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Public Glass is a non-profit glass art studio and school in a warehouse in Bayview. The space is lofty and industrial, but made cozy by all the people at work...and the persistent heat of the 2000 degree furnace, where a giant cauldron of glass is kept molten hot all year long.
The main studio is called the hotshop and it’s where Ethan Castillo teaches beginner classes. One night I visit, he’s teaching how to make glass flowers.
Ethan demonstrates the process for his students, who seem a little nervous around all the heat and industrial tools. The first step is to get some glass to work with.
He opens the furnace door and instinctively, everyone steps back. Even from a safe distance, you can feel the intense heat.
Ethan dips a long metal pole into the furnace and when it reemerges there’s a squishy gob of hot glass on the end.
“Once it’s out of the furnace,” he tells the students, “it has a warm voluptuous kind of glow to it. And it has a really nice kind of movement.”
He walks the glass on the pipe over to a gloryhole–a colloquial name for a reheating chamber. It’s a mini-furnace that looks a little like a pizza oven.
Ethan puts the glass-tipped pipe in the gloryhole and turns the pole. This helps the glass to stay hot so it can be shaped.
“And so that’s why you go back inside right? Because you’re losing all that heat.”
Glass art is a bit of a race. You have to keep turning the metal pipe that the hot glass is attached to or gravity will intervene.
“The goal is to keep it turning constantly,” he says.
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On the other side of the furnace, I meet Herb Dang, who’s working on a bowl.
“I have a cup in there,” he tells me “which I'm gonna pick up and blow out to a bigger vessel.”
Herb grew up in Bayview and has been at Public Glass since the early 2000s. He worked industrial day jobs but was making glass beads at home as his personal passion. It maybe wasn’t the best idea.
“Basically I would make things and then realize I didn't have enough ventilation and I could see the deposits on the inside of my ceilings from the gasses.”
That’s the thing about glass: you can’t do it in your house like painting. You need access to some really big, hot, expensive stuff. Herb says, that’s the reason Public Glass was born.“Part of the idea of this place was to have a publicly accessible studio.”
Public Glass was founded in 1996 by 3 students from the California School of Arts and Crafts. Once they graduated, they didn’t have a way to practice their passion.
“The people who started this place, they were the ones teaching. Their friends who already went to school were teaching. And that way they pay off teachers by saying, ‘Oh, you do an hour teaching, you get an hour of time.’ And for me teaching, I got time.”
Time in a well equipped studio was a big draw for artists.
“It was a way of turning what you knew into time in the shop,” Herb says,“even if you couldn't afford it. I mean, it's not cheap to blow glass.”
They also started offering classes to the senior center down the block and the neighborhood schools, as a way to connect with the community. They also made the Bayview sign, a local landmark. It’s these huge 3 dimensional letters on Third Street that spell out the word ‘Bayview,’ welcoming folks to the neighborhood. “We broke up all this ceramic tile and then created the sign.”
Public Glass is still committed to working with the community through its classes and this ethos of education. Even Herb, who's been doing this for decades, still sees his art as a learning practice.
“It's a great way just to clear the mind and be present in the now. It really entails focus,” he says. “You can't think about anything else. You respond to what's happening in front of you, otherwise you lose it.”
There’s a kind of metaphor for life in this idea.
“One of the things everybody learns in all these shops: if it's heading for the floor, don't get in its way. Don't grab for anything falling because if it's too cold, it'll cut you. If it's hot, it'll burn you. You let it hit the floor and then you figure out what you're doing.”
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Figuring out what they’re doing next is Marti Gorski’s job. Marti is a Management Consultant working with Public Glass. She first came to the studio as an artist in 2017.
“When I came into the shop the first time it was all women working in the studio,” Marti says, “and I was like, this is kind of, seems like the place I wanna be.
Marti started her glass art practice in college, where she began to understand the industry as being a pretty male dominated place.
She says glass blowing in general has a “long-standing history of being a hot, sweaty place for men.” The terminology is reflective of that, especially in the hot shop. “Our reheating station is called a ‘glory hole’. You can ‘jack the neck’, you can ‘paddle the bottom’.
Public Glass is working to be radically inclusive in making glass art accessible. Part of the challenge to doing so is that it’s so expensive. And that, in turn, has an effect on how the art is perceived.
“There's a thing in glass that half of the people believe that it's a craft. The other half of the people believe that it's a luxury medium.”
Yet glass is something we interact with all the time.
“We use glass in all sorts of facets of our life. From your drinking glasses, plates. your windows, your buildings, your smart glass, your phone. It's very much around us.”
The mission of Public Glass is to translate that idea of universal use into universal access. They offer classes, studio space to experienced artists, and scholarships so more people can learn the craft.
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Marti takes me back to the hot shop, where Ethan and the students are finishing their class.
While Public Glass has been going strong for nearly 30 years, it faces many of the same challenges as other non-profits: like consistent funding for all of their programs… not to mention their astronomical utility bill. But Marti says, they seem to have found their rhythm with the perpetual nature of this medium. “At the end of the day, everybody has to turn the pipe.”
That’s what Ethan’s students are doing. He picks up a new pole and offers it to one of them.
“As long as you keep it turning It should stay nice and smooth,” he tells them.
The glass flowers are blooming into a beautiful bouquet, along with plenty of poetic metaphors:an openness to try things out, make mistakes, work with others, all seem to be part of the glass making practice.
This story aired in the 3/27/24 episode of Crosscurrents.
