Lit

Bling Bongs

Edible Hudson Valley/Edible Westchester, Summer 2019

By Simon Abrams

To be clear, at this point, we were writing about hemp—the non-THC containing strain of cannabis. There were several reasons why we felt that it was important to devote an issue to weed in Edible. 1) We could see that cannabis agriculture was about to change the lives of many NYS farmers. 2) We were excited about weed as a regenerative crop that can literally remove pollutants from the soil. 3) We could smell that the legalization of recreational weed was imminent. 4) We knew that recreational weed was already hitting the underground food scene. 5) We were all for reparations made to the communities unequally prosecuted under Rockefeller Drug Laws. 6) After The Porn Issue of the previous summer, we wanted to top it.

Use The Weed Issue tag below to see some of the stories in this issue.

A Bong by Any Other Name

Heavily influenced by graffiti styles of the 1980s and 1990s, Colton creates large-scale glass sculptures that sometimes also function as pipes. In this piece, which is wall-mounted, one of its four separate glass components functions as a pipe. This work (Untitled, 2018) is being shown at New Glass Now, currently running at the Corning Museum of Glass.

Marijuana legalization is sweeping the nation, and with that comes a rise in the acceptance of the paraphernalia that accompanies the plant. Cannabis isn’t what it used to be, and neither are the smoking devices being made around the world by some of the most skilled artists working in the medium of glass.

Spoon-shaped pipes sold in the parking lots of Grateful Dead concerts used to be the norm, but now you can buy scientific bongs made to precise specifications. You can also find works of art: true sculptural objects that also just happen to function as pipes.

Most of the artists working in this new medium live in the U.S., although many reside in Canada, Germany, Spain, and even Japan, where cannabis is still illegal. Rooted in the movement’s illicit legacy, the artists creating this work often go by pseudonyms (as they do in the world of street art) to conceal their identities.

Over the past 10 years, as artists have gained broader acceptance and expanded the limits of their technical skills, sculpture has emerged as the next frontier. Flame workers, the types of glassblowers who make pipes (although not JUST pipes), are pushing the scale and complexity of these works through both abstract and figurative forms. The work ranges from popular and countercultural themes of the 1980s—like Super Mario and Wildstyle graffiti motifs—to exquisite depictions of natural plant life.

The supporters of this emerging genre of art are primarily the artists’ contemporaries or a bit younger; there is no established older patronage to shepherd the movement into art world acceptance. It has been entirely up to these artists, their counterparts selling the work, and the young collectors who ultimately support and validate this new art, to grow together as a community.

The elevated work being created now has carved out greater opportunities in the art world, with some glass artists showing at major galleries in New York and Denver, as well as important international art fairs during Art Basel in Miami. In Lit!, the 2017 exhibition that I curated at Chesterfield Gallery in New York, we showed works that underscored the evolution in the popular perception of marijuana use: from marginal to mainstream, from undistinguished to dignified. The show’s aim was to act as a survey of marijuana’s role in American material culture by highlighting its place among other significant works of Americana and contemporary art.

Mainstream gallery opportunities like these are still new, but even the prestigious Corning Museum of Glass in Steuben County, New York, will be including a sculptural pipe by David Colton in their upcoming major exhibition New Glass Now, which runs from May 2019 through January 2020.

This is the start of the next phase of the Glass Pipe Movement.

SIMON ABRAHMS is the founder of Chesterfield Gallery in New York City, which specializes in contemporary glass. To learn more, visit chesterfieldgallery.com.