Interpretations
Preston Singletary will have a solo exhibition of recent work at Blue Rain Gallery.
SANTA FE, NM
During Blue Rain Gallery’s Annual Celebration of Native American Art, Preston Singletary will have a solo exhibition of recent work opening August 13 and running through August 25 in Santa Fe’s Railyard District.
Singletary interprets traditional designs and stories of his Tlingit heritage in glass. In the 1980s he created glass interpretations of Tlingit cultural objects. He later experimented more with forms and techniques including cast glass but remains committed to “continuing the tradition” of his tribal ancestors.
His great grandmother moved to the Seattle area from Alaska in the 1920s. In a conversation with her daughter, his grandmother, Singletary relates, “She said if anybody were to look at her life’s work, then they would have to look at her grandchildren. So, today, I’m filled with a tremendous sense of purpose in the work that I do.”
Throughout his career, he has returned to the story of Raven who brought light to the world. In the beginning, the world was dark. Raven asked a fisherman, “Where is the light?” and was told a chief kept it in a clan house. Raven devised a plan to get the light through the man’s daughter. Transforming himself into a hemlock needle, he floated in the water of the stream outside the clan house. When the daughter drank from the stream she swallowed the hemlock needle and became pregnant with Raven as a human boy. The little boy discovered boxes in his grandfather’s house and begged to play with them but was warned not to open them. He played with them, but he opened them. The stars, the moon and the sun escaped into the world through the house’s smoke hole.
Raven returned to his animal form and his original white color. When he flew through the smoke hole, the soot turned his feathers black.
In the exhibition is a blown and carved black glass sculpture, Raven Was a Man. His potential shapeshifting is depicted in a human figure deep inside.
In 1968, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, hosted an installation, Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight in which visitors walked a journey from darkness into the light.
Light itself has been an animating force in Singletary’s work from the beginning. One of the first traditional objects he translated into glass was a cedar bark hat. When he sandblasted Tlingit designs onto the glass and placed the finished piece on a pedestal, it cast shadow patterns. “It was like a spirit that was being revealed to me.”