Josiah McElheny

American, born 1966

BiographyJosiah McElheny is a conceptual artist with studio training rooted in glassblowing whose work synthesizes the tradition of finely crafted objects with intensive intellectual inquiry. Now at a successful midcareer point in his practice (born, 1966), his work is included in the permanent collections of Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Moderna Musset (Stockholm), the Tate Modern (London), the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of Art and The Corning Museum of Glass, among others. He received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award (1995) and the 15th Rakow Commission from The Corning Museum of Glass (2000) and was announced as a MacArthur Fellow in 2006. McElheny investigates the history of twentieth-century modernism through object making, sculpture, writing, performance and film with a goal to expand on long-held historical narratives and our relationship to these narratives. With a practice focused on the medium of glass, his philosophical explorations range from astronomical cosmology to the visionary work of Hilma af Klint and the role of thepublic park in political activism. This installation, Impurities, is from his early body of work, which encompasses the use of fictional, factional artifacts with appended narratives that combine elements of the history of glass with his own imaginative interpretations. McElheny received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1997) and has studied with master glassmaker Lino Tagliapietra (Italian, b. 1934). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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