03 Apr DETAILS: THE MECHANICS OF MASTERY

Ona Magaro has always been an artist.

Born in Enola, Pennsylvania in 1976 as the only child of parents deeply ensconced in fine food, a small-scale farm, and hospitality, Magaro spent her formative years surrounded by nature and extended family on the namesake Magaro Road. The summer before she began high school, her parents enrolled her in Buck’s Rock Performing and Creative Arts Camp, where she enjoyed 12 weeks of artistic exploration in mediums as diverse as they were numerous. There, she developed her fascination for art’s materiality, in forms both fine and functional.

From her studio in Bozeman, Montana, Ona Magaro produces technically inspired fine art and custom lighting, fixtures, chandeliers, furniture, decor, and large-scale commercial installations in a range of metal and glass finishes. | PHOTO BY AUDREY HALL

After high school, she attended New York’s Alfred University, where she studied material engineering — one of the first and only programs focused on such in the country at the time — and fine arts. She spent countless hours examining various compounds’ impacts on clay, which ceramic students hand-formulated on site. Focused on the science inherent in those manipulations, she applied the same principles to glass, creating new colors, textures, and forms like a chef in a kitchen. With a mind dually inclined toward the technicality of creation and its manifestation, she found an educational home that fostered her curiosity and talented professors like sculptor Glenn Zweygardt, who challenged and influenced her commitment to knowing how each choice in a creative process impacted the whole.

“I wanted that information,” explains Magaro. “I only felt I could execute something conceptually if I knew how to do it technically. People think they’re making something new [with their art], but it’s just a new recipe. I kept feeling like if I knew more technique, it would somehow make execution easier.”

Magaro continued her education, graduating from Ohio’s Bowling Green, where she produced glass, mixed-media, and large-scale sculptures in earnest, perfecting the engineering of such creations, the skeletal system necessary to support the structure, and the mechanics behind the making.

“It comes back to the process; the joy that I get with this work is the process, not the end product so much,” says Magaro. “Working with glass? It’s magical — fragile, fluid. How do you capture the fluidity of the material in that one moment? In thinking of a bird, I might make one swoop of the underside of a wing, maybe just the movement off the top of the head to the tip of the beak — that’s line drawing in glass, not the whole bird. When I sculpt, that’s what I do. Glass looks weightless, but it weighs a ton — how do I create that [feeling of weightlessness]?”

As if both landing and taking off at once, this glass sculpture captures dynamic movement in static form. | PHOTO BY GIBEON PHOTOGRAPHY

Now, with over two decades of training, experience, and experimentation, she is still fascinated with the craft and is driven to create. And it shows.

After settling in Montana and launching OM Design, first in Absarokee and eventually in Bozeman with her two children in 2015, Magaro found a home for both her heart and her work. She produces technically inspired fine art and custom lighting, fixtures, chandeliers, furniture, and decor in a range of metal and glass finishes, alongside large-scale commercial installations, sharing her lifelong passion with a growing body of collectors, collaborators, and enthusiasts.

The translucence and fragility of glass implies an inherent weightlessness, but the medium is actually very heavy. Central to Magaro’s approach, this interplay of contraries — the process of coaxing forth this and other dichotomies in both her utilitarian and fine artworks — fuels her seemingly boundless infatuation with experimentation. | PHOTO BY JESSIE MOORE

Offering a poignant exploration of the material’s delicate beauty, Magaro’s intricate and evocative designs employ glass not just as a medium but as a storytelling tool, allowing light, texture, color, and form to narrate each visually stunning piece. While some artists use glass as a conduit for more abstract concepts, she celebrates the medium in its own right, fusing traditional techniques with innovative approaches to transform simple molecules into masterful works of art.

Trained in a number of mediums, Magaro has developed her own methods to bring her visions to life. Each piece marries her deft handling of molten glass and dexterity with coldworking, the process by which cooled glass is sculpted, ground, and polished. Her signature works are often layered, creating a sense of depth and movement. By combining transparency with opacity, smoothness with texture — the roughness of rock or delicacy of flora — Magaro manipulates light’s play across and through the glass. Her frequent addition of color, whether in subtle gradients or vibrant hues, creates further dimensionality and mesmerizing visual interest.

