Beholding a stained glass window can enable, encourage, and literally enact the process of being filled with light…It’s so persuasive not because the pictures are convincing narratives but because the colors are overwhelming and the light is sublime…and, by golly, it’s coming from inside you, it’s part of you.
Judith Schaechter
Judith Schaechter b. 1961
Judith Schaechter is a world-renowned stained glass artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 1983 with a BFA in Glass. Schaechter quickly discovered her love of working in stained glass and made it her chosen medium. She is one of very few contemporary artists who works in stained glass – rather than blown glass – and has enjoyed an influential role in not only reviving this dying art form, but making it relevant to today’s art scene.
She embraces the traditional use of stained glass and its ability to enlighten and inspire through the universal and transformative power of light, intense color, and imagery. Her works incorporate concepts of love, violence, sex, sadness, struggle/suffering, and, ultimately, beauty in each of her complicated, dazzling pieces. Rather than positioning her audience in a particular narrative, her scenes create and ambiguous setting in which the viewer can draw his or her own conclusions. Schaechter's creations can have a profound affect, much like the depiction of saints and martyrs of medieval stained glass, though in contrast, her subjects are secular. Her work pushes boundaries in both medium and concept, and effectively transforms suffering to physical beauty with grace, power, and elegance.
Schaechter's glass has been exhibited widely, and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Hermitage in Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Corning Museum of Glass, The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution and numerous other public and private collections. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Crafts, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, The Joan Mitchell Award, The Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Leeway Foundation grant, and two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts awards, and has taught at several institutions, including Penland, Pilchuck, Rhode Island School of Design, PAFA, and the University of the Arts.
Auction Results Judith Schaechter
