Museum of Glass opened 20 years ago. Tacoma and glass art haven’t been the same since

The fires always burn at the Museum of Glass. For the past two decades, orange-hot molten glass has kept glass blowers busy and audiences enthralled inside the museum’s tilted cone.

Twenty years have passed since that cone became an instant icon for Tacoma when the museum opened. The Museum of Glass’s (MOG) creation heralded a rebirth for the city’s long-neglected waterfront and made the City of Destiny a center for glass art.

For a look back at MOG’s first 20 years The News Tribune interviewed the museum’s executive director along with two glass blowers who have been at the museum from its opening.

Building a museum

MOG’s hot shop director Benjamin Cobb was living in New York state when he first heard about a museum being built on the West Coast. While blowing glass at Corning Glass Museum in 2001, Cobb ran into a friend who told him about the project going up in a town called Tacoma, somewhere south of Seattle.

“And she said they have the balls to call themselves the Museum of Glass,” Cobb recalled. Intrigued, he applied for a position and was hired while the hot shop was still under construction.

Hot shop gaffer Gabe Feenan was working in the Bay Area when he heard about MOG. He started work there a month after the museum opened in July 2002.

“So we showed up,” Cobb said. The pair were hired by glass artist Charlie Parriott, who oversaw the design and construction of the hot shop.

“The three of us at the time, were all very different,” Cobb said. “And I don’t think we knew what the museum was. But we were told that the hot shop was a glimpse into the working artists studio.”

Cobb wasn’t used to working in a public hot shop with an audience hanging on every move, but he quickly became accustomed to the “fish bowl” like setting.

Since then, the two men have gone from gawking fan boys to peers with some of the greatest glass artists of the 21st century. They’ve seen glass art become more sophisticated and more accepted as an art form on a par with any other.

And, they’ve met their heroes like Italian glass master Lino Tagliapietra.

“I think it’s been really cool to work with those people who I used to look up to as invincible, god-like glassblowers and see them messing up or making something that’s a little off center. Oh, they’re human,” Feenan said.

Teaching and learning

During the year, the museum’s robust visiting artist program keeps the hot shop occupied more than half the time. Cobb, Feenan and the other permanent workers help artists realize their vision.

Feenan learns new skills from each visiting artist he works with.

“When I first started working here, I really treated that as an education,” Feenan said. “And throughout the 20 years, I feel like I’m still learning.”

In the early years, visiting artists would bring their own glass blowing teams. Now, they usually rely on MOG’s.

That was the case last week when artist John Moran, the winner of Season 3 of Netflix glass blowing series, “Blown Away,” was working in the hot shop.

“If somebody can draw it on paper, then we can figure out a way to make it,” Cobb said. “But I feel like I’m learning this week. (Moran is) doing things I’ve never seen done.”

Evolving glass

As techniques have been refined since the 1960s when art glass began to take off so has the resulting work. The breadth and sophistication in glass art has only increased since MOG opened.

Take a walk through MOG’s 13,000-square-foot gallery and you’ll see art that has, except the medium of glass, little in common with each other. Recently, a full-size armchair made from delicate glass filaments occupies one corner. Life-like birds fill a case. A multi-colored chandelier by Tacoma native Dale Chihuly stretches nearly floor to ceiling. Nearby, the gone-but-not-forgotten art deco ferry Kalakala is memorialized in glass.

“You can see that it’s no longer just about technique and making the most pristine thing,” Cobb said. “It’s more about the idea.”

Glass is not easy to work with. Large projects require a team. It’s expensive. Skills take years to develop.

MOG has leveled the playing field by creating programs that allow everyone from Hilltop kids to wounded veterans to work in the hot shop.

Kids design glass

A long-standing program at the museum, Kids Design Glass, allows children to submit their conceptual drawings of something they’d like to see turned into glass. Cobb and Feenan say it’s one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of their roles.

