Josh Simpson Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1949 -

Josh Simpson attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York and learned glass blowing at Goddard College in 1972. At that point Simpson built his first glass studio in the Northeast Kingdom, Vermont, where he first began in a teepee and traded his glass for a thousand pounds of dried chickpeas on which he subsisted. His second studio established in Northford, Connecticut in 1973. Attended ACC Rheinbeck Craft Show and obtained first gallery order for glass. In 1976, Simpson moved to Shelburne Falls, where he began to produce his first glass planets (for which he later became famous) to entertain visiting school children. Josh held his first international exhibition at Galerie Heidi Schneider in Zurich in 1988. Simpson met his future wife, an Airforce Mission Specialist Cady Coleman, whose astronautical and extreme environment missions in outer space, Antarctica, and the deep sea influenced Simpson’s glass spheres that represented space, planets and underwater life forms. Among his most intriguing or compelling works in glass are called “tektites” were inspired by molten meteorites from outer space. In 2006 he was commissioned by the Corning Museum of Glass to make a hundred pound glass “planet”. The next year the Huntsville Museum of Art opened a career retrospective for Josh. His exhibition record is extensive, and his glass is represented in innumerable museums and private collections both in this country and abroad.