Dominick Labino was an artist, an inventor, a technologist and a master craftsman. He is an internationally-known glass artist whose work is included in more than 65 museums in the United States and abroad. Dominick Labino: The Man
And His Art, a WBGU-PBS production, showcases Labino's artistry and craftsmanship while providing
an interesting look at the artist through his
environment and personality. The 30 minute program received an 1981 OEBIE award in the production achievement category.

During his 40 year career in the glass industry,he developed glass compositions, processes and machines for forming glass fibers, glass papers and furnace designs. Three of his developments for glass fibers having to do with insulation against extreme temperatures were used in the Apollo and Gemini space craft.

Vice president and director of research and development for Johns-Manville
Fiber Glass Corporation when he retired in 1965, he continued to serve as a research consultant.

A craftsman for many years, Labino worked in oils and watercolor, metal casting and wood sculpture during the late forties and fifties, when he also made enamel-on-copper jewelry, formulating his own enamels and creating a device for cutting and shaping beads from copper tubing.

In 1963, on his 150-acre farm near Grand Rapids, Ohio, he began working with hot glass as an art medium, doing free hand glass blowing.

He designed and built his own furnaces, annealing ovens, glass-blowing tools and finishing equipment, and his laboratory was equipped for testing the properties of glass. One of his designs,a triple-hinged swinging door on his glass-melting
furnace worked so effortlessly and safely that it has been copied by other studio glass blowers.

Labino formulated his own compositions from raw materials and his research in color development has resulted in glass compositions with unusual and exciting effects. With his command of the chemistry of glass, he was able to achieve colors which are uniquely his own and visual effects which are dependent upon and enhanced by the high quality of the glass itself.

Labino had investigated glassmaking in ancient times and his research to prove the technique by which Egyptians of the 18th dynasty (1500 B.C.) made hollow vessels on a sand core was published by the Corning Museum of Glass in its "Journal of Glass Studies" in 1966. He also wrote numerous articles for technical publications and was author of a book, "Visual Art in Glass," published in 1968.

The artist's work has been shown in local, regional, national and international exhibits, both competitive and invitational, and he had won major awards at all levels.

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