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Robert Sowers (stained glass).

Robert Sowers was an American painter, photographer, stained glass artist, and a seminal figure in the re-emergence of stained glass as an architectural art in the United States. His architectural glass commissions cover some 20 years from St George's Episcopal Church, Durham NH, 1954 to Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, New York NY, 1975, and the blue cross window for Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Burlington VT, 1976 (decommissioned in 2019). In November 1953 he participated in the New Talent Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. He designed the vast American Airlines terminal glass facade at Idlewild / JFK Airport in 1958-59 and demolished, due to terminal expansion, in 2008. . In addition to his glass commissions he wrote multiple magazine articles and published four books on stained glass, art, and architecture. He was an exceptional photographer documenting his own as well as other artist's glass work and spent many hours walking the streets and parks of Manhattan and Brooklyn with camera in hand. A posthumous volume of his B/W photographs was published in 1990. In 1979 he began a series of black and white paintings that eventually transitioned into color and were based on his 35mm slides of derelict industrial landscapes, city parks, and the botanical gardens of New York City and Tanglewood in the Berkshires. He sold his first painting through OK Harris Gallery, and reviewed the first printing of his fourth book almost simultaneously with his untimely death in March 1990. His archives are in the Rakow Research Library, Corning Museum of Glass Corning NY.

Biography

He was born in Milwaukee WI in 1923. The family moved to Florida in 1932 because his father Ray Sowers, a highly respected educator, was offered a position in the state. His art teacher in High School, Max Bernd-Cohen, encouraged his creativity, was a profound influence, and became a lifelong friend. While serving in the army at the end of WW2 he was able to study art at Bairritz American University, Bairritz, France. On returning to the US he enrolled at the New School for Social Research, studied with the painter Stuart Davis, encountered the theories of Rudolf Arnheim, and graduated with a BA in 1948. In 1949 he received his MA from Columbia University. A Fulbright Award for the study of Medieval Stained Glass in the UK enabled him to attend the Central School of Arts & Crafts in London from 1950 to 1953. William Johnstone was the Principal and it was here that he completed special studies in stained glass with John Baker. Returning to Manhattan he and his wife, Terry Obermayr, at first lived in a large loft on the Lower East Side and subsequently moved to a corner brownstone in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, NY.. Sowers began to pursue stained glass commissions though it was an uphill battle to get the attention of Modernist architects of that time. Architects whose buildings he did work on included Percival Goodman, Fritz Nathan, Eero Saarinen, Kahn & Jacobs, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Roger Ranuio, W. Brooke Fleck, Carter & Woodruff, Stanley Prowler, Henry Dreyfuss, Chloetheil Smith, William Garwood, and Philip Ives. In the execution of projects he utilized traditional painted and leaded glass as well as more experimental processes of lamination with epoxy resins and Dalle de verre. This period of commissioned work as an independent artist consisted of inevitable ups and downs and it was during one of these bleak periods that he decided to reconsider "autonomous" panels independent of an architectural setting. In 1971 he was Artist-in-Residence at Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, NH. This marked the beginning of a period of small panel making including the incorporation of various cast glass shapes salvaged from the closing sale of Leo Popper's glass warehouse in lower Manhattan, and culminating in a series of panels exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in 1975. For this panel series the design / cartoon was executed as a "painting" showing the details of the glass in full color. The panel and the cartoon make a pair. There are a number of these design / paintings in the Rakow Research Library.