Marvin Lipofsky
American, born 1938
Littleton had been the first American artist, in the 1960s, to visit Czechoslovakia, famous for its work in glass, where glass sculpture had been made since the 1950s. Marvin Lipofsky would also be an early visitor, observing there. Since that time, the artist has traveled extensively, collaborating with the world's best glass artists.
After graduation from Wisconsin, Lipofsky was hired by the University of California, Berkeley, where he introduced the second university glass program in America (Littleton was the first). Lipofsky also established the glass program at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1967, the San Francisco area becoming a center for glass in the 60s and 70s because of his own work and the students produced by his teaching.
While Lipofsky may be best known for three-dimensional globe forms, he has indulged himself in the making of glass Pop Art pickles and hamburgers. He has also created multi-colored, irregular flower-like forms that can suggest twisted fragments of wreckage.
Lipofsky is the founder of the Glass Art Society. He has had more than forty one-man shows, received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and been declared a Living Treasure of California by the Crocker Art Museum.
His work is in the permanent collections of more than eighty museums and private collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Oakland Museum, California; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York City; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Corning Museum of Glass, New York; Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; and the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan.
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