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MICHAEL JANIS

Craft, Multimedia, Painting, Public Art, Sculpture / Installation, Visual / Media

I am a contemporary artist working primarily in glass, using figurative and narrative forms to explore identity, assimilation, and collective memory. Drawing from my family’s immigrant history, I’m interested in how the body carries psychological and social experience—often fractured, unstable, and unresolved.

In my work, the human figure is abstracted and disrupted rather than depicted conventionally. Through light, shadow, transparency, and reflection, the glass panels create a shifting sense of depth and disorientation, mirroring the fragmented way we experience contemporary life. I use a labor-intensive sgraffito technique with finely ground glass, layering imagery intuitively to build narrative tension.

Glass allows me to work simultaneously with fragility and precision, opacity and clarity—qualities that parallel the instability and resilience embedded in personal and cultural histories.

About the Artist

I am a contemporary artist working primarily in glass, using figurative and narrative forms to explore identity, migration, social history, and collective memory. Trained as an architect, my practice brings a disciplined, structural approach to glass as a conceptual medium rather than a purely material one. My work bridges studio glass and contemporary art and includes sculpture, architectural-scale installations, public art, and community-engaged projects. I am Co-Director of the Washington Glass School in Washington, DC, where I have helped lead nationally recognized public art and educational initiatives. My work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Fuller Craft Museum, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and has been featured by the Corning Museum of Glass, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and American Craft Magazine. I am a Fulbright Scholar and have taught and lectured internationally.   I am particularly interested in how fragile materials can carry durable narratives - how glass can function as memory, witness, and social record within contemporary art discourse. 

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Artist's Statement

I create layered glass works that explore transformation, perception, and memory. Using crushed glass powder as a drawing material, I build imagery through sifting, scratching, and firing, allowing scenes to remain suspended within the glass rather than resolved on the surface. Light, transparency, and sequence play central roles in how the work unfolds, producing shifting readings as the viewer moves. The process is intentionally slow and meditative, resulting in works that suggest meaning without closing it off, encouraging multiple interpretations.

Featured Work

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Glass powder imagery creates this four (4) part work. At the core of my artwork is pure portraiture, but great focus on the disharmony of the self and perception. Pressures from society and the toll it takes on one’s emotional state are featured and the familiar is fractured and distorted by outside influence. I use the frit powder imagery as means of immersion into an emotional tenor. Recently, the world has changed so much that it has become a surreal experience. Feeling disconnected from all sense of “normal” creates a disconnect from one’s environment, as well as from our body and thoughts. We have come to feel that we are someplace else, in some other time, waiting for the moment when we are part of the world again.
My figurative artwork is an exploration of the human form through a fragmented and disjointed lens. By breaking down the body into abstract shapes and jarring angles, I aim to create a sense of unease and disorientation in the viewer. Through this approach, I seek to challenge the conventional notion of beauty and perfection that is often associated with figurative art. Instead, I embrace imperfection and the unconventional, allowing the fractured forms to reveal a deeper, more complex understanding of the human experience. I am drawn to this approach because it mirrors the fragmented nature of our contemporary lives, where we are bombarded with disjointed information and experiences that can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves and each other. By reflecting this fragmentation in my art, I hope to encourage viewers to pause, reflect, and connect with their own sense of disorientation and complexity. Ultimately, my goal is to create art that is both visually striking and emotionally resonant, inviting viewers to engage with the tension between order and chaos, familiarity and unfamiliarity, and perfection and imperfection that is inherent in the human experience.
Commissioned artwork sculpture for new Arlington, VA residential/mixed use development. Framing the corner location of the new plaza at Fairfax Drive and North Quincy St. in Arlington, VA, the sculpture is made of almost 100 individual hand cast glass panels set into a bold geometric framework of acute angles that references the sculptural qualities of the new J-Sol building. The sculpture defines the location and creates a new sense of place with the layering of color, light and shadow. Merging architecture and design with their signature material, glass, the overall presentation of the sculpture is aimed to reflect our modern society and urban space.

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