Spartan Profiles: Pat Benincasa
DIMENSIONAL GLASS ART
Art can come in all kinds of shapes and forms. Artist Pat Benincasa, BFA ’73, an adjunct faculty member at the College of Visual Arts, St. Paul, MN, specializes in work on dimensional glass. Recently, for example, she won a national competition with “Falling Water Skylight,” a suspended, seven-ton glass and steel waterfall that sits in a government building in Minneapolis.
“There are not many people doing what I do,” says Benincasa. “Traditionally, artists who have worked with glass have used stained glass with leaded came. I treat glass more like a sculptural material, arranging layers of glass overlays with steel framing. That’s my passion.”
A native of Waterford, Pat learned all kinds of techniques while at MSU and actually spent 12 years as an oil painter. “I used to put 10 to 20 layers of glaze on canvases,” she recalls. “Then one day it occurred to me that instead of glaze I could simply use glass.” That realization took place in 1988, and since then, she’s worked with dimensional glass. “My philosophy is that light, in and of itself, is beautiful and fleeting,” explains Pat. “In its fullness, it empties space and keeps darkness at bay.”
Acting on that philosophy, she recently designed the “Redemption Window,” a non-flat, 3-D stained glass chapel window consisting of a 10-foot high glass cross perched on limestone boulders, for a church. “I asked myself why church windows had to be flat, and why they should only be beautiful from the inside,” she notes. “The Redemption Window uses 34 angled pieces of glass and is also beautiful from the outside, especially when the sun is shining on it.” She also did “Moon Boat and Night Glass Sky,” a glass sculpture in Kansas City, MO.
In addition to her glass works, she has paintings in New York, Chicago, Florida, and the Weisman Museum in Minneapolis.
