Werner Glinka is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was born and raised in Gelsenkirchen, Germany - an industrial town in the Ruhr Valley, the region of coal mines and steel plants. He trained as an electrical engineer before immigrating to California in 1981.
He spent over 35 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, building a career in Silicon Valley as an engineering and marketing executive. After moving to the Santa Cruz Mountains, he began making assemblages using found and discarded materials - metal banding from construction sites, rusted fence wire, salvaged wood, electrical insulators, river stones. The industrial landscape of his childhood and the Japanese-influenced minimalism of Northern California both shaped his work.
Glinka does not title his pieces. "Once it's on the wall," he says, "my work is done." He prefers to let each viewer bring their own interpretation.
His work has been shown throughout the Bay Area, including the Peninsula Museum of Art, the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, the Triton Museum, d.p. Fong Gallery, the 1870 Art Center, and the Fingerhut Gallery in Sausalito. His work is held in private collections in the US, Japan, and Europe.
After a ten-year hiatus from studio practice, Glinka has returned to making art. He now works from a studio at the Center for People and Craft, an emerging urban folk school in Minneapolis. Inspired by the historic Danish folk school model, the Center celebrates traditional crafts and their contemporary expressions, fostering community connection and intergenerational learning in the Loring Park neighborhood.