Jan. 16 through June 6, 2027
James W. Mithell, Jr., Center and Atrium galleries
Duncan McClellan: Shaped by Fire
The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art presents Duncan McClellan: Shaped by Fire, an exhibition devoted to one of St. Petersburg’s most beloved artists and a pillar of contemporary glass. McClellan’s love affair with the medium began in childhood: at age five he toured a glass factory in West Virginia and where he watched a skilled craftsman shape the glowing, molten glass. After first working in leather and clay, he learned to blow glass at a studio in Ybor City in 1987, went on to study large-scale forms with Fred Kahl and John Brekke of the New York Experimental Glass Workshop, and became only the second American invited to study and work at the ARS Studio in Murano, Italy.
McClellan’s signature work is instantly recognizable: multi-layered, stylized vessels that pair intricately etched imagery with sensuous forms, pieces that shift in character and meaning as the light around them changes. Each is finished through acid-etching, fire-polishing, and a six-stage grinding and polishing process.
Beyond the studio, McClellan has helped shape the region’s cultural identity. In 2009 he moved from Tampa into a renovated former tomato plant in St. Petersburg’s Warehouse Arts District, becoming one of the district’s first tenants and creating a gallery that showcases nationally and internationally recognized glass artists, who are invited to work in its on-site hot shop. He is widely credited with building an art glass mecca and community in St. Petersburg, and his space includes a classroom where students from public and private schools learn the art of glassblowing. Fittingly, his work already has a home at the Leepa-Rattner, where he is among the Florida artists represented in the museum’s permanent collection.
Shaped by Fire offers visitors a chance to experience the full breadth of an artist who has spent decades transforming heat, breath, and sand into luminous works with his recognizable oeuvre.
Image credit: Duncan McClellan, Funeral Urn for an Artist’s Ego II, glass, 30 x 15 x 15 in.