Nate Ricciuto

Nate Ricciuto is a multidisciplinary artist whose work envisions design, architecture, and craft as existing in the odd space between technology and fantasy. His recent projects have been exhibited at the Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, NY), the Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, OH), the Toyama Glass Art Museum (Toyama, Japan), Practice Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), S12 Galleri (Bergen, Norway), Weston Art Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), Roy G Biv and Hawk Galleries (Columbus, OH), The Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH), and the Museum of American Glass (Millville, NJ). He holds a BFA from Ohio State University (2008), and an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture (2015).

Nate has been an Emerging Artist in Residence at Pilchuck Glass School, and a Creative Glass Center of America Fellow at WheatonArts. He was a recipient of the 2021 Momentum Fellowship from the Toledo Museum of Art, the 2020 Saxe Emerging Artist Award from the Glass Art Society, and has received two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council (2017 & 2021). Nate lives in Columbus, OH, where he is an Instructor and Glass Program Coordinator at Columbus College of Art and Design.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Informed by an exploration into both the desire to imagine alternative worlds and the myriad strategies for achieving them, my projects seek to uncover motives for operating outside of the status quo. Through playful interventions that blend boundaries between natural, technological and fantastical, I reconsider narratives of progress and legacies of resistance. My work engages with the language of unconventional architectures and found materials in examining the intersection of craft techniques, disruptive tactics, and homespun ingenuity. I draw from sci-fi imagery, outsider ideologies, and countercultural aspirations, and construct experiences that evoke the potential of both isolation and hyper-connectivity in cultivating delusional and speculative attitudes.

My recent work embraces the restlessness and irreverence of tinkering, an activity that eschews the wisdom of established systems, and hopes to discover redemptive qualities in the unfamiliar and contradictory parts of our experience. I search for ways to see our increasingly technological world as stubbornly messy, imprecise and human, while creating spaces that entertain paranoid sentiments and invite myopic fantasies of self-reliance and escape.

Inspired by affinities between conspiracy theories, handmade structures and alternative lifestyles, my projects probe material relationships and perceptual slippages in reflecting and amplifying an atmosphere of uncertainty, distortion, and everyday absurdity. I approach glass material as a central phenomenon in understanding histories of design, architecture and invention, and utilize this peculiar substance in creating objects and environments that conjure idealistic, inclusive, radical and flawed visions of the future.