OPENING: Rik Allen’s one-man (Space)Craft Movement lands in Santa Fe

Rik Allen brings together his skills as a glassblower and metalsmith in spacecraft from a rusting utopia.

Rik Allen honed his glassblowing skills as part of a close-knit team that transformed hot glass into rope, terra cotta, wood, and organic materials for the unique vision of William Morris that often brought the aesthetics of archeology to an ongoing project mining an idealized past. In his own work, Allen also creates objects that look like they’ve just been dug up from the earth, but these are objects from the future, or a vision of it from an earlier Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers era. Tonight at Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, a solo exhibition of Allen’s work will feature a new fleet of rusting space-ships that mix steel and glass in vessels that echo with quiet solitude.

Fifth annual Female Flame-Off burning up Northern California this weekend

The scene from last year's Female Flame-Off, an annual event which has been held each year since 2006 at different locations around the U.S.

Girls like to play with fire, too. To see for yourself, just attend one of the annual Female Flame-Offs, an event that started in Chicago in 2006, and has been held in Philadelphia; Berkeley, California; and Texas in the years since. For 2010, women flameworkers will return to California to create works of glass art to be auctioned off to benefit a charity organization. The event takes place in the town of Arcata, in the far Northwestern corner of the state, not far from the Oregon border. Matt C’s Studio at the Unauthorized Art Building in Arcata is the site of the three-day event that started this morning at 10 AM and runs through Sunday.

Image Gallery: “Kaleidoscope” exhibition caps Montreal’s year-long “City of Glass” celebration

A nonprofit center for emerging Quebec artists was the setting for the "Kaleidescope" exhibition on Wednesday evening in Montreal.

Winding up the year of events that turned Montreal into a “City of Glass” for 2010, a high-profile exhibition of glass art at the nonprofit space Espace Création Loto-Québec was a parade of some of Canada’s most-important artists during the opening party on Wednesday evening, September 29th. Continuing through December 5th, the exhibition with the full title “Kaléidoscope, variations sur le verre québécois” (“Kaleidoscope, variations in Quebec glass”) brings together work selected by one of Montreal’s most important curators. Paul Bourassa, curator of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, chose the works from over 20 Quebec artists, presented in the context of contemporary art themes such as aura, object, narration, history, and nature.