Edgewood Artist Wins Prestigious Award

Edgewood Orchard Galleries glass artist Audrey Handler is a recipient of the 2014 Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award. Handler has exhibited her blown glass at Edgewood Orchard for 31 years.

Handler is well known for her bowls of realistic life-sized blown glass fruit and vegetables. In a series, called “Pear in a Chair,” Handler collaborates with her husband, John Martner, creating small sculptures combining wood and glass. They include tiny chairs and love seats, fabricated of precious woods, mated with life-sized glass pears, apples, cherries and petite glass wedding gifts.

A recent addition to Handler’s blown glass works are landscape paintings using low fire glass paints fused on tile.

Handler’s glass blowing studio is housed in a renovated cheese factory in Verona, Wis., where she lives with her husband, a woodworker.

The 2014 ceremony presenting the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Awards was conducted on May 16 at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend. Handler was one of seven honorees for this prestigious award.

In 2013, Anne Haberland Emerson, a long-time supporter of Wisconsin artists through her lifetime involvement with Edgewood Orchard Galleries, received the award. Edgewood Orchard Galleries, open daily 10 am to 5 pm, is located at 4140 Peninsula Players Road. For more information, call 920.868.3579 or visit edgewoodorchard.com.