Born in 1949 in Brooklyn, New York, Howard Ben Tré is a contemporary sculptor known for his many large-scale public commissions in glass. Ben Tré gained significant technical experience as a teen while attending an industrial arts high school. He didn’t consider pursuing art until he began taking studio classes at Portland State University in Oregon, while studying biology (BSA, 1978). Ben Tré was hooked, and he went to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence to complete his MFA (1980). While at RISD, he came across the glass studio, and he was immediately drawn to the medium. He soon became interested in casting glass, applying the skills he had gained in his high school’s foundry to the new material. Ben Tré is known for working with a glass body that – in its final form – absorbs light, yet remains luminous. He has mounted numerous solo exhibitions and has been commissioned to create outdoor site-specific works for public plazas and sculpture parks around the country. His work is represented within the collections of museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. Ben Tré has received a number of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1980, 1984, and 1990), and he was elected a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006.