Richard Jolley

Richard Jolley was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1952. He moved to Tennessee in his youth and has lived and maintained a studio in Knoxville since 1975. He attended Tusculum College and Peabody College where he studied glass art under Michael Taylor starting in 1971 and received his B.F.A. During that time he also studied under Richard Ritter at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina.
Jolly has had over 65 solo museum and gallery shows throughout the U.S., Europe, Japan, Australia, Israel and China. Richard Jolley’s work has been collected extensively in both private and public collections, including those of the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Corning Museum of Glass, the Museum of Fine arts in Boston and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

I’m proud of the fact that I graduated from college aspiring to be an artist working in glass and I’m still holding to that vision. Any success I’ve had in my art career is due to a combination of my love for the narrative, the ideas behind my work and the technical expertise I have gained over decades of creating glass objects. It seems as though you wake from a dream one day to realize you have been involved in a journey with a material and a process for over half your life and still there is so much more to discover, uncover and be covered up by. One of the joys I have with this impressive material, glass, is that you are making something from nothing.As with many artists from the 70s, I sought out non-traditional materials and encountered glass, which became my primary medium. The many dualities of nature and materials interest me, and I express this concern in my work by employing a figurative/narrative mode to document our time and environment. There is a classical/modern link in my work just as glass is a modern material in ancient history. What I look forward to most are the pieces that I have not yet made.