by Dennis Dalman
Thirteen works by stained-glass artist Laura Ruprecht are now on display for public viewing in the Gorecki Art Gallery at the College of St. Benedict.
There will be a public reception for Ruprecht at that gallery from 5-7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25, and she will give a talk starting at 6 p.m.
The exhibit, entitled “The Nature of Wholeness,” opened Sept. 5 and will run through Oct. 10. The gallery is open from 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. The gallery is located within the Benedicta Arts Center at 37 College Ave. S.
Ruprecht is a 2025 recipient of a “Creative Individuals” grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.
Ruprecht’s radiantly colorful stained-glass mosaic panels are described on a poster for the show:
“She uses hand-cut stained glass mosaics to explore the fragility, resilience and the evolving rhythm of life. Each piece reflects her deep connection to nature and the human experience where brokenness and healing co-exist.
“Through luminous surfaces and fractured forms, she invites viewers to find beauty in imperfection and meaning in the act of becoming whole.”
Most of her panels involve birds or other critters, many of them faced with extinction, like the prairie chicken, such as the loggerhead shrike, the burrowing owl and the Monarch butterfly.
Background
In a Sept. 13 interview with the Newsleaders, Ruprecht shared information about her life, her education and her intense involvement with the art of stained-glass.
Born in St. Cloud, she and her family grew up in Rockville. She graduated in 2009 from the College of St. Benedict with a degree in art (specialty in oil painting). Ruprecht and her husband, Jon Schulte, live in north St. Cloud where she works in an art studio located in her garage. Jon is a musician and drum teacher for the St. Cloud-based Wirth Center for the Performing Arts. Some years back, the couple played in a band together – Jon on drums, Laura on keyboards and vocals.
Laura and Jon have two beloved cats, Evelyn and Vonnie.
Besides her passion for art, Laura enjoys gardening, cooking and bicycle riding.
From painting to glass
After completing college, Ruprecht worked at the Paramount Center for the Arts in St. Cloud, and that is where she first tried her hand at stained-glass window/mosaic work. The Paramount Center was commissioned by the City of St. Cloud to create some large concrete sculptures, which contained some stained-glass mosaic insets.
“Although my background was in oil painting, I was an assistant artist to help with the mosaics on those sculptures. And I liked it immediately. That was in 2013.”
Inspiration
Ruprecht said many ideas for her stained-glass mosaic panels “come right out of the blue” but that animals are usually what inspires her work. She loves the symbolism of life that animals seem to embody and how the behaviors of various animals reflect similar behaviors in human beings, how the “pieces” of life over time become integrated into a “whole.” Like many bits of colored glass becoming a unified vision.
She used a burrowing owl as an example. One of her stained-glass panels in the gallery show is of a burrowing owl.
“That owl,” she said, “creates its nest in a hole in the ground to keep it hidden, safe and protected – much the same as human beings use strategies to keep themselves protected.”
Doing the work
When inspiration strikes or when Ruprecht develops an idea, she draws her immediate vision in simple black lines on an iPad. Then she makes a more elaborate copy of that, filling in colors to the shapes within her design.
She then takes the colored drawing to Michael’s Stained-Glass shop in St. Cloud and matches up the colored-glass sheets she will need.
Back home in her studio, she cuts the glass into pieces that can range from very tiny to fairly large. She then grinds the edge of each piece of glass and adheres those pieces to her elaborated drawing on a translucent backer board (usually about 18 x 24 inches). Finally, after many hours or days of work, she lets the adhesion dry entirely and then uses a black grout to fill in all the spaces between the glass pieces. The black grout not only holds the pieces securely in place but also serves as a unifying background that makes the colors contrast and pop out at the viewers. The black grout is much the same as the lead network of church stained-glass windows that “hold” the pieces together and cause the colored glass to look so luminous and radiant.
Thrilled
Ruprecht said she is thrilled to have her works exhibited at a solo show at the Benedict and Dorothy Gorecki Gallery.
“I’m so proud,” she said. “It took a lot of work to do those stained-glass panels and to be honored in a solo show is thrilling, especially at my alma mater (CSB).
This stained-glass art work by artist Laura Ruprecht is a radiant visual symphony of shapes and colors.
This stunning stained-glass mosaic is one of many art works by Laura Ruprecht.
