Gemma Hollister: Narrative Structure and Divine Light
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Release Date: 12/19/2025
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...
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Ariana Makau and Nzilani Glass Conservation: At the Intersection of Equity, Preservation and Art
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Ariana Makau, founder of Nzilani Glass Conservation, was the second person in the world – and the first woman – to receive a Master’s Degree in Stained Glass Conservation from the Royal College of Art in London. Equally comfortable on a job site, at a board meeting or in a museum, Makau has over 30 years of experience with art and architectural preservation. Her work is most fulfilling at the intersection of equity, preservation and art. Nzilani Glass Conservation is an award-winning firm and one of the few companies in the United States qualified to create new or preserve...
info_outlineUpon graduation from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture with a BFA in glass, Gemma Hollister was awarded the Windgate-Lamar fellowship from the Center for Craft, which allowed her and her partner to start a small studio in Philadelphia, Antolini Glass Co. While balancing her personal artistic practice and work as a production glassblower, the artist recently appeared on Netflix’s Blown Away: Extreme Heat. The show inspired new work, which she made both in her own studio and during a residency at Monterey Glassworks.
States Hollister: “Blown Away gave me a chance to challenge myself and level up my skills in glassmaking. It isn’t very often that you are given such specific parameters and a time crunch to make your work. I gained so much confidence in myself as a gaffer and an artist. Looking back, it was also very special to me to be able to represent a younger generation of glassblowers, especially female glassblowers, on such a big stage.”
A 2023 Saxe Emerging Artist nominee, Hollister developed a practice that involves creating fantastical objects, sculptures, and installations that center around themes of imagination and control, manifesting as both literal and abstract sculpture. For her, working with glass is an exercise in the belief that her own actions directly affect change. She works to further understand the material so that she can control its outcomes by working with direction and intention.
She says: “The act of creating glass, as in many crafts, is a protest against an unresolved and rapidly evolving technological world. Glass historically has proven the power to educate, inspire, and call to action those who observe it. In my practice, I manipulate traditional associations with both blown and stained glass — its narrative structure and divine light — by addressing contemporary issues that I want viewers to reflect upon.”
Hollister has traveled the country as a student and teaching assistant at institutions such as the Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG) and Pilchuck Glass School. She received a partial workshop scholarship from CMoG in 2024 and a Pilchuck Glass School Summer Staff Scholarship in 2023. She has been a teaching assistant to both hot glass and stained glass greats such as Martin Janecký, Jason McDonald, Bill Gudenrath, Aya Oki and Judith Schaechter. Hollister participated in Blown Away Season 4 Group Exhibition at CMoG in 2024, an exhibition with Karen Willenbrink Johnsen and Morgan Peterson at Traver Gallery, and a solo exhibition titled Heaven Is Full Of Junk in 2022. She will teach in 2026 at CMoG August 9 through 22 with her partner Tate Newfield.