Hana Hastings, Sand and Fire Works: Using Social Networks to Successfully Market Stained Glass Patterns, Classes and Artwork
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Release Date: 12/11/2025
David Yeshia: Guiding Artglas into 2027 with New Artistic and Online Offerings
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Using glass as a medium to capture and refract light, David Yeshia seeks to freeze moments of transition, combining myriad elements to manipulate their visual and symbolic effects. Also a metaphor for his life at the time, Yeshia was smashing glass and rebuilding the fragments into something beautiful. A new breed of “artrepreneur,” he emerged from the Covid pandemic bringing art out of the gallery and into the public marketplace by developing accessible and affordable works. A self-taught Canadian glass artist known for his signature fused glass techniques, Yeshia has developed...
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Gen Z Glassblower Jack Spitzer
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Demonstrating at the 2026 Glass Art Society conference at the Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, 24-year-old Jack Spitzer impressed the standing-room-only crowd as he created a vessel form from his Stochastic Series. The young glassblowing phenom was met with enthusiastic applause as he carried out a technical move known as “The Laydown.” Born in July of 2025, Spitzer’s Stochastic Series started as opaque vessels and transformed into the current transparent cane vessels. The newer work debuted at Sandra Ainsley Gallery last week. These new...
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John Luebtow: Perfect Investigations of Beauty and Abstraction
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Over the past 55 plus years, John Gilbert Luebtow has become one of the most respected names in contemporary glass sculpture. Inspired by Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten, the artist developed innovative technical processes in glass-making, introducing and incorporating gesture and expressive qualities into impeccably finished sculptural components. A student of Harvey Littleton, Mark Peiser and others, Luebtow explored blown, cast, and fused glass, as well as other techniques. Lois Lambert Gallery, Santa Monica, California, presented Retrospective – From...
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Cedric Mitchell: At the Intersection of Craft, Design and Culture
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Cedric Mitchell is a multidisciplinary designer, glass artist, and cultural tastemaker successfully combining elements including craft, utility, and visual culture. His work is rooted in handmaking but reaches beyond any single medium. He designs objects that carry energy, emotion, and intention – pieces meant to live with people. Says Mitchell: “My design language is what I call modern funk. It is defined by bold color, playful geometry, and confident forms balanced by structure and refinement. I draw inspiration from music, movement, architecture, and everyday rituals. Whether I am...
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C. Matthew Szösz: Traversing Unpredicted Landscapes
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
An artist and educator, C. Matthew Szösz has established a practice that revolves around experimentation and investigation of techniques and material, with a focus on understanding the ways in which physical objects and events transform into intellectual and emotional experiences. He operates and is interested in the space that exists between design, craft and fine art. Wrote William Warmus in Glass, the UrbanGlass Art Quarterly: “So each Szösz project represents a unique inquiry into outcomes driven by curiosity, inspiration, and technical opportunity. Attempting to...
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Davide Salvadore: Keeping Murano at the Heart of the International Glass Community
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
You might imagine that if you were born and raised on the island of Murano in Italy, with forefathers and relatives immersed in glass for generations, that one would have a mighty head start in becoming a famous glass artist. But in many ways, these connections make the goal of establishing an original voice as a glassblower a hefty challenge indeed. The artist in question would have big shoes to fill. Davide Salvadore strives for perfection in his work, surpassing the simple notion of glassblowing as a job and entering into the realm of passion, artistry and service to the material. His...
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Studio Glass Pioneers Joey Kirkpatrick and Flora C. Mace: Inventing Processes to Realize Ideas
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Joey Kirkpatrick and Flora C. Mace consistently invite us to enter a meditative state. Whatever the medium, each piece seems to raise more questions than provide answers. The artists, respected for their innovative work, have concluded the series for which they are most known, large-scale blown glass fruit and vegetable forms. Their subsequent work includes life-size figurative wood and glass sculptures as well as outdoor bronze installations and glass work that features blown vessels and cast panels with illustrations of the ‘first facts’ of bird identification realized through...
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Jesse Olwen Stained Glass: Wrapping New Flesh on the Bones of An Ancient Craft
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
In a heartbreakingly dark and beautiful panel depicting the Statue of Liberty afloat in a pond amongst lily pads, water grasses and small frogs, Jesse Olwen reveals his inner sadness about the state of affairs in the US and wider world today. Though the most recent, this is not the only one of his works to reference Memento Mori– a Latin phrase meaning, remember that you have to die. Olwen is a stained glass artist based in Montreal, working at the intersection of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary visual culture. His work reinterprets historic techniques through...
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Documenting Laura Donefer's Glass Fashion Show
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Laura Donefer is known for artwork that pushes boundaries by exploring memory, assault, bereavement, joy and madness. Celebrated for her innovative, colorful blown glass and flameworked Amulet Baskets, the artist has been using glass as the primary medium in her work for over 40 years, all while teaching, promoting the glass arts worldwide, and producing her unforgettable Glass Fashion Show (GFS). Donefer has produced 15 of her extraordinary fashion shows, many for the Glass Art Society (GAS). In fact, at GAS Murano 2018, her remarkable and ground-breaking event included 33 glass costumes worn...
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Jen Elek: Reflecting, Magnifying and Representing Bold Color in Hot Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Investigating interpersonal themes and the notion of community, Jen Elek is a studio artist and educator based in Seattle, Washington. She creates objects and installations of colorful glass and neon light employed as a form of non-verbal communication. Her most recent glass series titled Doliums is inspired by large Roman clay storage containers. Elek received her BFA from Alfred University in Metal and Hot Glass sculpture in 1994, after training as a welder in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was a student of Michael Scheiner, Dante Marioni, and Ann Wahlstrom at Pilchuck...
info_outlineUsing Etsy for pattern sales, Patreon for teaching classes and Instagram for promoting her artwork, Hana Hastings, Sand and Fire Works, Grimsby, Ontario, Canada, has acquired a substantial following for her offerings in stained glass. Wanting to differentiate herself from the more traditional glass designs and commonly seen pattern work, Hastings brought nature and natural subjects into the homes of her patrons by experimenting with 3D sculpture and unique textures and colors of glass. Mastering her marketing efforts on social media, the artist grew a following significant enough to dedicate full-time hours to her craft and begin teaching her techniques online to other budding glass artists.
Says Hastings: “I’ve only been a full-time glass artist for five months after nearly two decades of being a hobbyist and in business for six years total. In 2026, I hope to focus less on producing work for sale and more on artistic exploration in my chosen semi-sculptural approach to the Tiffany technique. I’m also absolutely fixated on sustainability in glass art and am working towards being a fully no waste studio.”
Inspired by nature and her “dangerously vast” collection of houseplants, Hastings developed a series of 3D sculptures in rarely seen textures and colors of glass. She made a name for herself via this unusual and modern take on design in the local glass scene as well as the online sphere. Her new work sells out on Instagram in as little as six minutes on release. With over 270K followers on that platform, Hastings is one of the most followed glass crafters of today.
Hastings’ work is deeply personal, a connection with glass rooted in the artisan legacy of her grandfather and teacher, Seamus. They spent countless hours of her childhood working together, and those moments shaped her love of glass and knowledge of the craft. Two decades later, the artist channels that heritage into her own practice, designing original work and small sculptures inspired by the forms, geometry and textures found in the natural world.