Members of Studio-de-Verre’s collaborative team gather outside the building for a group portrait—an image that reflects the collective expertise and long-standing partnerships that fuel the studio’s creative output.

Glass is one of the more remarkable materials found in nature. Spewed from a volcano, molten glass can cool quickly in the air before landing as obsidian, which when broken produces sharp edges that make perfect tools for cultures that lack metals. Dissolved in water, it precipitates out in its purest form, quartz, making geometric crystals that can grow to almost any size or fill cracks in other rocks. Its range of colors, from clear to smoky or rose, make it desirable as an ornamental material. The basic constituent, silicon dioxide, usually called silica, is the most common mineral on the surface of the Earth, most often seen in sands, some of which are rare and in great demand; microscopic variations in the surface of grains make some sands good for certain tasks, such as turning cement to concrete, while whole deserts of other sands just don’t work right.

Elsewhere, glass is one of the most versatile and valuable materials invented and made by people. While its uses seem limitless, it’s actually uncommon in human experience until recently. This is because glass is hard to make, difficult to work, and nearly impossible to recycle. And it’s fragile, easily broken, and then usually beyond repair. Whole populations lived and died without encountering it. If we scan human history, it’s easier to count the societies that had glass than those that didn’t. Egypt: wealthy Egyptians had jewelry and personal effects made of glass, which was essentially interchangeable with jewels. We know next to nothing about these charming and impressive materials, if only because their makers kept the secret of their creation. Likewise the Romans, who also used glass for tableware: bowls, tumblers, and goblets among them. Their secrecy was so complete that we don’t know where they were made; perhaps in some remote corner of the empire like Palestine.

One thing we do know is that glass can be made in two very separate steps. The first involves melting sand, using chemicals that lower its melting point and furnaces that produce high heat. That’s one of the things we don’t know about these ancestors: no one has found an adequate, ancient furnace, or even the ruins of one. But this half-glass, now called cullet, could be shipped cold to a distant workshop, where it was heated and worked in ways that we are rediscovering today.

Completed works line the studio’s walls.

A fused glass piece by Dan Cummings showcases his signature precision: black and white abstract elements stretch and coil across a metallic ground, revealing the complex patterns achievable through layered heatwork.

Through the years, there was some wonderful glass made. Mirrors from Bohemia and goblets blown in the Venetian island of Murano are popular examples. But as a truly artistic medium, glass was hobbled by the need for factory-scaled workplaces. Are beautiful objects produced by teams of laborers under the direction of designers works of art? It depends on how the terms are defined, but almost none of the glass objects made until recently were the work of one person toiling alone, in solitude, to express that one person’s experience or view of life. Such things are hard to market and do not appeal to the factory aesthetic.

Throughout the 20th century, individual artists and small groups tried to find a way to work glass the way painters paint. The breakthrough came in the mid-1960s, in the American midwest, where two men, one an abstract expressionist-inspired potter and the other a chemist who would go on to create the tiles that protected space shuttles from the fiery heat of reentry, brought together furnace designs based on ceramic kilns and glass formulas suitable for small batches that could be worked in a studio. Today, artists wanting to work with glass come from all over the world to study and practice what became known as studio glass.

A superb example of a studio glass workshop, one of the most substantial to be found anywhere, occupies a converted industrial building in what remains of a commercial area on the southern edge of Salt Lake City. Here a large, colorful, mock-glass sign on the street side declares Studio-de-Verre to be a “Glassart Studio and Gallery.” The name, which starts in traditional French, to which it grafts one of the several English names for studio glass, thereby makes the first nod to the synergism that continues to allow individuals and small groups to meet the daunting demands of glass for large spaces and multiple resources. For comparison, all over the world artisans use gold-plated glass beads that a few years ago we found being made in an apartment just outside Prague, where they were electroplated in the bathtub.

A worktable at Studio-de-Verre holds an assortment of relief molds, framed glass panels, sketches, and sculptural components—evidence of the layered processes behind the studio’s fused, carved, and cast glass techniques.

Combining a studio with a gallery is a dream of many artists, but it’s especially useful for glass, where the formal gallery not only offers a permanent place to display their wares, but provides an opportunity to show the works of other progressive Utah artists, thereby placing the glass made in the surrounding rooms in its proper place in today’s rich diversity of fine arts. For instance, currently one wall is devoted to the unmistakable paintings of Sri Whipple.

Outside, next to the front door that separates visitors from the many “glass people” who prefer to come and go via a large, roll-up side door leading directly into the cavernous workshop areas, a smaller sign reveals more of the story. Listing both their names and those of their former, individual enterprises, it charts the precedents of this latest collaboration. They are Kerry Transtrum’s Glassfire Studio, formerly in Layton; Stephen Teuscher’s 2 Sure Productions, in Logan; and Dan Cummings’s Spectrum Studio, which was on nearby Malvern Avenue for decades, until his loyal landlord’s recent death forced a move. Together, they make up the proprietary core. We speak of teams of glass artists for a reason:f the demands not only of a day’s work, but of a career, readily exhaust the resources of any one person, and a short tour of the space behind this sign will soon acquaint the visitor with the vast array of tools and spaces the work requires. What makes this story most worth telling is the way they have collaborated and combined all the requisites in one location.

