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Pittsburgh Native Gayle Forman Wins 2024 Ron Desmett Award

The 2024 Ron Desmett Award recipient Gayle Forman is not playing around, even though her work is ultimately about play. 



“In my work, I strive to find something I refer to as the ‘wiggle’ or instances in which materials, objects, or people no longer have defined limitations and can fluctuate between hard and soft, rigid or flexible. I seek to combine materials and aesthetics in new ways to play with their boundaries and expectations. Integral to this work is the undercurrent of play, or the state of being that encourages exuberant discovery,” said Gayle Forman, the 2024 recipient of the Ron Desmett Memorial Award for Imagination with Glass.



This annual award given by Pittsburgh Glass Center (PGC) recognizes artists who think outside of the box, practice curiosity, and take risks to create unique, imaginative works in glass. It is in honor of PGC’s late cofounder Ron Desmett who was an artist who eschewed conventions and promoted idea over technique. 

BALANCED MEAL, 2013

Forman, a Pittsburgh native, was introduced to glass at Pittsburgh Glass Center as a high school student in 2006 in PGC’s youth program. It’s only fitting that she return to Pittsburgh Glass Center for a project that reimagines the material that has been so central to her career. 

In her quest for wiggle, she stumbled upon its antithesis, or its resting state—suspension. She plans to use this residency at PGC to develop a library of material samples that successfully capture moments or “freeze” motion in glass. Through processes such as freeze and fuse and casting with glass “foam”, she’ll develop different samples and components to then reanimate through the reintroduction of heat in the flame and hot shops. 



About Gayle Forman

Handcrafted objects that exist both as user friendly items and sculpture, made by Gayle Forman, and available at Forman Function. Photo: Cody Guilfoyle.
During PGC's Grand Reopening Free Community Celebration on Friday, October 4, Forman will orchestrate a performance modeled from “A Hot Day at the Playground,” which was originally featured in the Chrysler Museum Glass Studio. The PGC hot shop will be transformed into a playground space with teams of glassblowers exploring their new equipment through gravity, tension, and velocity. Anticipate a lot of swinging, sliding, and spinning.

An avid fan of frozen treats, I gravitate toward things that melt, spill, and generally make a mess. A self-proclaimed absurdist, I found my practice on imagination and play, sifting through frivolous and foolish events of daily life seeking moments of “eureka.” Everyday life provides a stage for illogical intervention, from setting up a playground in a glass studio or casting a classical sculpture in rubber. I search for moments of “wiggle”, when materials move beyond their boundaries. Though these fascinations take shape in a myriad of media, my research is informed by the material possibilities that glass provides. If glass can be s t r e t c h y and gooey then splinter in the following instant, perhaps foam could shatter or cardboard could inflate.

First encountering glass during high school at Pittsburgh Glass Center, I received my BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. Since then I’ve worked within museums, nonprofits, and fabrication studios as an educator and administrator, concurrently maintaining my artistic practice. In 2019, I was a Fulbright U.S. Study & Research grantee in São Paulo, Brazil, researching gambiarra, a practice of creative and makeshift material reuse. Inspired by this methodology, I worked in affiliation with the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo and Instituto Campana, a non-profit founded by Brazilian designers the Campana Brothers. This experience impacted my thinking and how I can further explore the experiences of daily life and the inevitable materials we use to construct it. Glass is a ubiquitous material, understood on some level by everyone, and I see this understanding begin to change when someone sees glass in its molten state. That moment of transformation or surprise is something that I attempt to capture throughout my work. From interaction and activation emerge new fantastic functions for ordinary objects or materials. Learn more.