Spotlight: Glass group hosts biggest collectors in Sarasota

It’s a rainy Wednesday. About 50 people gather in the academic center at Ringling College. A few of them admire the glass art displayed in the Basch Gallery before heading into the auditorium. It’s where the annual meeting for the Florida Glass Art Alliance takes place.

Richard and Barbara Basch, for whom the gallery is named, are seated in the audience. So are Philip and Nancy Kotler, whose donated glass collection is on display at The Ringling Museum. Carol Camiener, a glass collector and organizer/co-founder of the group, welcomes everyone to the auditorium. It’s a who’s who of glass collectors in attendance.

One man, Herman Frankel, says he has 120 pieces of glass of all sizes and adds two to three pieces to his collection each year. He says some members have modest collections and others’ are more impressive (such as the Kotlers’ and Basches’). But every member is here because he or she loves glass.

The group meets formally once a year. Occasionally, members get together and take field trips to nearby Florida glass exhibits or to see private homeowners’ collections. They’ve been doing this for around a decade.

The mother group is the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, to which many members of this group belong. The local group started when a few friends (all members of the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass) met in Chicago at one of the biggest annual glass shows in the country, Sculpture Objects Functional Art + Design (SOFA). They thought, “Why don’t we have a group like this in Sarasota?”

Upon returning home Camiener and Edris Weis decided to take action. They founded the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass. As of the 2014 meeting, there are 95 paying members.

Each member’s yearly contribution goes toward a scholarship for a Ringling College of Art and Design student to study glass art at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Wash. Danielle Colon, the student the group sent last summer to study the art of glass making, is at its annual meeting to show the members photos from her trip. She’s a painting student by study.

“I didn’t realize how much the experience changed what I’m doing (at Ringling),” she says.

The influence of glass study found its way into her work. Since returning, she has been experimenting with clear mylar, transparency and layers. Richard Basch makes a joke about wanting her to get painting out of her system and focus on glass as he heads to the front of the room to make an announcement.

He says that one of the big names in glass right now, Italy-based Lino Tagliapietra, will exhibit his work in the Basch Gallery next January. When he says this, there are a few excited gasps around the room.

The group slowly trickles out of the room at the meeting’s end.

“Lino Tagliapietra,” one member says to another. “That’s going to be a good one!”