The three artists included in this exhibition at the McLean Center for the Arts in McLean, Virginia, Michael Janis, Allegra Marquart and Tom Baker, are all, according to the curator, storytellers. The curator was Nancy Sausser and she is not only right, but I would also add that they are superb storytellers who employ the visual arts in their own distinct ways to narrate their stories.

Both Janis and Marquart are commonly associated with the revolutionary artists of the Washington Glass School. It is people like them, along with artists like Tim Tate and Erwin Timmers, who have been redefining the way that we think, interpret and discuss glass in the modern dialogue of contemporary art.

For the revolutionary minds of the 20th and now 21st century, glass in the context of the postmodern art world has nearly always been defined as craft, rather than art. This absurd segregationist designation, in my opinion, has been levied upon this entire substrate because of the spectacular success of a couple of "crafty" glass artists such as the gigantic public relations machine known as Dale Chihuly.

My own experience bears evidence of this. A few years ago a former Hirshhorn Museum curator told me that the "Hirshhorn does not collect glass." Replace the word glass with any other art medium and you see how odd that statement was.

And the "craft" brand has also stuck because the successful names of the craft world drifted apart over the years, and also over the years built a formidable collectors' base developed at fairs such as the Smithsonian, SOFA, etc. These fairs generally predated the now common "high art" art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Pulse, Scope, Red Dot, etc.

The "craft" world was doing hugely successful art fairs many years before it became more common for the "high art" world (and yes, I know that Art Basel in Basel itself has also been going on for decades).

And thus, for years glass artists and other "crafty" artists were happy with their vessels and bowls and organic marine forms that commanded good prices from a very specific (and limited) set of collectors.

And then a few years ago, centered around the Greater Washington, DC region, a new glass movement began to emerge. This group of artists saw glass as just another substrate to create artwork, all kinds of artwork, not just bowls and vessels and pretty organic forms.

They used those materials to develop narrative stories, as Janis and Marquart do in this show. And they married glass to technology, as Tim Tate does with his self contained video installations. And they had glass emerge as a powerful new form of "green art," as Erwin Timmers does with his recycled materials glass sculptures.

In this MPA exhibition, Janis shows us what he contributes to that incendiary new group of narrative glass artists, if we can even call them just "glass artists" any longer. In this show he exhibits seven pieces from his Tarot Card series. These wall hung glass panels, elegantly bordered in metal, each depict a card from the ancient fortune telling card system. Using the traditional process of sgrafitto, Janis essentially draws on glass with glass dust and then fuses it all to deliver what can best be described as a glass drawing. They are simply rendered in a minimalist style on sheets of translucent glass that forges a brilliant aura of ethereal context to his subjects.

Marquart is an enviable technician and astute artist who searches the world of fairy tales to discover and present in a new visual way a subject matter that often resides in our childhood memories. In this show she exhibited both kiln formed glass and relief printmaking to deliver the tales. It was a superb partnership of genres. These are sculptural stories.

Tom Baker had eleven intimate and exquisite silkscreen relief prints which unfortunately were a little overpowered by the larger works of Marquart and Janis, and yet, probably because of their intimate size, still managed to attract those of us who like to get nose-close to a work of art to explore it deeply and precisely. His dizzying visual dialogue includes pyramids, electric mixers, ballistic missiles, etc. all waiting for close inspection and interrogation to deliver the narration component of this artists' works.

And the same narrative thread that joins all three artists' works into a cohesive exhibition is the glue that joins the viewer to the conversation in the viewing of the show.

Novie Trump Charts a New Course

Titled "Uncharted Sky: Recent Sculpture by Novie Trump", the exhibition also at the McLean Project for the Arts certainly charts a new path for this talented DC area artist and in my opinion can be considered as the breakthrough exhibition by Trump.

At McLean Trump flexes her artistic muscles in 11 works in ceramic, porcelain, glass, found objects, metal, stoneware, cork and an elegant assortment of porcelain bees. She also joins an emerging new movement centered around the Greater DC area that is breathing artistic life into genres of art historically associated with craft rather than high art. It is clear to see that over the years, artists like Margaret Boozer and the various artists working out of her Red Dirt Studio, as well as the wondrous Laurel Lukaszewski have begun to do to clay and to porcelain what the artists of the Washington Glass School, DC Glassworks and others have been doing to glass over the recent last few years. They are all the Alfred Stieglitzes of their genres.

