Anna Boothe Works

Biography

Anna Boothe was trained as a sculptor at the Rhode Island School of Design and has worked with glass since 1980.  She holds an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, where she was a member of the Crafts / Glass Program faculty for 13 years.  Until recently, she was the Instructional Chair of the Glass Art Degree Program at Salem Community College in southern New Jersey.  There she helped to develop the new program’s curriculum that focuses studies on kiln forming, kiln casting and flameworking and coordinated the school’s annual International Flameworking Conference.

She lectures and teaches workshops on frit and traditional pate de verre casting regularly, and has taught at the Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, Urban Glass in Brooklyn, NY, the Pittsburgh Glass Center in PA and in many university art settings, as well as in Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey and Japan.

Anna’s kiln-cast figurative work is in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass and in numerous private collections.  In recent years, she has participated in the Particle Theories and Celebrating Connections exhibits at the Museum of American Glass in Millville, NJ, Figures and Forms at Leo Kaplan Modern in New York City, World Glass Today at the Aptos Cruz Gallery in Adelaide, Australia and the Bullseye Connection Gallery’s 20/20 exhibit in Portland, OR.  In the past several years, she has lectured at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Illinois State University, Illinois-Wesleyan University, Sheridan College in Toronto and the Everhart Museum in Scranton, PA.

Anna served on the Glass Art Society’s Board of Directors from 1998-2006 and was President of the organization from 2004-2006.

Artist’s Statement

I come from a strong line of accomplished painters, woodworkers, and crafters and from an upbringing visually peppered with ancient Middle Eastern and East Asian references. As an employee, I have spent much time "playing-out" the decorative art gene in the guise of a traditional French/Italian pastry chef in Philadelphia and later as a cake sculptor and illustrator (using whipped cream modeled with a palette knife). My vessel castings tie together these aspects of my background with my training as a sculptor and user of glass. I view the frit or traditional pate de verre casting process I use to create the forms as a type of permanent baking. The technique's resultant translucent sugary fused glass allows light to hold imagery, as if floating in space, and provides me with a medium through which I am able to diffuse emotional, dream, and pragmatic experiences into one layered montage. Both my early and more recent figurative sculpture reflects my attempts at making visual my ontological inquiries. Each modified and augmented female form searches for context. Each grouping of parts provides a specific set of spontaneous, yet somewhat controlled psychological boundaries. As an artist, I work to ponder and question the relevance of and my reactions to these fabricated "situations". Humbly, I suspect that I create these icon-like objects in order to promote my own sanity, and thus, my general comprehension of self.