass $2,000Lancelot S. Fraser grew up in a small mountain community of Idyllwild, California. At the age of fifteen he learned the craft of pottery and decided that he wanted to be an artist. Directly after high school, Lance moved to San Diego and began blowing glass at Palomar College in 2002. Lance received two associates degrees and then spent several years as a nomad traveling the country and blowing glass. In 2008, he was accepted to the California College of the Arts, and in December 2010 Lance received his Bachelors of Fine Art in Glass. Lance has attended workshops at the Pilchuck Glass School, Penland School for Crafts, Eugene Glass School and the Appalachian Center for Crafts. Lance is currently living, working and teaching in Oakland. Website: lsfraserglass.com |
|||||
 |
19. TABLE BELL bronze $600Nicholas DiPhillipo has channeled his interest inburning and melting things into relatively non-destructive activities. For almost thirty-five years, he has worked as a professional metal caster in the areas of sand casting and lost wax casting, with a focus on designing and building equipment used in the casting process. Things he does are mostly bells but a lot of other stuff too. His pyromania is managed within legal and reasonably healthy limits. Nick also teaches and heads the Foundry Department at The Crucible. |
|||||
 |
20. UNTITLED bronze, stainless steel, fire $5,000Peter Kropf is fascinated with all forms of fire and its ability to transform. He creates sculptures with a variety of materials, and often seeks to include fire as a focal point. He is always looking for different and interesting ways to share his joy of fire with the community at large. Peter can often be found at The Crucible working as a Senior Studio Manager and setting pyrotechnic effects for Crucible productions. In his spare time, he is known to drag chaos through their IT Department. Website: peterkropf.comChris Niemer, Blacksmithing Area Head at The Crucible, was born with metal in his blood; both his father and grandfather were machinists. For Chris, metalsmithing is a form of alchemy, forging the past into the future using tools that are present. |
|||||
 |
21. FLAME OF THE SOUL glass $2,500Randy Strong is one of a handful of American glass artists to help revive the studio art glass movement. He first began working in glass in 1969 at the CCAC in Oakland. Upon graduation in 1970, he received the prestigious scholarship to the University of Art in Osaka, Japan as one of the first exchange students between the five Universities of California. His pursuit in ceramics led him into the largely unknown frontier of studio hotglass. In 1970, he was with Dale Chihuly when he and the Hauberg’s selected the location for the now renowned Pilchuck Glass School.His work has been acquired by collectors internationally and is a part of collections ranging from The Corning Museum in New York, to the Louvre in Paris. His newest sculptural work again breaks new ground by challenging the concept of solid form in glass by further expressing its personality in lightness and movement. In 1970, he established his own studio and gallery in Northern California, where he continues to create, design and teach. Website: rstrong.com
|
|||||
 |
22. SLICE OF PIE metal $650Rob Nehring received his BFA from the University of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in Inter-arts, which included theatre, dance and sculpture. After professionally dancing for 17 years and 18 years in the candy business, he dropped everything to take a class at The Crucible. Driven by the definition of sculpture as “something you back into when looking at a painting,” he strives to produce thought-provoking, yet whimsical work in three dimensions. An accomplished artist, Rob’s sculptures are in galleries and private collections throughout the United States. His sculptures are created from 99% recycled materials. Through found scrap materials, Rob lets the materials dictate what they will become. Rob runs Rusty Noodle Studios, teaches and is the Adult Program Director at The Crucible. Website: rustynoodlestudios.com |
|||||
 |
23. FROM MY WINDOW cartoneria $3,000Ruben Guzman holds a MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Art University and a BA in Graphic Design from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. Guzman had the privilege to learn cartoneria under the tutelage of the world-renowned Linares family. Guzman’s work has been exhibited nationally and abroad. Many local institutions have shown his work, including the Oakland Museum of California, Palo Alto Arts Center, Sonoma County Museum, Mexican Museum and Richmond Arts Center. Guzman’s sculptures are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution and Sonoma County Museum. Ruben Guzman has been awarded with more than a dozen grants to produce public art; among them are grants from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, the City of Oakland and the Creative Work Fund. Website: rubenguzman.com |
|||||
 |
24. MESSENGER BAG leather $500Sam Waller has been working with leather in the BayArea for the better part of seven years. Self taught, he has had the great pleasure of working on a number of short run and one-off commission projects for fashion and art shows. His work has been featured in local Oakland shops as well as tradeshows around the country. Sam is also the lead Instructor for Leatherworking at The Crucible, where he rents a studio and teaches adult and youth courses. Website: wallerleather.tumblr.com |
|||||
 |
