Eric Rubinstein

For over 30 years, Eric Rubenstein has been a dedicated community member and user of UrbanGlass Studio in Brooklyn, NY, where he has been passionately developing and creating his intricate glass sculptures.

From the beginning of his glassblowing career, Eric was fascinated with inserting existing glass elements (canes, murrine, glass bits) into molten hot glass. The result is the permanent suspension of these elements within his finished pieces. Eric noticed similarities between the emerging patterns and colors and his memories of the coral reefs he’d seen while snorkeling in tropical waters. The objective of suggesting undersea imagery in glass has been a part of his process ever since.

Rubenstein says of his work, “My recent pieces are Reef Relics and Reef Remnants. In my imagination, I see them as gemlike objects being viewed by people of future generations—the preserved remnants of those undersea worlds that we might have saved but failed to do so.

They took all the reefs and put ‘em in a reef museum. (With apologies to Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi, 1970).”