And you can add Novie Trump to that select list of new revolutionaries dragging clay and porcelain away from the "crafts only" realm and erasing the lines that segregate craft from high art.

The exhibition is not only a triumph of technical skill, an inherent part of the genre itself, but sheer minimalism begins to emerge from some of the work as well. In "Out of the Fire," a gorgeous porcelain set of wings installed in a row on the wall, Trump uses the repetitive motif of the wings to set a sense of order to the piece and extend that sense of order and alignment to the rest of the show. It is the key work in the exhibition, the simplest and inherently the most elegant. It was also red-dotted, and so it will soon adorn a collector's home somewhere in the area. In fact, I know who bought the piece and she’s a well-known and respected curator.

It happens again in "The Way Home", a dizzying wall piece of dozens of porcelain bees and a Stoneware hive that makes us wrestle with the visual idea offered in such elegant stylized manner that it allows Trump to marry a traditional piece in the Stoneware hive with a minimal and repeatable bee form that distills the art to its simplest offering. This piece also begins to demolish the Berlin Wall of art between art and craft.

Laurel Lukaszewski at Project 4

I first fell in love with Laurel Lukaszewski’s work when I discovered it in one of the past Artomatics. Back then, I picked her work as the key find of that particular Artomatic, and then I sat back in self-righteous pleasure as I saw Lukaszewski continue to grow as an artist and art force around the DC region.

Earlier in this piece I mentioned her as one of the three dimensional powerhouses that are dragging clay and other crafty substrates away from the craft world and into the rarified upper artmosphere of the blue chip fine arts world.

For a couple of years after that Artomatic we all marveled at Lukaszewski’s spectacularly complex interwoven forms, which managed to take the sense of the Byzantine into a minimalist context – that’s an almost illogical bridge which would ruin most Vulcan minds - but the sheer sharpness of this artist’s prowess did exactly that: she delivered these complex, tubular (not in the Californian sense) forms that interlocked in gorgeous wall hanging mazes that pulled us with a newfound magnetic attraction to the media of clay. “There is magic in them works,” someone chewing a chunk of grass might say, and that magic served Lukaszewski well.

“God is really only another artist,” Picasso once said. “He invented the giraffe the elephant and the ant. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.”

And that is what artists, real fire-in-the-gut artists, are supposed to do. And the fire that burns in Laurel Lukaszewski’s belly really came to a high roar in this exhibition at Project 4 gallery on U Street, NW in DC. And to say that I was left reeling from seeing what a huge turn this artist had made in one show would be the understatement of the year.

There are only four pieces in the show: Sakura (a sculptural cherry blossom installation); Pause (a hanging ribbon installation); Ghost (sculptural leaves); and Floridan (an outdoor floor piece).

I’m going to take a chance and write about only one of them, because that one piece describes the new impression that the artist has left on me.

In Sakura, the two-level gallery is used to showcase hundreds of small cherry blossom sculptures, each one individually pinned to the wall, to float and rise up from the main level, like a wave of starlings, from floor to floor.

Each individual cherry blossom is a gorgeous example of a master sculptor at work -  hundreds of them, floating up in a swirl of shadow-casting flowers is something else more akin to an Akira Kurosawa film come to life in a minimalist dream.

In this piece the artist bridges a paradox: minimalism is less – and she accomplishes that in the art form. And yet, her minimalism requires, no… demands -  an entire “home” as its home.

What do I mean by that?

This gorgeous and enormous piece is a re-arrangeable work of art that can be set and re-set and re…ahhh… reset in many shapes, each one of which will yield new results, but the “less” of minimalism needs and covets more and more of the wall that it requires to anchor itself to.

I submit that Sakura is such a spectacular work of art that if a collector purchased it, and I hope that a savvy one will, the only way that it could be showcased would be as the only work of art in that home, house or setting. Anything else hanging on those walls around Sakura would diminish the artistic power punch to the solar plexus that Sakura delivers.

It is the triumph of minimalism over space. And it is the triumph of a courageous artist not afraid to flex her own artistic muscles.

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