Damian Priour was 6 years old before he realized sand was not an ingredient on a hot dog. The eldest son of a family seven generations born on the shores of Padre Island, Priour and his art are products of the Gulf’s tidal forces as surely as weather.
In his sculpture, glass has become a metaphor for water. It alternately pools in rivulets or flows like powerful currents, as he wills, carving up immense slabs of fossil-laced native Texas limestone. When Priour first combined the two in the 1970’s, like a sailfish yanked in by some incomprehensible force, he was hooked; the pairing of materials was as natural to him as saltwater. Collectors, critics, and museums have agreed.
Damian Priour’s sculptures have been widely exhibited and are included in important collections throughout the world: the Corning Museum of Glass, The Equitable Companies, McDonald’s World Headquarters, and Texas Sculpture Park, among others. His art can be found in private collections as diverse as Cher’s, the Southern Baptist Convention headquarters, and Emmaus Catholic Church; his large-scale works are displayed in public collections from Palm Springs to Austin to Corpus Christi.
Priour received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin in 1972, completed Design Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1977, and participated in the International Sculpture Conference at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in 1988. He has taught classes in creativity at the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle and Centro del Arte in Monterrey, Mexico. He works at his ranch and studio west of Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife Paula.
