Julie Carcione Cavaz is one of the three recipients ot the 2008 SonomaArts Awards for Emerging Artists.
Ryan lely/Sonoma Valley Sun
In addition to her creative drive, Sonoma glass sculptor Julie Carcione Cavaz has additional incentives to make new pieces – financial support and deadlines – and she’s grateful for both.
As one of three recipients of 2008 SonomaArts Awards for Emerging Artists given by the Arts Council of Sonoma County and Community Foundation Sonoma County, Cavaz has received $5,000 to help finance new work that she’ll show at three exhibits this spring and summer, here and in Santa Rosa. The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art nominated Cavaz for the award, and a jury of curators selected her from 57 artists.
She expects to produce about a half-dozen new pieces in her series of large-size glass sculptures she calls chaplets, because she models them on chaplets that some Catholics wear on their wrists, as a form of rosary beads for prayer.
Cavaz studied painting at the University of San Francisco and then in graduate school, at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she discovered glass. In her first week there, a professor noticed the reflections in her paintings and suggested she check out the school’s glass shop. There, she met Frank Cavaz, a Canadian from Toronto who would become her husband. He was also a new student, studying glass blowing.
After graduation in 1992, the couple spent three years in New Orleans, where Cavaz taught painting and drawing at Delgado Community College, and her husband worked as a glass blower.
Returning to the Bay Area in 1995 to be near family, the couple started Bacchus Glass, first producing vases and other glassware they sold at American Craft Council fairs, then glass for decorative lighting manufacturers in the Bay Area. Now they design and produce hand-blown light fixtures with four full-time employees at their studio on Eighth Street East.
Between running a business and raising two sons, Dylan, eight, and Dante, five, Cavaz effectively had no time for her art, although she still felt a powerful need.
Wanting to remember all her feelings during the birth of her second son, Cavaz wrote everything down afterwards – how she felt at different times and readings from the fetal monitor. Then she created her first glass sculpture, St. Anne Chaplet. Her husband blew 18 red glass balls to represent prayer beads that are connected by copper and steel. On each ball, Cavaz engraved some of what she had written down after the birth. “It’s how art talks about things that are intensely personal but universal,” she said.
Another chaplet honors the martyr St. Therese, with clear glass balls holding such symbols as thorns, an olive branch and blood. Another is for St. Kateri, the first native American to be made a saint. Born in 1656 in upstate New York to an Algonquin mother and a Mohawk father, she devoted herself to teaching prayers to children and helping the sick and the aged.
Viewers find her work in glass accessible, Cavaz says, independent of religious symbolism. “They can have a visceral reaction to the beauty they see.” She mentions a non-religious collector who has one of her chaplets hanging on a wall and feels comforted by its presence every day. “It’s what the viewer thinks that’s important,” Cavaz said.
Exhibits of New Work by Julie Carcione Cavaz:
Emerging Artists Invitational
Courthouse Square, Santa Rosa, April 26, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Emerging Artist Winners Exhibit
Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, May 3 – June 29
Emerging Artists Selected Works
Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, July 12 – August 17
