Preston Singletary: Raven Visits SFO

Preston Singletary: Raven Visits SFO

Preston Singletary (b. 1963) is a Seattle-based artist who combines forms, imagery, and storytelling from his Tlingit heritage and culture with modern glass sculpture. Singletary uses glass as a medium to connect Indigenous art with contemporary art and states, “my work challenges the notion that Native artists must only use traditional materials. By embracing glass as a storytelling medium, I seek to affirm our presence and identity, reinforcing that Indigenous cultures are dynamic, evolving, and rooted in resilience.” In recent years, Singletary’s work has focused on stories that surround Raven, a mythological figure found in Tlingit and other Indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Preston Singletary: Raven Visits SFO is one in a series of new exhibitions accompanied by text from New York Times bestselling author Garth Stein (b. 1964), who is also of Tlingit ancestry. According to Singletary, this collaboration “resulted in what I have come to think of as a new direction in my own work: imagining the stories of what Raven is up to these days.”      

[image]
Detail of Bear’s Cave  2025
Preston Singletary (b. 1963)
blown and sand-carved glass
Courtesy of the artist
Photograph by Russell Johnson
S25–05
L2025.0601.006