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Feature
In Profile: Designers Who Make an Art Out of Light
Thomas Alva Edison perfected the incandescent light bulb in 1876, and the world became modern. In the years since, technology has continued to transform the light bulb—from incandescent to fluorescent, to today’s LEDs and OLEDs, and beyond. Lighting has long been a preoccupation for designers: the opportunity to take a functional object and turn it into a work with a higher calling.
In articles to follow, our first-ever special focus section, MODERN looks at both the history and future of lighting as design. You will read about designers who work with light and discover new ways to look at nature or aesthetics. We’ve selected seven designers whose work crosses over from the practical to the poetic, whose work is shown in leading design galleries and collected by museums. You will see ten early modern lighting designs that shaped the future, and read about the Italian companies that have fostered design and ensured that what we put in our living rooms and libraries has more than mere function. A final article looks at the forces—from ever-advancing technology to the repurposing of old materials— that are shaping the future. Can I resist a pun here? No. I hope you will find this section illuminating.
Jeff Zimmerman
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Jeff Zimmerman’s background as an artist with a serious love of nature is evident in the work he creates using the centuries-old techniques of glass-blowing. In 1988, while studying for a degree in anthropology, Zimmerman took his first glassblowing class and was hooked—and then went on to earn a BFA at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Tennessee. Zimmerman furthered his training with summer staff jobs at the Pilchuck Glass School outside of Seattle, where he met legendary glass artists such as Lino Tagliapietra and Pino Signoretto, and worked at the International Center of Research on Glass and Visual Arts (CIRVA) in Marseille, France. Zimmerman was also a member of the B Team, an experimental glassblowing group that was as much about performance art as it was about glassblowing.
Now a master glassblower, New York-based Zimmerman produces both small objects and large sculptures, some illuminated, that have evolved into lighting. An important aspect of his creative process is to encourage and exploit the “planned spontaneity,” as he puts it, inherent in working with the material. The exposure to nature that he cherished growing up in Colorado is also a factor, seen in the organic shapes in his pendant lights, floor lamps—which are really illuminated sculpture—and chandeliers.
COURTESY OF LOS ANGELES MODERN AUCTIONS
Vine, 2016, is a completely new take on the chandelier, comprising more than a dozen hand-blown, iridized opaque globes positioned along a brass “vine” that can be hung from the ceiling or mounted vertically on a wall. A local Brooklyn studio created the vine from brass tubing shaped expressly for the fixture. Each piece is unique, and Zimmerman assembles it himself. Another piece from 2016 is Crystal, which is totally customizable and can be used singly as a pendant, grouped and hung at different lengths, or clustered to form a chandelier. Each mold-blown piece is shaped like a large, raw crystal with a colored transparent top and matte-finish bottom. Zimmerman’s lighting can also be site-specific. He designed and installed a Bubble Cluster fixture in the library of the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. An assemblage of opaque spheres in different sizes runs the length of the room close to the ceiling, emitting a soft glow.
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Zimmerman’s work is sold exclusively at New York’s R & Company, where he is one of their most sought-after designers. In the last three years, he’s worked on nearly forty commissions, and over the two-decade span of his career, he’s produced more than a hundred custom works. Zimmerman does all his glassblowing at Brooklyn Glass, a shop in the Gowanus neighborhood that has become an enclave for artists and designers.
He has exhibited internationally, at the Sean Kelly Gallery; Galerie Perrotin in Paris, Miami, and Hong Kong; the Brooklyn Museum; the American Crafts Museum (now the Museum of Arts and Design); Corning Museum of Glass; and the Boghossian Foundation in Belgium, and is held in many private collections. Zimmerman’s work always begins as art, which he transforms into a lighting fixture of great distinction.
-Annette Rose-Shapiro
