Nancy Blair’s Glass Menagerie

Nancy Blair is a woman with a history – a herstory, that is. A frank feminist, the 50-something is a sculptor in ceramics, glass and mixed media; an author with five published books to her credit; an educator who teaches ceramics at the Vero Beach Museum of Art and hot-cast glass at Pilchuck Glass School in Washington state; a scholar whose specialty is the goddess-centered religions of pre-history and a business owner who started and operated both a successful restaurant and an art reproduction company.

For the particulars of Nancy’s varied career, one must turn to her memoir, Thank You: Your Opinion Means Nothing to Me, published in 2004 by a division of HarperCollins. Our story will fill you in on what’s happened since.

Nancy was born in Willimantic, Conn., genetically predisposed to art and hard work. Her father was an advertising designer for a company in Hartford. He moonlighted as a sign painter, working from his own shop; he did beautiful hand lettering and he’d let her come along with him on jobs. She learned the craft of gilding from him, she says. He was “pretty remarkable, quite a genius, and his work was sought all over New England.”

Read the entire article in the January 2011 issue