Danny Perkins: Earning acclaim for his methodical yet emotive technique, Danny Perkins has been a leading glass artist for over twenty years. His fluid and towering forms require an intricate production process, which involves blowing glass into a wooden mold, cutting the glass, reassembling the pieces, and then sandblasting the final vessel to a matte finish before airbrushing color onto the surface. Though the early phases of construction mandate a group effort to accommodate the sheer scope of Perkins’ ambition, the artist finds inspiration in the Abstract Expressionist notions of interiority and self-referential aesthetics; in Perkins’ words, “The colors with the forms I use are emotion, they are love, sex, god, pain and joy. I have developed relationships with the colors over the years, so when I paint the shards the colors have faces that I know intimately.” A longtime affiliate of the renowned Pilchuck Glass School, Perkins was honored with the School’s Artist in Residence Award in 1987, and has studied under the direction of Pilchuck’s extraordinary faculty throughout his career – performing an apprenticeship with the Italian glass master Lino Tagliapietra in 1985, and later serving as a teaching assistant to Paul Marioni and Dan Dailey, as well as the esteemed painter Jim Dine. Among numerous distinctions, Perkins’s art has appeared in the pages of American Craft, Contemporary International Glass, Glass Magazine and The New York Times. His works are actively sought by significant private collections and included in such eminent public institutions as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, The Oakland Museum, and the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.