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Studio glassmaking is defined by the efforts of a single individual or a small group of artists to
determine the design of an object and complete the execution of it. In the 1960s technical advances in
glassmaking allowed artists to work alone at a modest glass furnace, which thus permitted shifting production
from a sizeable factory setting with numerous assistants to a studio setting.
The movement began in Toledo, Ohio, where Harvey Littleton (b. 1922) a ceramic artist held two glassblowing
workshops in the spring and summer of 1962. Littleton was the son of the director of research at Toledo’s Corning
Glass Works, and he had combined his father’s research with both his own experiments and what he had learned of
Italian glassmaking techniques. In this effort he worked closely with Dominick Labino (1910–87), vice president
and director of research for a fiberglass corporation, who himself had a sizeable body of technical knowledge.
After formulating a successful approach to creating a small-scale studio furnace, they decided to share their
knowledge and techniques with other artists.
The Toledo Museum of Art’s director Otto Wittmann, quite a forward-thinking man, encouraged them to hold two
workshops and allocated both space and materials on the museum’s grounds. The weeklong workshops included morning-long
lectures on the history of glassblowing, tours of Toledo’s largest glass plant, and instructions on constructing a kiln
and on various ways of creating with glass. The afternoons were devoted to glassblowing. Workshop attendees, numbering
fewer than a dozen, consisted of artists working in ceramics at various career levels, from university art department
professors to the undergraduate art students.
This project funded, in part, by a grant from the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass
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