Do me a favor: curl up your index finger and bite that first knuckle—pay attention to the texture you feel through your teeth when you bite down. A brief sensation of tenderness quickly yields to the firmer bone underneath. This is how I convey to students what the glass bubble should feel like in the micro-moment one is cracking said bubble open to make a blown foot. I teach people how to shape glass. And then I help people learn how to speak through this material.
The story I tell people of how little I knew of Wisconsin when I first moved here takes place at the Denver airport. I was staring at the weather radar map, knowing a storm was approaching during the layover to my job interview. I could read the trajectory and intensity of the storm as it drifted east. But I could not, for the life of me, identify the shape of Wisconsin. The blood drained from my face; I knew nothing of where I was headed.
Despite my geographical naivete, I landed the job, and in the decade plus that has transpired since, I have centered my life at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—more specifically, in the UW Glass Lab. Of its many strengths, UW-Madison has a long history as a leading contemporary craft program. Glass holds a special place in this history, as the UW Glass Lab was the first academic glass program in the nation and birthplace of American Studio Glass.
The seminal narrative of American Studio Glass is a rich legacy to inherit, but it is not one that needs me to tell it because the entire canon of American Studio Glass does that job so well. In my day-to-day life, encounters with those familiar with this history follow a similar pattern. My crass cocktail recipe for the conventional story of glass in Wisconsin: mix one part Harvey Littleton with one part Dale Chihuly, shake heavily with a strong pour of capitalism as the sole model of value by which everything is measured, garnish with irresistible eye candy and sip on repeat for sixty plus years.
My career trajectory intersects Wisconsin craft history in a moment of transition, post-American Studio Glass. The niche commercial market for which glass was renown is losing its collector base as it moves through its “Great Aging.” Glass-specific galleries are far fewer and further between as the design market becomes a more practical playground. Academic glass programs struggle to survive the multiple crises of higher education. And however entertaining, the viral success of a reality tv show on glass does little to assuage the questions surrounding the future of this field.
After 11 years in this role, my positionality informs my ability to speak to the arts in Wisconsin. Nothing of my expertise is assumed here; it must be claimed. Whether one characterizes the responsibility as a burden or a power, stepping into this history came with the inevitability of representation. What happens when a historical midwest craft program brings in a woman of color to lead—one who has directly inherited handskills from this tradition, yet lacks the privilege of representation preceding her? What happens when the brilliance of a history one inherits is dimmed in its relevance today? How does one lead the next generation from a requisite position of representation when we must question what we’re even celebrating here?
You have to tell a different story.
Stories are complex. They are entangled in a multiplicity unfolding simultaneously, shapeshifting and contaminating one another. I could speak to distinctions of the past decade: what gets privileged in my own studio work, the marked demographic shift in the student body—representation evidencing its reflexive mirroring power, or the nonprofit work I do in centering BIPOC and queer voices in glass at GEEX, the Glass Education Exchange. But the most holistic representation of what I have learned since my humbling weather map encounter is found in the resistance practice of actively shifting the historical narrative of glass in Wisconsin.
While I have numerous admirable colleagues at UW-Madison, the person with whom I feel the greatest affinity—my work BFF—is Tracy Drier, the scientific glassblower in Chemistry. He once based his operations out of the Glass Lab when he got kicked out of his shop while his building was being renovated. After two months with us, he articulated, “The difference between working here and working in Chemistry is that over there, everyone loves chemistry, but here, everyone loves glass!”
I embody this truth in how I approach shifting the narrative: I put the material first to lead the charge in centering an otherwise marginalized narrative of glass in Wisconsin. The founder of the UW Glass Lab, Professor Emeritus Harvey Littleton, was not the first glassblower hired by UW. In 1920, forty-two years prior to the start of the American Studio Glass movement, UW hired James B. Davis in Physics to fabricate the vacuum tubes that made the invention of radio possible. His contributions were so pivotal to this innovation that you can find an image of him with his torch in the Radio Hall mural celebrating this history. Narratives of glassmaking as essential to research breakthroughs persist throughout this university’s history across a vast array of disciplines. The hallmark Babcock butterfat test—which helped establish UW as a major research institution in 1890—relied on a particular geometry of a bottle with a graduated neck, made by Chicago-based Louis Nafis. Earlier still, the founding of Washburn Observatory on campus in 1878 was remarkable at the time in Wisconsin because of its setting at a research institution. The third largest refracting telescope at 15.6” held the finest optics crafted by Alvan Clark and Sons of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts.
Glass in UW’s teaching collections, too, reach back to the late 1800s. Early in his career at UW, Edward Birge purchased glass models of invertebrates made by the famed German flameworkers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. A few of these delicate specimens dating back to 1890 are still present in the Zoological Museum today. This moves the timeline of UW’s history of collecting the world’s most prized handmade glass back 134 years. Astronomy also collected a complete set of 55 of Harvard’s Astronomical Photographic Glass Plates, mapping the sky circa 1903. And the Geology Museum has in its archives a most complicated piece of glass—a bright yellow shard of the ultra-thick, 70% lead oxide glass window that protected Manhattan Project workers from the materials they were working with at the Hanford site in Washington State.
Earlier still are the tradespeople and glaziers that cut and installed every window in the first buildings that established this institution. And predating this university are artifacts shaped by Native Americans in Wisconsin who sourced their materials from Obsidian Cliff in Wyoming. The embodied skills of Native American experts in flintknapping and pressure-flaking are most certainly the oldest traditions of human glassmaking in Wisconsin.
How we tell the story of glass in Wisconsin matters—critically. These threads of glass throughout UW’s history establish a multiplicity of narratives that activate the material practice, culture, and intelligence of glass and glassmakers. The skill of shaping glass is a power in and of itself—an embodiment of craft as the original engineering. This power moved into the hands of artists in a longstanding history of materially-grounded research and innovation. Artists working in glass not only imagine in and through the material, but make these imagined transparencies real. While an insecurity around hard, provable truths often fuels the hierarchical fallacy and arm wrestle of the arts vs. the sciences, the arts are essential as research precisely because they make real what is known and felt in lived human experience, but not quantified. We celebrate and reify human subjectivity by speaking through narrative and speaking through material. We build the material intuition to bridge imagination to reality—and this can begin by biting one's knuckle on your way towards breaking a bubble.
In anticipation of the opening of our new space in September 2024, we invited active participants and longtime contributors to the artistic communities in Wisconsin to write about the cultural context of this region. While we recognized the impossibility of capturing this state in its entirety through this one endeavour, the goal was to gather a range of perspectives to provide a fuller and more complex understanding of the artistic production of this region. We welcomed thoughtful, critical pieces that allow readers to see the artistic milieu, or this place, in a new light, reflections on Wisconsin's histories that have defined its present, or future-facing pieces that guide us towards new directions.
Helen Lee is an artist, designer, and educator. She holds an MFA in Glass from RISD and a BSAD in Architecture from MIT. She is a 2024 United States Artist Fellow; her work is in the collections of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Corning Museum of Glass, Chrysler Museum Glass Studio, and Toyama City Institute of Glass Art. She is currently an Associate Professor and Head of Glass in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and proudly serves as the Director of GEEX, the Glass Education Exchange.
1To learn more about the history of American Studio Glass, visit Voices in Studio Glass History (https://exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu/studioglasshistory/), an online exhibition and archive organized by Bard Graduate Center. For a more comprehensive lecture, watch A Short History of the American Studio Glass Movement, from Beginning to End (https://www.bgc.bard.edu/research-forum/articles/274/a-short-history-of-the), presented by independent curator Tina Oldknow.
