Charles Jarboe - Bio

Charles Jarboe is a current second-year MFA candidate in Glass at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Jarboe’s background is in sculpture, performing arts, theatrical and architectural lighting design. His previous master’s studies in lighting at the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute continues to inform his multidisciplinary approach to artmaking.

Jarboe began formally studying art as an undergraduate at Goucher College where he focused on sculpture. Jarboe also began working with sound during a semester abroad at the Glasgow School of Art and incorporated sound installation, painting, and drawing into his final undergraduate thesis exhibition titled Explorations in Sound: Black, White, and Gray in 2009. It was during undergrad that Jarboe also discovered the transformative power of light as an artistic medium while working on theater and dance productions both onstage as a performer and behind the scenes as a student technician.

Jarboe’s fascination with the ability of light to profoundly affect perception and emotion led him to work as a theatrical lighting designer in New York City after finishing his undergraduate studies. He worked on dozens of productions with dance and theater companies in New Jersey and New York, both as a designer and electrician. In 2013, Jarboe developed and performed his light and sound installation Clavier à Lumières, inspired by the sensorial connections between color and sound explored by Isaac Newton, Vincent van Gogh, and Alexander Scriabin.

In 2014, Jarboe pursued a Master of Science degree in lighting at the Lighting Research Center in order to investigate the psychological and physiological effects of light. While as a graduate student and staff research scientist at the LRC for the following five years, Jarboe researched means of applying laboratory studies on the impacts of light stimuli on the human circadian system into architectural practice in numerous contexts, from schools and offices to long-term care facilities. Jarboe developed architectural lighting systems, experimental apparatus for lab studies, and personalized light devices that aimed to increase circadian entrainment in various populations and improve overall health and well-being outcomes. In 2018, Jarboe worked for architectural lighting design firm Cline, Bettridge, Bernstein in New York City, before returning to the Lighting Research Center in 2019. In 2020, Jarboe’s research team at the LRC transferred from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and became more heavily focused on clinical research.

It was a visit to the Corning Museum of Glass in 2022 that introduced Jarboe to the material uniquely capable of embodying light in ways he had not previously experienced. It was this encounter with wonder that inspired Jarboe to return to his art practice with a renewed focus on exploring processes geared towards revealing the ephemeral characteristics of light. Working with glass has presented Jarboe with the means of expressing his unyielding fascination with light, color, and perception and to develop a new body of sculptural and installation-based work as a Master of Fine Art student and soon as a professional artist.