Richard Jolley was born in Wichita, Kansas 1952 then moved in his youth to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In 1970, the artist began his studies at Tusculum College in Greenville, Tennessee, studying glass under Michael Taylor. Building and maintaining a glass studio in Knoxville since 1975, Richard Jolley has participated in over 65 solo museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the country as well as Europe and Japan. Early in his career, Jolley had been included in some of the most important glass exhibitions at the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporro, Japan, and the International Exhibition Glass in Kanazawa, Japan, as well as Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey and Laumier Sculpture Park in Missouri. Over the next decade the artist continued to be included in important museum exhibitions surveying contemporary glass and sculpture such as the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art and most recently in the Wornick Collection exhibited at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. Richard Jolley has additionally been honored for his art through a variety of awards, commissions, and invitational workshops in Tennessee and abroad. In 2007 Jolley was the youngest visual artist to ever receive the Tennessee “Governor’s Distinguished Artist Award”.