Julia Weber
Staff writer
Sean Glover will deliver the second of the 2025 Chautauqua Visual Arts Lectures at 6:30 p.m. tonight in Hultquist Center.
Glover is a faculty member this summer in the School of Art, and his work will be on view in “Harmony,” the School of Art faculty exhibition opening Tuesday, July 2, curated by Susan and John Turben Director of CVA Galleries Judy Barie. Glover received his Master of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University and has exhibited nationally and internationally. He teaches at Tufts University.
Glover works in fresco, framing a well-known, centuries-old technique through a contemporary lens to bring issues of technology and labor to the forefront of his work.
Growing up in a military family, Glover said he was encouraged to prioritize practicality and service to others and that, in his experience in the education system, art was not considered to be an avenue for those values. At first, he listened, but he always felt like something was missing.
“I was always tinkering and playing with things. I was fixing things in a certain way,” Glover said. “I realized my creative avenue through that was handworking.”
His background was in sculpture, but it wasn’t until an artist residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture that he found fresco.
“The moment I applied plaster to the wall, I felt like a circuit was complete, like there was something electric happening,” he said. “The way I was thinking about art, thinking about objects, thinking about history, it all made sense.”
The fresco technique is thousands of years old and spans across many cultures. Through a series of chemical reactions, limestone is first fired until it turns into a fine powder. Then, water is added to the powder to create a sort of putty, which can be spread and manipulated. It can be difficult to time the process and work with the material instead of against it, but when done right, artists can add pigment to the plaster to create the vibrant, rich frescoes seen time and time again throughout history.
“It’s that rare moment where the chemical reality and the romantic idea of the painter come together and are working,” Glover explained.
In his artist lecture, Glover will discuss the history of frescoes as an artistic medium and his use of them in contemporary sculpture. In his experience, the way to progress as an artist is to “just keep making.”
“Just be honest about who you are, what you care about, but just always keep making,” said Glover.
