Josiah McElheny

McElheny grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. While attending high school in the early 1980s, he was part of Boston's underground music scene, and worked as a sound engineer at Radiobeat Studios. He holds production credits on records by the Proletariat, Sorry, and Death Wish, recorded in 1983 and 1984.

McElheny went on to receive his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1988.[2] As part of that program, he trained under master glassblower Ronald Wilkins.[3] After graduating, he was an apprentice to master glassblowers Jan-Erik Ritzman, Sven-Ake Caarlson and Lino Tagliapietra.[1]

In earlier works McElheny played with notions of history and fiction.[4] Examples of this are works that recreate Renaissance glass objects pictured in Renaissance paintings[5] and modern (but lost) glass objects from documentary photographs (such as works by Adolf Loos).[6] He draws from a range of disciplines like architecture, physics, and literature, among others, and he works in a variety of media.[7]

McElheny has mentioned the influence of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges in his work.[8] His work has also been influenced by the work of the American abstract artist Donald Judd.[9]

McElheny has also expressed interest in glassblowing as part of an oral tradition handed down generation to generation. He has used the infinity mirror visual effect in his explorations of apparently infinite space. His work also sometimes deals with issues of museological displays.[10]

One of the artist's ongoing projects is "An End to Modernity" (2005), commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. The piece is a twelve-foot-wide by ten-foot-high chandelier of chrome and transparent glass modeled on the 1960s Lobmeyr design for the chandeliers found in Lincoln Center, and evoking as well the Big Bang theory.[11] "The End of the Dark Ages," again inspired by the Metropolitan Opera House chandeliers and informed by logarithmic equations devised by the cosmologist David H. Weinberg[12] was shown in New York City in 2008. Later that year, the series culminated in a massive installation titled "Island Universe" at White Cube in London[13] and in Madrid.[14] In 2019 the installation was exhibited at Stanford University's Cantor Center for the Arts.[15]

• 1993 – Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington
• 1995 – Award Winner, 1995 Biennial Competition of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York, New York
• 2000 – The 15th Rakow Commission, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York
• 2006 – MacArthur Fellows Program[11][23]

• Museum of Modern Art, New York[24]

• Josiah McElheny: A Prism. Skira Rizzoli International, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8478-3415-0.
• The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart's 'The Light Club of Batavia'. University of Chicago Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-226-51457-4.