COOL STUFF
Art of glass
By Stephanie Berberick

Sister Ann Therese Kelly at work on stained glass art. Photo by Sister Gerard Fredrick CSSF.
Kelly’s students learn about the glass art process at Villa Maria College. Photos by kc kratt.
Glass, when crafted by an artist, speaks. It does not speak aloud with words, but with color, imagery, and design. Anyone who has stood in awe while gazing at bright cathedral windows can testify to the fact that glass can tell quite a story.

Buffalo native Sister Ann Therese Kelly is an artisan who has the talent to make glass speak. It is both a tedious and time-consuming process, Kelly says, but one rich with rewards.

“It is a long process that takes research into symbols and time to meet with the people of the parishes and discover what their needs are and what is going to energize them in the images of the glass,” she says. “It’s a wonderful process of working with people and educating them.” Kelly adds that she, too, is still learning after thirty years.

Kelly originally discovered the craft of stained glass at a workshop taught by Glass Roots Stained Glass Studio’s proprietor Jane Jacobson, and has taken that two-way stream of knowledge and applied it to teaching interested students across New York and New Jersey. She is currently an associate professor of Fine Art at Felician College in Lodi and Rutherford, N.J. At Felician, Kelly developed two three-credit, semester-long stained glass classes that have been drawing students from all majors.

“I started this program around 2001 or 2002. We run these classes every semester and they always fill,” says Kelly. “[The students] look at glass and it looks exciting and colorful. I get a lot of students who are not art majors and they really relax into glass, even though it is hard work. It is an outlet for them.”

Kelly recently returned to WNY on a six-month sabbatical to design a ten-foot glass skylight for a nineteenth-century castle in Rutherford, N. J. While in Buffalo, Kelly took a break from the designing groove to spread her knowledge of the craft to students and faculty at Villa Maria.

Villa Maria’s Art Department chair Sandra Reicis and professor Natalia Albul worked with Kelly on a two-week Interior Design Studio II program that fused elements of interior design with the art of making stained glass. “The students were designing the ‘Millennial Dream Home,’ which was required to provide luxury residential features but include the design parameters of both universal and sustainable design. Their custom-designed glass tiles could be utilized as design features in their final presentations,” Reicis explains.

The students were not the only ones who took knowledge away from the workshop. “Here, I had a chance to work with Sandra and I learned how glass works with interiors, not just with architecture,” Kelly says. “It was fabulous. We learned from each other; I love that.”

Reicis absorbed a great deal from the program as well. “I had worked with leaded glass prior to our workshop, but the opportunity to work in fused glass was excellent,” Reicis says. “Sister Kelly demonstrated how to take a window design, begin with a fusion process, continue with a painted process, and finally assemble with a leaded process to create beautiful window and light projects.”

In Buffalo, Kelly has also done stained glass designs for St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church on Clinton Street—including windows entitled “the New Jerusalem,” “Sunrise/Wheat/Eucharist,” and “Genesis”—and SS. Columba-Brigid Church. She is currently working on designs for a window in a small chapel in Pennsylvania. “Through these projects, since they are in churches, I deal mainly with Christian imagery. However, I have done windows for people’s homes, so those images are different, of course. A lot of my imagery deals with creation and nature,” Kelly explains.

The stained glass artisan will be working with a theme outside the norm this year as she designs a piece for a thirty-five-foot window at Niagara University’s Dunleavy Hall for the Nursing Alumni Association. The design, she said, will be inspired by the history of the nursing program at NU.

Kelly, who also works at St. Bonaventure University in Olean over summer months, has no plans to stop her work with glass, both in the classroom and across the east coast. Creating illuminated stories and using her hands and talents to cultivate them to bloom in glass is something that Kelly always finds pleasure in, she notes, adding that her artistic life has been a rewarding and brightly colored experience. “I just love it all,” she says.

Spree editorial intern Stephanie Berberick is a senior at Buffalo State College.


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