420 West 14th St.
New York NY 10014
212-414-4014 (ph)
212-414-2636 (fax)

Although many describe me as a glass artist, it is more accurate to say I am an artist who works with glass.

I started as a painter in the late 1970's, was a pioneer of the vanguard art furniture movement of the 1980's, and eventually stumbled into the glass world by doing reverse-painting on glass after a trip to Haiti in 1981. I've experimented with painting, casting metals and carving wood, but I'm particularly drawn to doing unconventional work with glass. I currently have a studio within a glass-slumping factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn and take advantage of the industrial techniques I'm exposed to there to create art. The essence of my work is to find the sacred in everything.

My current exhibition "Tarot" explores the rich imagery of the classic tarot card deck which was adopted by mystics, occultists and secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. The tradition began in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman, published Le Monde Primitif, a speculative study which included religious symbolism and its survivals in the modern world. De Gébelin first asserted that symbolism of the Tarot de Marseille represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. Gébelin further claimed that the name "tarot" came from the Egyptian words tar, meaning "royal", and ro, meaning "road", and that the Tarot therefore represented a "royal road" to wisdom. De Gébelin wrote this treatise before Jean-François Champollion had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, or indeed before the Rosetta Stone had been discovered, and later Egyptologists found nothing in the Egyptian language to support de Gébelin's fanciful etymologies. Despite this, the identification of the tarot cards with the Egyptian Book of Thoth was already firmly established in occult practice and continues in modern urban legend to the present day.

Carmen Spera