“Just seeing the kids, how excited they get, and then seeing the family, how excited they get,” Feenan said. Those early participants are now in their 20s and sometimes return to the hot shop.

“They say to us, ‘That was a game changer,’” Feenan said. “It was still a big deal to them and that feels good. I love making things, but when you actually touch somebody’s life, it makes it that much more special.”

There are two versions made with one going to the child and the other put on display at MOG.

Breaking glass

With so many artists and other projects over the years, Cobb and Feenan don’t always remember, when visiting a gallery or museum, if they had a hand in its making. The pair work on 20 to 40 pieces a week.

Unlike a painting where an artist can revisit a canvas over days or weeks, a work in glass usually needs to be completed in one day. Hot glass cannot be left out in the open to cool or it will shatter. Instead, it’s put in an annealer, where it cools down over hours or days.

Still, there is shattered glass — often when a work separates from the poles the blowers use to blow, extract molten glass and keep it hot. Breaks are a hazard of the medium.

“You don’t get too, too emotional about it,” Cobb said.

Feenan still grimaces over the memory of a mistake he made years ago that sent an artist’s complicated work crashing to the floor when it was seconds from being finished.

“And it just smashed and it went on the ground in 100 pieces,” he said. “I know the guy well, we’re friends and I still apologize to this day.”

At the helm

MOG’s executive director, Debbie Lenk, has spent eight years running the museum. She previously worked for Weyerhaeuser. Lenk brought a financial background to the museum, which has weathered tough financial times in its history.

While Tacoma Art Museum has undergone two expansions in recent years, MOG’s footprint hasn’t changed in the last two decades.

What has changed are MOG’s surroundings. Linked to the waterway via the Chihuly Bridge of Glass, the museum has witnessed the revitalization of Tacoma’s polluted waterfront — once a Superfund site. Today, the museum is flanked by condos, apartments, businesses, parks and promenades.

“A lot of that was our positioning as kind of a leader and connecting the waterway,” Lenk said. “It just really shows the importance that culture can make to our business district and university district.”

Changing focus

MOG was envisioned and began as museum dedicated to glass art but soon changed its focus to contemporary art. In 2007, it swung its focus back to exclusively showing glass art and mixed media that incorporates glass. Today, it’s the only one of its kind in the western United States.

In 2021 MOG acquired the Robert Minkoff collection. Minkoff, a Washington D.C. resident, was one of the foremost glass art collectors in the nation. MOG also acquires an artwork from each visiting artist.

“We have one of the only collections that’s grown in a way that’s documenting the growth of the movement,” Lenk said.

Because there are few traveling glass shows, MOG had to develop its own. Some of those have gone on to other museums. A show dedicated to Seattle-based artist Preston Singletary, whose art frequently reflects his Native American heritage, opened at MOG in 2018. That show is currently at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

In addition to its in-house programs, MOG maintains an outreach program to schools and takes its traveling hot shop into the community.

Finances and future

After some lean years in its history, Lenk said, MOG today is financially healthy. Half of its income comes from contributions (donations, grants, members) and the other half is earned from admissions, commissions and store sales.

MOG’s stature in the glass world was evidenced earlier this year when Tacoma served as the host city for the Glass Art Society’s annual conference. It brought a who’s who of glass to Tacoma.

As the Museum of Glass enters its next 20 years, it will continue to strengthen its community engagement programs and increase opportunities to see artists in action.

All of it presided over by the shiny cone.

“Almost daily people are outside taking photographs,” Lenk said. “If they get engaged, they want to be out in front of the cone. When they graduate, they want a photo in front of the cone. It’s pretty incredible, the number of times we look out the window and see photographers.”

MOG by the numbers

• Exhibitions since 2002: 140

• Temperature of liquid glass: 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit

• Annual visitors: Over 100,000

• Percent of visitors attending free of charge: 40

• Annual hot shop visiting artist residencies: 35

• Children reached through educational programs: 200,000

Source: Museum of Glass