Toledo got dubbed “Glass City” after manufacturers concentrated there in the 1880s. It’s now home to a remarkable collection of glass art and a thriving community of artists.
Transcript
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Toledo, Ohio has such a long history with the glass industry that it’s called Glass City. And while Glass City doesn’t have as many factories as it used to, it is awash in glass art, as NPR’s Danny Hensel reports.
DANNY HENSEL, BYLINE: This story begins with one man, Edward Drummond Libbey.
TEDD LONG: Edward Drummond Libbey came here in 1888 and essentially made Toledo the glass capital of the world.
HENSEL: That’s Tedd Long, a local storyteller who writes about the history of Toledo. He’s speaking to me outside of Libbey’s stately yellow house in the Old West End neighborhood. Libbey had owned a glass company outside of Boston, but he relocated after an advertising campaign from Toledo businessmen – basically, our city’s great for making glass. Come. And soon after Libbey’s move, the industry took off.
LONG: And now you have all these names that are mixed together. You know, Libbey-Owens-Ford became Pilkington. Owens Corning, Owens-Illinois – all headquartered here in Toledo.
HENSEL: The Libbey House overlooks the Toledo Museum of Art, which he helped create.
DIANE WRIGHT: Well, we’re standing in a gallery that has some pretty incredible glass from the 19th century.
HENSEL: Diane Wright is the museum’s curator of glass. She leads me through the collection in the glass pavilion. It’s a squat, modern glass building that sits across the street from the museum’s neoclassical main building.
WRIGHT: This building itself – this is a work of art, you know, in terms of the architecture.
HENSEL: Toledo’s art scene has long been tied to its glass industry. In 1962 – six decades after Libbey helped found the art museum – local workers created the studio glass art movement here, workers like Dominick Labino, who was a scientist at a local glass company. He met up with an artist named Harvey Littleton.
WRIGHT: They ended up – primarily driven by Harvey having these kind of experimental workshops here in Toledo – where they wanted to take glass out of the factory environment and bring it into the artist studio.
HENSEL: Labino became an artist himself, and his work is in the same museum that hosted his workshops.
At the center of the pavilion is an active hot shop where visitors can watch glassblowing demonstrations.
WRIGHT: And it’s called a hot shop because of this piece of equipment right here.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Ooh.
HENSEL: The museum also works with companies like NSG Pilkington to bring in artists to experiment with the material.
Tell me what we’re looking at.
KYLE SWORD: Yeah. So the piece that’s in front of me here – this is actually friends of ours that ran a place in downtown Toledo called Gathered Glass.
HENSEL: I meet R&D director Kyle Sword outside of Pilkington’s offices in nearby Northwood, Ohio.
SWORD: To me, it kind of looks like a dandelion before it pops. You know…
HENSEL: This statue is about 8 feet tall and covered in all shades and types of glass.
SWORD: We would just give artists a bunch of flat glass and access to industrial manufacturing methods and said, play with it. Make something interesting, and see what you can come up with. And the idea with that was to try and drive, like, how else could we think about glass? How else could an artist envision this material be used in a way that, traditionally, we don’t see this used in the automotive, architectural or solar industries.
HENSEL: Sword, who’s been learning glassblowing himself, says it benefits the artists as well as the industry.
SWORD: You know, there’s lots of ways that glass gets processed industrially. That’s the same problem that the studio movement was trying to solve in the 1960s, which is artists just don’t have access to some of those things.
HENSEL: One of those artists, 25-year-old Hannah Bowlus.
HANNAH BOWLUS: So this light box series of 12 light boxes…
HENSEL: She has an exhibit at the pavilion right now called Origin Point. It’s a collection of objects and designs – some blown, some cast, some are functional, some are decorative. For Bowlus, the design usually comes first.
BOWLUS: OK, I really wanted to have this shape. Now, like, let’s apply the engineering side of this to, like, how does this shape actually become a usable – have a usable function and be easy to interact with?
HENSEL: She shows me some of her art on display, like a pair of tall, domed lamps made from bright-green blown glass.
BOWLUS: So these are called the slime units. These are actually the first lamps that I made. So these are about six years old.
HENSEL: Around the corner from the glowing geometric light boxes sits a wall of stacked cubes connected to a button – a glass video game. You can stack moving lights on top of each other or play a game similar to Space Invaders.
BOWLUS: I play a lot of games, so I was thinking about older video games and that pixelation. So I just was like, Well, let me talk to some of my programming friends and see if we can pull together a big screen to play a game on.
(SOUNDBITE OF ITEMS STACKING)
BOWLUS: Check it out.
HENSEL: Hannah Bowlus moved here from nearby Bowling Green to be closer to the museum. And she’s not alone.
BOWLUS: Artists come, like, out of state to rent here because it’s affordable and just ’cause of the history, and I feel so grateful to be able to have this. I wouldn’t be able to continue my practice.
HENSEL: Hannah Bowlus has much more art to make, because as the title of this exhibit says, this is just her origin point. Danny Hensel, NPR News, Toledo, Ohio.
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