25. LEATHER SWIRL VEST & HAT leather $1,111Siobhan van Winkel creates wearable art and “funktional” objects, currently utilizing rescued leather and other charged media. Guided by the animal’s body memory and collaborating with thissuggestion, she coaxes it to melt over a structure or person. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a MFA candidate at the California College of the Arts. Website: funk-art.com
|
|||||
 |
26. From STEVE LUNDBERG’s Private Collection glass $1,500Steve Lundberg’s career in glass began in 1972 when he became an apprentice to his older brother James, a pioneer in the studio glass movement. His talents included shaping, decorating, casting, lampworking, torchworking and lapidary. His ability to create complex glass formulas enabled him to design glass art that is still envied by his peers. In 2008 the Master Glass Blower Steven Lundberg, put down his blow pipe for the very last time and passed away that year. Steve’s creations are on permanent display at The Smithsonian Institute, the White House, The Corning Museum of Glass, the Art Institute of Chicago and worldwide. Many of Steve’s private art glass collection pieces were released at auction soon after his death and so the likely last opportunity to buy a personal family item created from the genius of Steven Lundberg is gone. |
|||||
 |
27. HEATWAVE orange crystal alabaster $2,100William Rose began creating art more than thirty two years ago designing and building custom homes, all the while traveling to many locations throughout the United States creating sand sculptures. In searching for a more permanent medium, William joined The Crucible five years ago andstarted stone carving under the guidance of Instructor and Master Sculptor Barry Baldwin. While studying at this industrial arts school, William’s focus has recently expanded to include welded sculpture. William lives in the South of Market area of San Francisco with his wife of thirty eight years and has two grown children and two grandchildren. |
|||||
 |
28. CRANBERRY TASTER blown glass and soda lime ash $500Zach Rudolph has been developing his unique style of glass art since 1997. He interprets age-old traditions and techniques whilecreating new modern works of art. Presently living in Santa Cruz, California, Zach continues to produce high quality and limited edition glass art. A BayArea native, Zach is dedicated to uncovering the mysteries of glass working. He has mentored with some of the world’s most accomplished glass artistsincluding: Dale Chihuly, Richard Royal, Davide Fuin, Preston Singletary andElio Quarisa. Website: zachrudolphglass.com |
|||||
 |
29. Courtesy of Vessel Gallery, Oakland CREATURES by Alex Abajian and J. Lin Hsien Kung blown glass $11,200The “Creatures” were born from making things and working with people. The glassblowing processes haven’t changed very much for a long time, arguably centuries. Although new technologies for heating and melting have developed, how blown glass is limited by what it is, and what it is dictates what can be done to it. With lots of repetition details becoming apparent, Alex Abajian and J. Lin Hsien Kung were fixated on those details. The most notable ones governed their movements and thereby their work flow. They wanted to take a snapshot of breath and movement frozen in time and governed by a limited process. Alexander Sarkis Abajian graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000 with a BA in Glass Sculpture. Since then he has exhibited nationwide. Alexander is a prolific young artist untethered by convention. He integrates a variety of different elements to his own sculptures. Whether electroplating metal to glass, combining kiln castings with hand blown accents, manipulating solid pieces of color to forge vessels impregnated with intricate designs, or translating his own figurative paintings into three-dimensional sculptures, Alexander manifests an interminable drive to create. He is on the forefront of glass art, truly utilizing the material as a means of expression, free from the constraints of craft. J. Lin-Hsien Kung was made in Hong Kong, born in Taiwan, his parents are from China. He received a BFA from the Rhode IslandSchool of Design in 1999 in Glass Sculpture. After a short stint at Hampshire College studying Latin American Literature and the behavior patterns between wolves and sheep dogs, he left the East Coast heading west after college, in part to heal from an accident that left a few titanium pins and stainless steel plates in his head. During this time he moved from New Mexico to Southern California, and then finally Oakland. Glass making has been his passport toseeing the world. He has traveled through Japan, China, Taiwan and most recently Scandinavia where he had an opportunity to be in the heart of the Glass Kingdom. He’s worked on various projects from custom lighting (as seen in the DeYoung museum cafe) to designing custom products (as seen in the Asian Art Museum gift store, San Francisco). Lots of things inspire him. Most of them are framed by an idea he read a while back, and he can neither remember what heread or where he read it. It’s definitely wedged in his bookshelf somewhere. He’s interpreted the excerpt as such: “Artists are litmus tests and filters for/of their surroundings. The artist is a filter breathing in their surroundings and breathing out creations.” With that in mind, he’s inspired by process, moreover processing. He makes things so he can be engaged with theworld around him. Website: vessel-gallery.com
|
|||||
|
Special thanks to: Periscope Cellars, ORO Pisco, Grace Street Catering, Classic Party Rentals.
|
||||||
