Editor's Letter
by Andrew Page
Along with much larger cities such as Seattle and New York, Asheville, North Carolina, established itself as one of only a handful of glassblowing centers in the U.S. despite having a population of fewer than 100,000. Glass artists moved to this mountainous region of Western North Carolina for its natural beauty, an arts community fueled in part by its proximity to the Penland School of Crafts, and the tourists who flocked here on weekends to buy glass art from the burgeoning galleries, studios, and craft marketplaces such as the Marquee, which opened in the River Arts District in 2021. For Asheville artists, October through December was the high season, when leaf peepers and gift shoppers provided an economic harvest of dollars that the glass community depended on to get through the rest of winter, when people tended to stay home.
The Marquee, pictured before and after Helene, was devastated by floodwaters.
The arrival of Hurricane Helene in late September changed all that, killing 42 citizens in Buncombe County, washing away homes and glass studios in and around Asheville, felling centuries-old trees, knocking out electricity and water systems, and causing catastrophic flooding of the River Arts District, where the French Broad River reached the ceilings of the Marquee. The flooding not only destroyed vendors’ merchandise, but compromised the structural integrity of the building itself. The damage varies by the luck of topography and proximity to the river. In downtown Asheville, the North Carolina Glass Center was largely spared, being on higher ground, and just outside the city, Alexander Bernstein’s home and studio only received minor damage, though his parents’ Penland home was so damaged by falling trees, they have been staying with him.
As winter approaches, systems are coming back online, roads are being rebuilt, things are being stabilized to a large extent, but it’s a time of reflection and economic anxiety. Insurance policies are being studied, as are assessments of the staggering costs of rebuilding. Processing all the trauma of what everyone went through also can be overwhelming. At press time, Asheville water systems were still getting back on track, with daily updates on the water quality, property tax reappraisals were being conducted,, and emergency shelters were still housing those that lost their homes.
But perhaps the most urgent threat facing the battered glass community was the absence of customers, who were not permitted to enter Buncombe County for the first weeks after the storm as the roads were cleared and repaired. As October stretched into November, sales were still mostly limited to online purchases by those looking to help. Replacing the lost income to tourists will be difficult, but anybody with an Internet connection can throw their support in the direction of this hard-hit community by purchasing directly from artists’ websites, or through the many organizations hosting marketplaces (see Sophie Faber’s Glass Quarterly Hot Sheet article for a fuller list, and her article in Hourglass for a more complete picture of the damage and recovery efforts).
Elsewhere in this issue, we look at another geographic center for glass—Toledo, Ohio, known as “Glass City.” Today’s breakthroughs in social media, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence seem so ephemeral when compared to the 20th-century innovations that were developed here, such as an automated glass bottle-making machine, tempered glass, fiberglass insulation, and encased photovoltaic cells to make solar panels. Long before Silicon Valley, this was “Silica Alley,” and when a public art project was sought to anchor a new park, aptly named the Glass City Metropark and built on the formerly industrial site across the river from downtown Toledo, designer Bryony Roberts knew the project would need to be in glass.
The result is a field of nearly 200 laser-etched globes that contain objects precious to the city’s diverse population. Read our feature on the Field of Histories project and the artist behind it. Elsewhere in this issue, a far more fanciful engagement with glass history is documented by artist and educator Justin Ginsberg, who traveled to Sweden to cover Daniel Peltz’s unconventional proposal to bring elephants from the tropical rainforests to the site of a historic glass factory in Sweden, in a wide-ranging conceptual project in irrational economic thinking that is also a critique of late capitalism and the current refugee crisis across a changing planet.
Glass contributing editor Emma Park supplies two European reports, first covering the British Glass Biennale as it prepares to hand its administration over to the U.S.-based Glass Art Society as part of that organization’s increasingly global expansion. And, secondly, to a provocative exhibition in Venice looking at the early 20th-century years, when Murano glass had a prime perch at the Venice Biennale. Park contrasts that era with today, when it’s up to the glass community to organize Venice Glass Week to exhibit the work as a satellite to the large international art fair.
Across this issue, we look back and peer forward to gain insight into how glass has and will continue to shape a changing world.