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Featuring glass artists: Richard Jolley

Richard Jolley has maintained a glass studio in Knoxville since 1975 and has received 65 solo museum and gallery exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Japan. His work has also been selected for a wealth of important group exhibitions surveying contemporary glass and sculpture.

His first major retrospective, Richard Jolley: Sculptor of Glass, traveled to 14 museums over five years. In 2011, the Mobile Museum of Art presented his extensive oeuvre, along with that of his wife Tommie Rush, in A Life in Glass. He was commissioned to create a glass sculpture, Everything and the Cosmos, for New York’s Seven World Trade Center in 2007.

This imaginative artist is represented in more than 33 public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York; and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. He was the youngest visual artist ever to receive the Governor’s Distinguished Artist Award in Tennessee, and he was recognized in 2010 for Outstanding Accomplishment in the Field by the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass.

Mr. Jolley studied glass under Michael Taylor at Tusculum College in Greenville, Tennessee and then at George Peabody College in Nashville (now part of Vanderbilt University), where he completed his BFA. He also advanced his technique at the noted Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina under the instruction of Richard Ritter.