Sand, salt, and glass are materials we encounter constantly and rarely stop to consider. In the hands of Fernando Mastrangelo, they become sculptural landscapes that draw the eye first and reveal their deeper stories over time. It is a transformation Baccarat knows well: crystal, too, begins as raw material and becomes something luminous through craft.

Born in the United States and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, and Buenos Aires, the New York-based artist and designer studied sculpture and worked under Matthew Barney before developing his own techniques with sand, salt, silica, and powdered glass. His work is now held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and his latest series, Territories, explores land, ownership, and belonging. The Artist Series at Baccarat Hotel New York, curated and produced by Orange York, brings together artists whose work reflects this devotion to material and craft. As part of the series, we spoke with Fernando about the materials he has learned to shape, the space between art and design, and why the handmade resonates so strongly in an increasingly digital world.

In conversation with Fernando Mastrangelo

You spent your formative years between the United States, Mexico, and Argentina. Looking back, how have those experiences shaped your understanding of place, and how does that perspective continue to inform your work today?

Growing up between different countries gave me an early understanding that our relationship to place is incredibly subjective. Each country has its own cultural identity, architecture, landscape, and relationship to materials. Moving between them made me aware of those differences, but also of how much our surroundings shape the way we see the world.

I think that experience created a fascination with landscape and geography that's stayed with me throughout my career. I'm interested in how a place can hold memory, identity, and history, often without those things being immediately visible. In my recent work, landscape has become a way of exploring those ideas. What appears beautiful or serene on the surface can carry much more complicated stories underneath.

Sand, salt, silica, and powdered glass have become a defining part of your artistic language. What draws you to these materials, and what possibilities do they offer that more traditional sculptural mediums do not?

I've always been attracted to materials that have a certain honesty to them. Sand, salt, and glass are incredibly elemental. They're materials we encounter constantly, but rarely stop to consider. There's something fascinating about taking something so familiar and giving it an entirely different presence.
What I love most is that these materials have their own personalities. Sand has a particular weight and texture, salt crystallizes in unexpected ways, and powdered glass captures and refracts light beautifully. I've spent years developing processes that allow me to manipulate them, but there's always an element of unpredictability. In a way, I've had to invent my own craft around these materials. There wasn't an established technique I could simply follow. That process of experimentation has become as important to me as the finished work itself. I think that's what continues to excite me: even after all these years, there's still so much I haven't discovered.

Your practice moves fluidly between sculpture and collectible design, creating works that are both functional and expressive. What have you discovered through that intersection, and how has it influenced the way you think about making?

I've always found the distinction between art and design a little limiting. Historically, we've created these categories to help us understand objects, but I don't think an artist necessarily needs to work within them. For me, furniture has always been another opportunity to explore sculpture. A table or a cabinet can communicate ideas, evoke emotion, and challenge our understanding of what an object is supposed to be. The fact that it has an implied function doesn't have to define its artistic value.
Over the past few years, I've become increasingly interested in pushing that relationship further. I'm less concerned with whether something fits neatly into the category of art or design and more interested in whether the work has something meaningful to say. I want to create objects that contribute to a larger conversation, rather than simply occupy a space.

Many of your works transform ordinary, often overlooked materials into objects of remarkable beauty and permanence. How does that act of transformation shape the stories you hope your work conveys?

Transformation has always been at the center of my practice. I love the idea that a material as ordinary as sand can become something that feels precious, monumental, or even impossible. But I also think beauty is an incredibly powerful way to engage people. I'm interested in creating something that draws you in visually, and then reveals another layer of meaning once you spend time with it. That tension between the immediate experience of an object and the ideas behind it is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. 

With my recent landscapes, for example, I'm exploring how places that appear extraordinarily beautiful can also carry histories of conflict, ownership, and division. The materials become a way of expressing that complexity. You might first encounter the work through its color or texture, but hopefully you leave thinking about something beyond the object itself.

As part of Baccarat's Artful Conversations series, you'll be speaking beneath the hotel's iconic chandeliers, which, like your own work, celebrate the transformation of raw materials through craftsmanship. In a world that increasingly prioritizes the virtual and ephemeral, what do you believe draws people toward handmade objects and tangible experiences today?

I think we're experiencing an interesting cultural moment. So much of our lives now happens through screens, and we're surrounded by images that can be created, manipulated, and consumed almost instantaneously. There's very little friction in that experience. A physical object asks something different of us. It occupies space, it has weight, texture, imperfections, and a history of how it came into being. You can sense the time and labor that went into making it. I think people are increasingly drawn to that because it offers something the digital world can't fully replicate.

What I find particularly interesting about craftsmanship is that it represents accumulated knowledge. It's something developed through repetition, failure, experimentation, and years of working with your hands. That's certainly been my experience. And there's something wonderful about having this conversation at Baccarat, where crystal and light create such an extraordinary physical experience. It's a reminder that materials still have the power to surprise us, and that the relationship between an object and the person experiencing it can be profoundly emotional.