Nancy Nicholson’s art glass panel featuring colored mouth-blown Lamberts glass Original fashion ensemble created by Parson’s students in response to Nancy’s glass art

Nancy’s “East Village Sunset” art glass panel becomes part of the “The Art of Craftsmanship Revisited: New York” collaborative initiative of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Parsons School

“There is something so special about the way the light hits the glass; the way the color is revealed,” says Nancy Nicholson, a stained glass artist with 25 years of experience and a long-time Bendheim Art Glass customer. “When the light changes, the colors are shifting constantly; different textures distort what you see through the glass…It feels very much alive.”

 

Nancy is one of a select few New York City artisans to take part in the initiative "The Art of Craftsmanship Revisited: New York," a collaborative project of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Parsons - The New School for Design. The initiative brings Parsons’ students together with New York City artisans to celebrate the tradition of authenticity, creativity and craftsmanship. Working closely with the artists, students create original fashion ensembles and short documentary films inspired by their work.

The “Light Shift” documentary captures Nancy Nicholson’s creative process from design and glass selection to the completion of an elegant art glass piece. As Nancy examines the shelves filled with Lamberts Art Glass in Bendheim’s Passaic, New Jersey warehouse, she looks for the desired textures and colors to create a one-of-a-kind canvas for her design.

 

A pale-yellow glass sheet with graceful streaks of green and red catches Nancy’s eye, and she holds it up to the window. As she checks the glass against the light, the colors come alive, bouncing, shifting and merging playfully in a series of dramatic transformations.

 

Hand-crafted utilizing the centuries-old mouth-blown method, each sheet of Lamberts Art Glass is unique. It exhibits extraordinary brilliance and structure, optimal light refraction, and a rich color palette. Colors are produced following medieval formulas, carefully mixing measured amounts of metal oxides into the glass batch. Bendheim, the exclusive supplier of Lamberts Art Glass in North America, offers a rich palette of more than 500 in-stock colors, with more than 5,000 colors accessible through the Lamberts factory in Germany.

 

Nancy transforms the colorful Lamberts glass pieces into an East Village cityscape, exploring the layering of light and color to recreate the urban environment’s dynamic forms.

 

“Glass is a metaphor for how I see the world,” she says. “Glass, like life, is elusive and constantly changing.”

 

Please visit the Art of Craftsmanship website to view a short documentary video on Nancy Nicholson’s art glass.