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In Memoriam: Paul Marioni

The American Craft Council remembers the pioneering glass artist, whose idiosyncratic approach to the material led him to prominence in the field.

By Beth Goodrich
August 21, 2026

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Photo courtesy of Schantz Galleries

Paul Marioni in 2013.

Glass artist Paul Marioni has died at his home in Mexico at the age of 85. An American Craft Council Fellow, he was a major figure in the studio glass movement of the 1970s.

Marioni was born in 1941 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father was a physician; his mother performed occasionally as an opera singer. He was one of four sons, three of whom became noted artists. Marioni attended college at the University of Dayton and San Francisco State University before completing his BA in English and philosophy at the University of Cincinnati in 1967. At the time of his graduation, he was a single father of two young children: Dante (a 2012 ACC Fellow in his own right) and Marina, who both went on to careers as artists.

Marioni began his artistic career in the late 1960s as an award-winning independent filmmaker. Around this time, he met stained-glass artist Judy Raffael, who taught him the fundamentals of working in stained glass. He became enthralled with the medium, and as a largely self-taught artist managed to land an exhibition at the John Bolles Gallery in San Francisco in the mid-1970s.

Photo courtesy of the Corning Museum of Glass

The Conversationalist, 1974, lead glass, lead cane, sheet glass, wood, wire, 27.75 x 28.25 in.

Marioni taught at San Francisco State University from 1974 to 1978, after which time he moved his family to Seattle. He was invited to teach at Pilchuck Glass School shortly after its inception in 1971, and he continued to teach there off and on for the next 30 years. His teaching experience extended to many other institutions, including Penland School of Craft, California College of Arts and Crafts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, among others. Marioni described himself as a “radical”—his teaching style was unconventional, and he claimed to have been fired from four different schools. Three of those schools invited him back. He gave up teaching in 2001.

Marioni was first introduced to glassblowing by Marvin Lipofsky, and his style tended toward surrealism. He became frustrated with the interruption of the lead lines of stained glass, and as a result he developed a technique for creating a pictorial image on a blown vessel that he would then cut apart and flatten into a sheet, essentially creating a stained-glass picture without the lead.

It was with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship grant—he earned three, in 1976, 1982, and 1989—that Marioni developed techniques for casting in glass, a practice that he would employ in many of his public-art commissions. Being a self-taught glass artist gave him the sense of freedom to problem solve and devise his own methods to achieve the effect he desired. Light was the focus of his artistic pursuit; he often said he “disrespects” glass. “My real interest is in working with light. It has a fascination for me,” he told American Craft magazine in 1983.

Photo by Ed Watkins

Fuel Fool, 1988, glass, 10 x 8 x 8 in.

Marioni’s works were included in several exhibitions at the American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Arts and Design), including New Stained Glass (1978), Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical (1987), and Craft Today: USA (1992). Institutions that hold his work in their collections include the Corning Museum of Glass in Upstate New York; the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington; the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan; the Oakland Museum of California; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.

Marioni served on the board of Pilchuck Glass School as well as the Glass Art Society. The Glass Art Society presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004, and he received the Stanislav Libensky Award in 2009. The American Craft Council inducted him into its College of Fellows in 1999.

For more information about Paul Marioni, read the article “Light-Motif: The Glass of Paul Marioni” from the December 1983/January 1984 issue of American Craft, an oral history interview at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, or listen to his interview on the podcast Talking Out Your Glass. A segment of the Craft in America episode “Family” features Paul along with his children, Dante and Marina.

Photo by Bob Hanson

Dali, 1972, glass, lead, Fresnel lenses, leaded stained glass, 27.5 x 26 in.

Photo by Bob Hanson

Plug - For Those Who Dare, 1975, glass, lead, enamels, photo silkscreened and color photo transparency; leaded stained glass, 24 x 26 in.
Photo by Bob Hanson

Journey Through the Valley of the Kings, 1975, glass, lead, X-ray, zograph, kadolith, polaroid filters, two-way mirror, cracked glass; leaded stained glass, sandblasted, photo-laminated, multiple glazing, 24 x 26 in.
Photo by George Erml

The Warriors, Shapers of Our Destiny, 1984, glass, steel, 20 x 24 x 1.5 in.

Beth Goodrich is an independent librarian and archivist specializing in the arts. She was previously the librarian and archivist for the American Craft Council from 2017 to 2025.

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