Art + Design Magazine - Article featuring Habatat / Hampson and Corey Hampson

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WINTER 2020 • ISSUE 25

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GLASS Immersed in art since childhood, gallerist Corey Hampson shapes the collection of St. Petersburg’s Imagine Museum

by THOMAS CONNORS

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photography LUMINA STUDIOS

FAMILY

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ome of us abandon our heritage. We look beyond legacy, determined to shape our lives independently of the fate family history would seem to have in store. But the world would be a poorer place if no one built on the traditions and values to which they were born. Think of the Brueghels and the Wyeths. Or Eliel and Eero Saarinen.

Even when the family business is as much about sales as it is expressive sensibility, following in the footsteps of forebears can be not only personally satisfying, but a boon to artists and art lovers.

Corey Hampson has lived his life in the company of art.

The son of Ferdinand Hampson—the studio glass enthusiast who founded Michigan’s Habatat Gallery in 1971—he recalls the Philip Pearlstein nude that hung in the dining room and “strange and unusual paint-covered people staying at our house on a monthly basis.” So it’s not surprising he envisioned an artistic career for himself. “I took my first glassblowing class at the age of 15. When I graduated high school, I decided I wanted to be an artist and told my father. He answered, ‘You can always create, but you are going to business school.’”

What to another young man might have been a crushing blow proved the perfect preparation for a career as a key player in the studio glass movement. Now president and owner of Habatat, Hampson sits on the National Advisory Board of Directors for the Alliance for Contemporary Glass (AACG), serves as president of the Michigan Glass Collecting Alliance, and is active as an advisor and curator. His eye and expertise are on abundant display at the Imagine Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

With a number of resident collectors (including the museum’s founder, Trish Duggan), the Chihuly Collection at the Morean Arts Center, and a local community of artists and galleries, Pinellas County is becoming something of studio glass central. In sourcing material for the Imagine Museum (including works purchased from his own holdings), Hampson has attempted to create a family tree that traces the evolution of glass art, beginning with the pioneers Harvey Littleton and Dominick Labino, branching out to such artists as Jon Clark and Gene Koss (who founded the glass program at Tulane University), and drawing in younger artists such as Marlene Rose and Karen LaMonte. “This is not my story, it is the artist’s story,” he stresses. “I have just created the pathway and system to help explain it.”

While the core of the Imagine collection comprises work from the studio glass movement in the United States, it doesn’t neglect key figures from elsewhere, such as the Italian master Lino Tagliapietra, who in the 1970s introduced Venetian glassblowing techniques to students at the Pilchuck School in Seattle; the ceramist-turned-glass-master Bertil Vallien, who lived for a time in Los Angeles before returning to his native Sweden; the U.K.’s Colin Reid; and the Czech artist Tomáš Hlavička.

Despite decades of its practice in the United States (and its many admirers), glass art is often dismissed as merely

decorative, a poor cousin to the seemingly more profound enterprises of painting and sculpture (or even installation and video). Less "ism"-driven than other visual arts, it has, suggests Hampson, eluded easy definition and baffled the critics. “We call it a movement—does the art world call it a movement?” he muses. “The art world does not even know it exists, or at least what to make of it yet. I think once the art world decides to call it something, then we have achieved our goal in promoting our sacred glass cult.”

Imagine Museum, 1901 Central Avenue, St. Petersburg, Florida, imaginemuseum.com ▲

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Pinellas County is becoming something of studio glass central.”

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“We call it a movement.