"The thing I liked best was being able to make art without relying on anyone else." Photo: Maureen Peabody (B.F.A. '08)
Larry Zgoda (B.A. ’75) freely admits, “I never set out to be an artist.” As a teenager on Chicago’s Northwest Side, he was captivated by cars and thought about a career in mechanics, “but my parents wouldn’t let me have a car to tinker with,” he teases.
He now has scores of singular and inventive works for public institutions and private clients to his credit. A healthy following of architects, developers, and designers specify his work for their projects. Zgoda, 58, is clearly an artist, and a successful one at that. But the surest sign of his professional prowess as a stained glass artist is that 10 years ago he was able to forswear the bread-and-butter jobs of his earlier years—namely “historic restoration, replication, and all those tedious lampshades,” he discloses.
In college, Zgoda kicked around Northeastern University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for six years, studying music and psychology at the former, filmmaking and art at the latter. He transferred to Columbia College when he discovered photography, and once here made Chicago’s ample stock of exquisitely ornamented buildings the subject of his work. “I always found the stained glass their most intriguing aspect,” he explains.
An independent study class in what became his senior year allowed Zgoda to explore the crafting of stained glass “for credit,” he says, still incredulous, but with clear appreciation for the academic freedom. Before the year was out, “I was hooked. The thing I liked best was being able to make art without relying on anyone else. In filmmaking, you needed a whole crew.” With new resolve, he graduated in 1975 and worked jobs that allowed him to do his stained glass work on the side, until he hung out his own shingle for business in 1978.
Since then, Zgoda has become known as a groundbreaker in his field. His work incorporates traditional materials and techniques, yet he executes and applies them in fresh new ways. In his hands, highly refractive crown glass, first invented in the Middle Ages, is pieced together in simple but strategically crafted designs to maximize its kinetic reflective qualities. Glass “jewels”—so named for their similarity to faceted gemstones and so rarely used today that Zgoda imports them himself from Austria—are scintillating accents that give his streamlined designs rich complexity. He also rescues flawed or experimental glass produced by area glassmakers, cutting and refiring it into flat pieces he can use in his work. Zgoda even invented his own innovative chipping technique to give refined glass edges a textured, scalloped finish. “I call the pieces Clovis glass because I was inspired by the arrowheads of that primitive culture,” he explains.
As he assembled works for a March show at Prairie Arts and Fibers in Grayslake, Illinois, he marveled at the accidental nature of his passion and profession. “Who knows where I would be today if I hadn’t taken that independent study?”
See Zgoda’s work, which also includes mosaics, metalworking, and woodworking, at larryzgodastudio.com and Aquae Sulis (2211 N. Elston St., Chicago).
—Lisa Skolnik