For Magaro, joy in the process compels the creation. | PHOTO BY JESSIE MOORE

Magaro’s desire to experiment with process and material is perhaps the most defining characteristic of her work. This quality renders her as more of an engineer than an artist in her eyes. Abby Lutz, Magaro’s childhood friend and founder of the clothing companies ABELINE and of_dress, might agree, describing years of collaborating in the installation of site-specific works at the renowned Fabric Workshop and Museum, an internationally acclaimed contemporary art museum in Philadelphia.

“Her work is solid simplicity — she is solid simplicity,” Lutz says of Magaro with a laugh. “She incorporated leather — this soft, supple material — in one of her installations and, through some alchemy of her own invention, it became solid. Her works hold space; they become sculptural. But that kind of speaks to who she is, the most solid person I know. The way she tackles her work is without hesitation, as brave as possible. She’s always pushing the boundary of art, pushing the traditional practices to incorporate something different, something new. That’s what gives her work such a nuanced style, and what draws interior designers, builders, and collaborators to her vision.”

Hillary Asay, lead designer with Bozeman, Montana-based Domaine Interiors, has worked with Magaro on custom fabrication projects for nearly a decade and has yet to produce a design problem that Magaro couldn’t solve, and solve beautifully. “She’s always willing to think creatively to find the best solution, no matter if it’s lighting or an architectural feature going into a home,” says Asay. “She’s my go-to for custom lighting, sculptures, and glass artworks, always delivering outstanding results.”

Over the next 18 months, Magaro will focus on several large sculptural installations in public spaces throughout Montana, including the Benefis Aging Center in Great Falls; Gallatin County Justice Center in Bozeman; and Montana State University Mark and Robyn Jones College of Nursing buildings in Bozeman, Billings, Great Falls, Kalispell, and Missoula. Having moved to a larger studio in March to fit the massive installations’ production, she is enthusiastic about the work ahead. “I absolutely love public art because so many people get to engage with it,” says Magaro.

Magaro’s large sculptural installations, like this one at Benefis Women’s and Children’ Center in Great Falls, Montana, marry the vision of artistic exploration and the necessary precision of structural engineering. | PHOTO BY JESSIE MOORE

A custom cast-glass chandelier, though simple in style, provides an undeniably industrial vibe. | PHOTO BY JESSIE MOORE

“As human beings, we have an interactive relationship with light and color because of our complex system of perception,” Magaro adds. “It continues to amaze me how much is being discovered about how we perceive and the evolutionary process. Color inspires us — stimulates us to experience joy, happiness, appreciation, and healing. I want to create these experiences for others.”

And so she does. Magaro often accentuates the interplay between light and shadow, yin and yang, in works reverently meditative. The tension between fragility and strength, particularly, is a common theme within her work, and glass is a compelling metaphor for the human experience, fraught with both inherent vulnerability and graceful resilience. This play of opposites is a study of life’s impermanence, the inescapable moments of physical and spiritual fracture abutting those of power and permanence in an endless cycle of birth and death, making and unmaking.

When asked about the mark she hopes to leave on the art world, Magaro’s response is both humble and sincere. “I’m not going to, not the art world as we know it. Those who do that aren’t me. I’m kind of all over the place, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. For me, truthfully, the only impact I have outside myself is my relationships with people; I focus on the footprint I will leave. I want to raise good humans. Beyond that, if I make an impact on someone’s life for the better, that’s all I can ask for.”

Jessica Bayramian Byerly is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications, including The Montana Historian, Destination Big Sky, Views., and Big Sky Journal. She also curates distinctive content for a range of regional businesses, multimedia agencies, and nonprofits. A Bozeman, Montana native, Byerly is currently the associate editor for Big Sky Journal.