Emerging Markets: Banjo and the Glass Goddess

Even collectors with taste for the edge and thrill of outlaw life may be surprised to find fine art emerging from the peculiar realm where galleries and innovative glass meet the heady highs of hashish. Recent legislation in many American states has freed cannabis from the tight bonds of law which pressed its consumption underground into the clandestine spaces of shadow and secrecy, and a surprising new form of art has appeared, unique to these discrete circumstances, yet arriving into the art scene with an unusually well-developed secondary market.

Hybridity is often a mark of innovation. New combinations of established themes bring with them the twisty and unnerving excitement inspired by the freshness of novelty, the pleasant sensation of unfamiliar experiences. This enjoyable sensual gratification is especially present in art created by Banjo, a gifted and entrepreneurial artist who is early into the transitional business of high-end hard glass sculpture as fine art.

The Soft Glass Mafia

For centuries, soft soda-lime glass was the traditional province of Venetian blowers, who learned skillful techniques of color and twist in the privacy of guild workshops behind a glass curtain of almost mafiosi omertà. It was shaped into bottles and jars, delicate tableware, beading, sophisticated ornamentation, spectacular chandeliers, and sentimental souvenirs. The methods of production were closely guarded secrets – 13^th-century guild glassmakers living on Murano were condemned to death if they attempted to abandon the privilege and clique of their pampered lives on the island, and assassins were sent to execute any who deserted their caste. In this compressed culture of competition and elitism, exquisite and delicate innovations were developed, introducing rainbows of color and intricate patterns of cane and murine twisted and blown by superior craftsmen into forms of elegant curve and grace. The most sophisticated glass became a symbol of luxuriant wealth, collected by an aristocratic audience of admirers. In the 20^th century, much of the output of Venetian glass ateliers was collected by tourists and gathered in curio cabinets back at home as reminders of their initiations into the world of collecting, its value regulated by the limitations of the market brought by its secretive sources and its antiquity.

Banjo, Deva Wubot, Borosilicate glass, 6.5" x 7" x8", 2016

Hard borosilicate glass, which was invented in the 19th century, became the province of laboratory equipment, because it was extremely strong and could withstand greater extremes of temperature. Because it was prosaic it did not enjoy the admiration of wealthy collectors until very recently, when innovative American artists figured out how to introduce brightly colored oxides, and artists like Banjo began creating unexpected and iconic sculpture, with the bold novelty of mixed aesthetics.

Outlaw Glass and Pop Art

In the 1990s pot smokers enjoyed inhaling cannabis through rudimentary pipes made by innovative glassblowers like Bob Snodgrass. Banjo learned the basic craftsmanship of pipe making as he joined the hippie cavalcade following the Grateful Dead in the 1980s and 1990s, selling his wares in the deadhead marketplace that gathered outside the concert halls and theatres, and wandering to rainbow gatherings in the woods. But he soon found the simple pipes he made and sold unfulfilling. He had dropped out from art college to follow the barefoot bohemian path during his final year at Siena Heights University, where he studied sculpture and art history, and his creative drive was unsatisfied by the basic limitations of pipe and bowl, so he soon began to create more complex pipes with increasingly intricate twists and turns between mouthpiece and bowl. Attracted to cartoon characters and icons of popular culture, he created glass motorcycle girls, Megatron, and Optimus Prime, and learned ambitious methods of coloring glass, blowing gold and silver dust into the glowing molten surface under his blue blowtorch flame. He was making functional art, and, now a father saw the potential to make a steady income to support his growing family.

Banjo, Fractal Foam Devi, Borosilicate glass, 8”x 9” x 7.5”, 2024

His first customers were underground pot dealers with disposable income to spend, and they responded enthusiastically to his complex sculptured work, using his increasingly intricate pipes, but also collecting them purely for their aesthetic value. As American cannabis legislation relaxed, covert dealers turned into legitimate brick and mortar storefront traders, and the bohemian outlaws became bourgeois businessmen. Banjo followed the newly emerging market for his work. Precisely at the same time his ambition grew, cannabis culture became an acceptable, if edgy part of middle-class life, and gradually cannabis products found the discriminating connoisseurship afforded to fine wine, with varietal preferences for the form the herb took, and regional rivalries of taste and quality. Sophisticated smokers began to appreciate the aesthetic practicalities of their pipes, looking for beautiful equipment to enable and enhance their beautiful experiences. Banjo’s prices entered the tens of thousands.

Spiritual Fulfilment

Bright lead glass once filled the glowing and light windows of Western civilization’s greatest churches and cathedrals and offered a visual pathway to transcendence. Banjo was an early participant in the hybrid moment when the resonance between the spiritual experience of smoking cannabis and the spiritual glass of the churches met the pragmatic and aesthetic needs of smokers. But his personal spiritual path was complicated. His father was a mid-Western dairy farmer, while his mother was a hippy back-to-the-lander, who became an adherent to Baha’i, a middle eastern offshoot of Shia Islam. His parents soon divorced, and Banjo grew up chanting Baha’i prayers, skateboarding, and listening to ghetto rap on schooldays, while singing Baptist hymns on Sundays.

Banjo, Graphene Devi, Borosilicate glass, 8.5 x 7” x 7.5 “, 2021

Cannabis is a path to God in parts of the Hindu tradition, and, influenced by the alternative religious paths he had found on the hippy trail, Banjo began producing sculptures of the pantheon. Elephant headed Ganesh and dancing Shiva were his subjects, as he blended the tricks of pattern and color usually associated with soft glass with the bright tubes and tight curves of hard glass. But Banjo’s influences weren’t limited to the iconography of the gods – his instinct for sophistication had led him to highly developed imagery by H.R. Giger, the brilliant designer of Alien imagery whose biomorphs combined machines and living creatures into spectacles of horror and sublime pleasure, and Alex Grey, whose visionary hybrids of anatomical kundalini speculation and spirituality turned on a generation of seekers. His sculptures became hyper-complex, blending pop-surrealism with transcendence, fine art with function, the formal structures of hard glass with the pretty pirouettes of the soft.

A Glass Marketplace

Banjo met the pop-surrealist curator Greg Escalante in 2016, and the brilliant innovator quickly arranged for a show of his work alongside other important leaders of the lowbrow Los Angeles underground. Banjo had entered the fine art world. But Escalante died the following year, and Banjo, saddened by the loss of his new friend and mentor, retreated to his studio. A recent pop-up at The Chambers Project marks his re-entry into commercial representation.

Banjo, Isis, Borosilicate glass, 18”x 13” x 13”, 2016

Sharp collectors who recognize the value of hybridity and authentic innovation are already enthusiastic investors in the aesthetic of Banjo’s art, which is a satisfying mixture of the mood of our time and new techniques developed in the furnace of fine art. He seldom has inventory in stock, because the demand for his work exceeds his supply, and his prices for major pieces are creeping toward $100,000. Because his first wave of collectors were clandestine drug dealers, followed by a second wave of wealthy smokers after legislation, a discrete, but thriving secondary market already exists for his work, with anecdotal reports of collectors already making up to 100%-200% returns on their initial investments in pristine pieces. His glass sculptures are unorthodox and authentic, unlike the engineered output of the conventional art market. His work has evolved from fulfilling the simple needs of deadhead smokers into the complex and specialized output of a unique and successful fine artist satisfying the demands of a highly evolved niche. However, curious connoisseurs should not be surprised if they can still spot a tube ending in a mouthpiece, or a bowl, these little Easter eggs revealing the outlaw origins of these luminous and numinous pieces of art.

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