Audrey Handler

(UW Madison - MFA '70).

Originally a painter with a BFA, Dorothy is an important glass artist who took part in the formative years of the founding of the first collegiate Glass program in the nation, at UW-Madison. 

Handler got her start in the earliest days of the Studio Glass Movement — a chapter in contemporary art that essentially began in Madison in the 1960s through the vision of the late glass pioneer and UW-Madison art professor Harvey Littleton. Handler was one of his first female students, and became close friends and collaborators with fellow students Dale Chihuly and Fritz Dreisbach, two international names in glass art today.

Artist Statement:

In addition to my single blown glass forms of fruit, glass platters and vases, I also create sculptural environments that make a comment on universal experiences usually on domestic themes. My research, ideas and concepts come from life observations. These sculptures are small worlds and landscape portraits with life-sized objects and sometimes tiny silver people. They create a surrealistic time and place. I also make bowls of realistic fruit and bowls of vegetables. My sculptures combine wood and glass, a series I call “Pear in a Chair” and “Wedding Pair”. These are made with the collaboration of my husband, John Marter, who fabricates the tiny wood chairs and love seats. Painting with low fire glass paints and fusing them on tiles, glass and blown glass, creating landscapes of the prairie seen from my studio window, areas around Wisconsin and visions of landscapes from my many travels, has been a recent addition to my work in glass.

Her studio is an old renovated cheese factory with posters, photos and lots of space for creative work with the glass blowing studio on the first floor.