“We’re in mid-drip,” said Gregory Nangle by way of introduction when we arrived at his Philadelphia glass studio and foundry on a chilly March afternoon. “Watch out, this piece of glass might blow up a little.” Nangle and his assistants were hard at work on one of his own sculptures, a totem of found hardware cast in bronze and dripping with glass, the likes of which show in spaces like Philly’s prestigious Wexler Gallery. But on any other given day, the studio’s attentions could be focused on a commission for Anthropologie (the sculpted glass-and-metal register displays for the store’s Regent Street flagship), Robert DeNiro (the Art Deco lenses that adorn the exterior of the actor’s Greenwich Hotel), or Animal Collective, the New York hipster band who earlier this year projected lasers through Nangle’s spiky glass stalagmites as part of a performative sound installation in the Guggenheim rotunda. Called Outcast, his studio has a client roster a mile long and a kamikaze-like embrace of new work to match — Nangle seems to love the thrill of a challenge, and he can’t complain about the money that comes with such projects, either, for it allows him and his cohorts to continue making art.
“We’re very different from normal foundries,” Nangle says. “It’s usually very hard to work with a foundry as an artist. You’re struggling to communicate these ideas that aren’t real yet to someone who doesn’t truly care. That’s why I started my own; I was sick of being made to feel like that.” Nangle moved into this particular space — a cavernous former sand-casting factory where almost every surface is covered with hardware, tools, archived projects, and odd little shrines to the so-called gods of glass — three years ago, and though there are leftovers from the previous tenant, Nangle and his crew built much of the studio’s infrastructure from scratch.
Nangle was already used to doing things his own way. He attended Philly’s Tyler School of Art as well as an experimental studio program at the University of Hartford, but eventually dropped out of both programs. “Making art is all I’ve ever done, and I don’t think I was born with much natural ability, so I’ve had to work twice as hard as everybody else,” he says. “I was a good student in that regard. I just wasn’t very good at the academic classes.” After his studies, Nangle went to work for Simon Pearce and spent a year blowing glass in a factory to perfect his technique. “But those jobs are boring,” he says. The exception? An apprenticeship with the Pennsylvania-based artist Steve Tobin, who taught Nangle how to cast bronze and for whom Nangle still does projects. The two worked together on one of Tobin’s most famous pieces, a casting of the roots of a tree, dug up from the grounds of the Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, which served as a waystation after 9/11.
At the end of our studio tour, Nangle turned and exclaimed, “Have you ever been anywhere like this? I haven’t.” Neither had we.
