Glass Artist to Present Raab Lecture

Clear Spectral, Banded Green with Black, Red, Blue 1993-95 by Tom Patti

"Spatial Boundaries" is the title of artist Tom Patti's presentation as this year's Rosanne Brody Raab Lecturer at Skidmore.

The illustrated lecture gets under way at 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 4, in Emerson Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public.

Patti is a pioneering artist known for his use of architectural and industrial glass. He has brought to art a new color and optical imagery with his small, fused forms. His architectural and site-specific installations explore the same conceptual concerns -- form, structure, and light. Using a familiar glass material that we see each day but rarely "see," Patti expands the geometry of form to reveal a 21st-century vocabulary of surface, edge, and color -- glass that affects the perceptual boundaries of the environment in which we live. His ideas have influenced a new generation of artists working in glass. "The ability of glass to occupy several physical states -- transparent, opaque, dense, solid, weightless -- all altering our spatial boundary, challenges me," he said.

A native of Pittsfield, Mass., Patti studied perception theory in New York City with Rudolph Arheim at the New School and received bachelor's and master's degrees in industrial design from Pratt Institute. He has collaborated with architects on numerous projects using high-performance glass, including working during 1992-94 with renowned architect Cesar Pelli on integrated art for the new Owens-Corning World Headquarters in Toledo. His other installations include "Spectral Boundary" (1999), a 40-foot monumental glass wall for the New Mint Museum of Craft and Design in Charlotte, N.C., and "Spectral-Luma Ellipse 2000" (2000), a glass doorway 10 feet high and 20 feet long for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. (http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/contemp_glass.html)

Patti was selected by the MTA's Arts in Transit to collaborate with architects Fox and Fowle on artwork for the new Roosevelt Intermodel Station in Queens.

Among his many awards are citations from the College of Fellows of the American Craft Council and Outstanding Achievement in Glass from Urbanglass. Patti has been technical consultant on glass design for Corning, Owens Corning, PPG, and Solutia. His work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries around the world.

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