One name that doesn’t appear by the door is that of Andrew Schafer, a master glass blower, or gaffer—a title that dates back at least to the industrial revolution, probably to the middle ages, and is thought to come from the honorific “grandfather” that always designated the leader of any working team. Schafer travels at least as far as Astoria in the glass-heavy Pacific Northwest, and to St. Louis, whence he had just returned when he undertook to shepherd a group from the Glass Art Guild of Utah through completing some works that, half a century ago, could not have taken shape anywhere. Briefly, the Glass Art Guild is responsible for what may have been the fastest artistic growth in glass seen anywhere in the past quarter century. Both Transtrum and Cummings belong to the Guild, and in fact they received high honors at their 2025 exhibition at the Red Butte Gardens, which will also be covered here in 15 Bytes.

A glassblower lifts a fresh gather from the furnace before rolling it over preheated fused glass panels, beginning the crucial stage where surface design bonds to the expanding bubble.

Blown glass stands at the center of Studio Glass, for three reasons. One is that it was the first glass art to be made universally accessible by those craftsmen in the ’60s. Second, and no doubt the reason for that choice, glass blowing is surely the sexiest art to watch being made. Everyone who sees it seems to find it irresistible and a great many try it, only to find out it isn’t as easy as it looks. And the third can best be grasped by tuning in to the project that brought these Guild members to watch Schafer complete their projects, for which privilege they had competed with other members.

Glass is now many arts, and each makes certain demands on its practitioners. Most require one or more kilns. Some involve sand blasting or carving, which is a particular medium of Dan Cummings. Others, like sculpture, may require sanding, drilling and metal fabrication. At Studio-de-Verre, all these have their own areas, for convenience but also to protect the health of all. (Glass dust can disable and even kill those who routinely inhale it). Other areas are set up for paint mixing, with hundreds of jars of paint and frit, one of its glass versions, arranged on shelves. Such areas form satellites around a number of large tables that can be dedicated to a particular task, for which they are essential.

And in the middle of all this stands the gaffer’s bench, and facing it, the blast furnace (the proper name of which can no longer be used on the internet without consequences), its three pairs of firebrick doors operated by foot pedal. This pair of fixtures, each both complex and equipped with additional exotic tools that hang or rest where they can be immediately reached by the glass blowing team, form the functional core of the studio’s blowing shop.

The gaffer’s bench—equipped with torches, shears, paddles, molds, and protective pads—sits at the heart of the hot shop, where glass artists prepare and shape molten forms in real time.

Andrew Schafer holds the vessel in position as Kerry Transtrum prepares insulated gloves at the furnace—one of the many moments of teamwork required to safely transfer hot glass to the annealer.

Molten glass, which must be kept hot continuously whenever it is being used, fills a crucible inside a nearby furnace. The work done in conjunction with the Guild fairly typifies the cross-disciplinary demands of glass. One of the major achievements of studio glass was expanding the possible techniques for ornamenting blown glass. For the greatest freedom, this is done first on a flat surface, which stands in for the eventual curves, bulges and hollows of the final piece. Guild member Kerry Collett began her example by covering a heatproof rectangle with a powdered release agent followed by several layers of assorted shapes of multi-colored glass. She fused this in a furnace—fusing being one of the most popular techniques after blowing—cooled it, and brought it to the workshop, where it was heated to just below melting temperature in an electric kiln.

There were several ways forward from there, and they were discussed by Schafer and Transtrum, as they often are, even as the work was underway. They discussed choices they couldn’t make for sure until they saw how the glass handled. Soon enough, Schafer had a bubble of glass on the end of his pipe, somewhere in the range of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and about as long as Collett’s fused piece was wide. Reaching into the hot kiln, he laid the bubble down precisely across one end of the fused decoration, then picked it up and dusted off the release agent with a brush. What followed was half an hour or so of repeated reheating to keep it hot, while adjusting the size by blowing gently into the pipe, the shape with tools or by rolling the piece across the steel table, or marver, where much of glass blowing literally takes shape, and eventually coaxing the flat rectangle to wrap around the bubble. Once the fused part and the bubble were successfully married, the end away from the pipe was opened with shears and formed into the lip of a vase. Then the whole thing was meticulously separated from the pipe by a few dribbles of water and a knowledge-demanding tap, after which it was carried, again by Transtrum, this time wearing an aluminum jacket and a pair of asbestos gloves, to the annealing furnace, or lehr, where it would be cooled slowly for 40 hours. This, only one of many crucial steps, is called annealing, and it is only by slowly cooling that the glass can be kept amorphous, which means not allowed to form the invisible and inflexible crystal lattice that silicon would otherwise take on. Thus, instead of the brittleness of quartz or obsidian, it will have the tolerance for temperature changes and normal use that differentiates glass from natural stone. After that, cold grinding and polishing will be required to make the vase stand up straight, and its bottom a smooth, lens-like hollow or “kick.” Only then will it be possible to appreciate the finished work.

A completed blown-glass form twists reflections across its surface—layers of clear, inflated chambers capturing the distortions and luminosity that only hot glass can produce.

It should be clear at this point that there is far more going on at Studio-de-Verre than can be held all at once in one mind. It is to the credit of its owner/artists that they not only conjure the ancient arts and their modern equivalents, but a host of chemical and electrical knowledge that makes their work possible. They are also artists of a highly accomplished sort, as a tour of the many artworks displayed in the gallery and archived around the suitable spaces will prove. That all these exceptional folks found each other is a miracle of sorts, but it was a necessary achievement that made possible what is, without exaggeration, one of the world’s more mind-boggling artistic resources.

Studio-de-verre is at 2312 South West Temple in South Salt Lake.

All images by Geoff Wichert.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.