Marlene Rose

Marlene Rose, born in New York on December 5, 1967, is an American glass sculptor based in Clearwater, Florida. She works in sand-cast glass, a method modelled on the ancient tradition of bronze casting, and over the past four decades she has helped pioneer its glass equivalent. She has worked with molten glass since 1988 and has been a fixture of the leading art fairs for some three decades.

Rose earned a BFA with Honors in Glass from Sophie Newcomb College at Tulane University in New Orleans and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and studied at the Pilchuck Glass School.

Each piece is hand cast from molten glass into a unique modern work that carries references and allusions to ancient cultures and civilizations. Butterflies, Buddha heads, bells and horses recur as motifs in her translucent works, and these repurposed icons give the sculptures the look of preserved relics. Bridging time and space, they pay homage to disparate ancient cultures and stand as testaments to her investigations into the complexity of the human spirit, while their delicacy reveals the technical skill entailed in their making.

The sand-casting process she uses was developed in the mid-1980s. Rose pours liquid molten glass into carefully prepared sand molds, then cools the work for six days or more in a specially controlled oven before cracking open the mold to see what is revealed. There is a rawness and immediacy to working the sand of the mold, the thrill and danger of pouring material that is thousands of degrees hot, the patient gestation of the piece in the cooling oven, and finally the moment when the product of sand, glass, fire and thought is brought out into the light.

Rose received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2007. Her work is held by museums in the United States and Europe, including the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the Imagine Museum and the Leepa-Rattner Museum of the Arts in St. Petersburg, the Mobile Museum of Art, the Muskegon Museum of Art, the National Gallery for Foreign Art in Sofia and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Yerevan. Her technique was highlighted in 2020 with the solo exhibition Positive Reversals at the Imagine Museum, and she has been an award winner at the Habatat International Glass Invitational and a featured artist at SOFA Chicago.

Her work has been profiled on CBS Sunday Morning and in the documentary films From Fire, An Odyssey of Glass (2007) and A Sculptor's Perspective (2018), and is included in the books Studio Glass in America (2012) and CAST: Art and Objects (2017). She has mentored other artists and helped establish a prominent American museum devoted to studio glass, and her sculptures are sought by glass connoisseurs and fine art collectors internationally.