Writer, critic and curator MASON RIDDLE received subsidy to spend 27 days in Paris and Nancy, France, and Genoa and Venice, Italy, to research historic and contemporary glass art. This trip will allow her to study, firsthand, the aesthetic connections between European glass traditions and contemporary American, European, Australian and Japanese artists working with glass. She will build a more significant historical context in order to write about glass artists and art, and to curate exhibitions of local, regional and national contemporary glass artists from a more critical position than what is currently being accomplished.