John Littleton

Art Brokerage: John Littleton American Glass Artist: b. 1957. John Littleton is the son of glass artist Harvey Littleton and his wife, Bess Tamura Littleton. He was born in 1957 in Madison, Wisconsin, where his father was a professor of art at the University of Wisconsin. As a boy John Littleton grew up around glass art and his father's colleagues in glass, including Dale Chihuly, Fritz Dreisbach, Erwin Eisch, Robert C. Fritz and Marvin Lipofsky. When it came time to select a course of study in college, John Littleton, in a bid to establish his identity apart from that of his father,majored in photography with Cavalierre Ketchum (b. 1934) and did independent study in glass with David Willard. He graduated in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science in Art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. John works exclusively with Kate Vogel. Littleton and Vogel's first successful sculptures took the form of "Bags"; blown glass bubbles that were shaped to look like soft fabric bundles "tied" at the neck with a loop of glass and terminating in a flared ruff. The bags were quickly followed by two series of forms that had elements in common with them. "Handkerchiefs" took the form of soft inverted cones with flared, undulating lips; "Favors" featured an ovoid or lobed form with two flared rills of glass on either side, resembling a lump of candy twisted in colorful paper. Littleton and Vogel continued to produce bags, adding their "Acrobags" and "Imago" series of works (both of which feature small bags balancing on top of a single large one) in the late 1990s to their continuing line of "Bag Explosions." By mid-decade the artists' cast sculptures focused exclusively on hands and arms posed in the act of proffering an object. Earlier in the decade smooth stones, found by the artists on walks. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.