Feren’s “Glass Cast Violin” and “Artigas Donkey,” light box, ink on acrylic.
Madison sculptor Steve Feren’s new art gallery, Ferenheit, is built in an open, light-filled room at the back of the building that houses his large working studio — itself a museum of incandescence and color.
The high-ceilinged, industrial fantasy-like building, with its blowpipes and powerful furnace, is just a short walk across the curving driveway and lawn from Feren’s house, where he lives with his wife, Charity Eleson, on a winding county road in rural Fitchburg. The couple opened Ferenheit in late June with a pig roast and live music by the Tony Castañeda Latin Jazz Band.
After an inaugural six-month exhibit of Feren’s new work in glass and mixed media, other visual artists — painters, sculptors, print-makers, photographers — will be invited to show their work in solo shows in the gallery for six-month runs.
“This is a robin, in concrete and glass,” Feren says in the studio as we pass a massive and whimsical seven-by-eight-foot big bird, whose shimmering surface is inlaid with thousands of ice-blue reflective glass balls.
For decades, all of Feren’s works, most of them large-scale public works in glass, concrete, steel and ceramic, have incorporated light as a central element.
“Glass is about light,” he says. And while many of the gallery pieces are examples of exquisitely blown glass — such as the shimmering birds that hang overhead at Ferenheit — glass is only one of the substances Feren employs. Ceramics and silkscreened photographs, for example, are found in surprising combinations. The results glitter and glint with alluring fluidity and depth.
“Guardian,” plaster.
Feren recently retired after 30 years running the UW-Madison’s art department’s prestigious glass lab, begun as the first academic program of its kind by Harvey Littleton in the early 1960s. Littleton attracted future superstars such as Dale Chihuly, who came to Madison to study with him in 1965, and Marvin Lipofsky, the American Studio Glass Movement pioneer of UC-Berkeley, who died in January.
Feren still teaches glass blowing to adults and children in his home studio. He also lectures widely, including at 14 universities in China, to teach and talk about sculpture, public art, glass and light.
Feren’s best-known Madison work is probably the “Kohl Promenade” at the Kohl Center, created with sculptor Gail Simpson, in concrete, metal and acrylic with controlled LED lighting.
The artist also takes pride in “The Life Expressive,” a large-scale public art project in glass, aluminum and acrylic installed at UW-Parkside. It was among the last works to be funded by the Wisconsin “Percent for Art” program before the state Legislature ended the program in 2011. Feren’s piece for UW-Platteville, called “Unus Mundus,” installed in 1989, was one of the defunct program’s early successes.
In the gallery, his figurative sculptures in cast glass are on display. The comically beseeching four-legged beasts called “Spigs” have a candy gloss and milky depth within their colors, both reflecting and glowing with natural light.
Other cast glass works such as “Oakscape” stand like blocks of crystal-clear ice, embedded with stark black silkscreen images of winter trees, lakes and haunting glimpses of tiny people. They are bracingly fresh, cold and bright, with a storybook quality of fine old etchings.
Feren, who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, says he still draws inspiration from his childhood. He recalls shafts of sunlight beaming through near-closed curtains in his grandmother’s house. And he was fascinated by simple yet elegant objects such as reflective railroad signs: “It was the glass balls in these road signs that gave them their luminosity.”
Ferenheit Gallery 2601 Hwy. MM, Fitchburg, 608-216-5560, Viewings by appointment
