Holiday Sale Days 2011

Today, Thursday December 1st we open for our Holiday Sale. We'll be celebrating 37 years in business through Sunday December 4th with demonstrations of glass making and refreshments in the gallery. A large selection of ornaments and smaller things this year awaits your shopping list. We'll be offering 20% off all in studio made pieces.

Benicia artisans don't do a Holiday Open House; so it's rare to have Open Studios in December. Bring your out of town friends to see the glass blowers show how it's made here along the historic waterfront in Benicia, California. The Bay Area's glass makers to the Pope and US Presidents will also be giving glass blowing classes. You can register for a one day workshop December 17th on the Walnut Creek Civic Arts website: www.arts-ed.org.

Hand blown tree ornaments like these will be displayed along with unique works by Micheal Nourot and Nick Nourot. Don't miss this opportunity to get up close to the 2,000 degree molten glass in the glass shop and see the guys turn hot glass into objects of beauty right before your eyes.


Benicia has many Holiday events like the Friday December 2nd evening walk on First Street. There will be singers and wine, food and Victorian costumed revelers. The City of Benicia has a Christmas parade on Saturday morning.

BAGI Auction Raises the Bar

Last night April 18th, the Bay Area Glass Institute in San Jose, California, proudly presented the works of over 100 glass artists in their annual dinner/live auction. Many of the works there went for over the listed "fair market value". A few fetched in excess of $4,000.
Micheal Nourot and Ann Corcoran were the featured speakers just after the silent auction at 6 PM. The Nourots presented a power point on the formative years of the Nourot Glass Studio of Benicia. Afterwards they took questions from the 90 collectors who attended.
Quite a few San Francisco Bay Area glass artists attended as well. In the crowd were Mary B. White and Randy Strong.
The silent portion of the auction offered eight pieces of early Nourot Glass donated by Judy and Jerry Rose. The nicest one was the vertical stripe square cane murrini cylinder by Micheal Nourot.
The BAGI auction was held at 88 Fourth Street in the seventh floor ball room. The dinner was catered by the Fairmont Hotel. Event chair Steven Aldrich said, "I'm really plesed with what we've raised. It's been a good evening." Among the auctioned items were dinner with a visiting artist, lessons in the hot shop or outright donation to the electric furnace fund. The BAGI hot shop wants to go more eco-friendly by going electrical and over $11,500 was raised towards the cost of a new electric furnace. At BAGI they have classes, workshops, studio rentals a gallery and a gift shop. See their site at ww.bagi.org

Hot White Linen Nights in New Orleans Art Center

There is yet again a new slam against our most revered master, Dale Chihuly. The famous art walk titled: "Hot White Linen Nights" got off to a swelter this week in ole Nawlins. Here is what the art reviewer Doug McCash in The Times Picayune had to say.
"Many Julia Street galleries had apparently saved their most banal exhibits for the big night. The enormous crowd -- the envy of any art district in the nation -- was treated to forgettable decorative paintings, one or two heavy-handed political statements, amateurish pop culture photographs, and been-there-seen-that glass sculpture."
The theme was sweaty elegance, he also said and the fashions including paper dresses outshown the risk-taking in the artistic offerings. There was no artistic risk-taking unless you consider the shattering of a Chihuly glass work was his last backhand to the Seattle maestro.
Yee ouch! Will it become so commonplace to slam Chihuly work that it will no longer be notable? Tell that to the throngs in line at San Francisco's de Young were the tickets allow you in for a short period of time and that's it.
Making lots of money for the museum is no little deal. Other museums and art centers in the Bay Area should take note and put together another glass show soon that will please this art loving San Francisco public. Yes, perhaps even a retrospective of Nourot Glass works!
Beginning in 1974 Nourot has made all types of blown, cast and fabricated works and they are all on display in the "vault" at their gallery. Jobs for other artists, commissions for the Pope, and weird experiments like Glassmadness with James Erickson are all in there for curators to pick from. Wouldn't the public like to know that their own native sons and daughters who were trained and infulenced by Mr. Chihuly have been creating interesting and original works for the last three or four decades right under their noses? Many other Bay Area studio glass artists have much that would fit for a show like that and many have content more complex than anything at the Chihuly level.
Like Yogi Bera, the famous ballplayer said, "Could happen."