Book Signing at Bullseye Los Angeles and Judson Studios
On Saturday, October 25, during a week of special events celebrating his exhibition at Forest Lawn Museum, Narcissus Quagliata had a book signing at Bullseye Glass Los Angeles and Judson Studios. With many of his far-flung students gathered and a taco truck providing dinner, it was a festive occasion. Narcissus signed books for over 2 hours, and rumor has it he took care to personalize each one. Another classy day for the Maestro!
Backstory to the Exhibition
By the 1980s, Narcissus Quagliata had established himself as a rock star in the art glass world. His Bay Area studio overflowed with high-dollar commissions, especially portraits for the rich and famous. Development moguls, film directors, old money and new: everyone wanted to be immortalized by the young maestro. Quagliata was riding high. And yet it wasn’t the glamor of that season that stuck with him most. It was the contrast he experienced passing between the world of his patrons and that of the unhoused people living just outside his studio walls.
One of these neighbors impacted Quagliata deeply. The man showed up living in a car. He interacted with others, kept rhythms, ran errands. But his car soon disappeared. His words and rhythms and routines did too. Before long, when Quagliata stopped by with sandwiches, the man would only converse in grunts through a jungle of hair while ripping—endlessly, incessantly ripping—thin shreds from any paper he could find. No one knew how to help. Haunted, Quagliata began a 15’ x 9’ stained glass portrait of the man. The piece took six years to complete. To this day, Quagliata considers it to be his greatest work in stained glass.
Narcissus Quagliata: Archetypes and Visions in Light and Glass
Now even more renowned for his innovative work in glass fusing than for his many accomplishments in stained glass, Quagliata’s bold new exhibition at Forest Lawn Museum is a retrospective on personal and historic levels. It juxtaposes Quagliata’s kilnformed artworks with Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern stained glass masterpieces. The latter of these is Quagliata’s own, a portrait of the friend mention above, created over a six-year period in the 80s. By contrasting fused glass artworks with past exemplars of the medium he spent the second half of his career laboring to transcend, Quagliata’s exhibit lays bare his legacy as an innovator in glass fusing. The largest piece of this new work—The Bench—is approximately 11’ x 5’ and was fabricated in partnership with Bullseye Studio in Portland, Oregon.