From the issue dated August 7, 1991
'IT'S JUST HEAVEN HERE'
A Striking Campus Attracts Artists in Glass
By Peter Monaghan
Stanwood, Washington -- Each summer for the past 20 years, some of the world's most accomplished artists in glass and students eager to learn from them have come here to work and study at the Pilchuck Glass School. The school, which operates only in the summer, is widely considered to be the country's premier location for instruction in glass art.
"If you're in glass, there's no other place," says Perry Schwab, who was here recently to take a glass-blowing course. "It's just heaven here, it really is."
Like Mr. Schwab, who is about to enter his senior year at the California College of Arts and Crafts, about half the students here are enrolled in colleges of art, or in college or university art departments. The rest are professional glass artists, or art instructors. About a third of the students come here from other countries. The facilities and equipment here are state of the art and plentiful, and the quality of instruction is such that some artists who have taught here have returned as students.
Five two-and-a-half week sessions are held each summer, and usually five courses are offered in each session. In addition to taking the most popular courses in glass blowing, students can study various methods of glass casting, lampworking (shaping glass with gas-fueled torches), working with stained glass and neon, glass engraving, printing from glass plates, and other techniques.
Pilchuck was established in the early 1970's by Dale Chihuly, who was then an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Now based in Seattle, he is one of the world's best-known and most successful glass artists. He intended the school to be a place where glass -- which at that time was not a highly regarded medium -- would be fully accepted by artists.
Two prominent local art patrons, John Hauberg and Anne Gould Hauberg, donated a 40-acre plot on their Pilchuck Tree Farm here, about 50 miles north of Seattle, on a hillside sloping toward the Skagit Valley and the Puget Sound beyond. Mr. Chihuly recruited 2 instructors and 16 students and within two weeks built work and living quarters using logs, tents, and tepees. Then he and his students started blowing glass.
By the mid-1970's, a striking campus of wooden structures, inspired by local barns and farm buildings, had been built on the thickly wooded site. Thomas L. Bosworth, a professor of architecture at the University of Washington, designed the campus.
The school's reputation has been secured in large part by the quality of the instructors willing to come here -- many are among the best-known glass artists anywhere. About 40 per cent are from overseas, and most of the American instructors are college faculty members.
That rare assembly of glass artists, faculty members say, is what draws them here. "It's the only place where I can work with individuals from all over the world," says Curtiss Brock, who heads the glass department at Tennessee Tech University's Appalachian Center for Crafts. He is in his fifth summer teaching glass blowing here. "There's an unspoken rule here that everyone shares everything they know," adds Mr. Brock, whose work is widely shown in the United States and Canada. "That's unusual. At this point, I've taught my students all the tricks I know."
Marjorie Levy, the school's new director, says Pilchuck "really has the essence of what education in the arts is about. It encourages people to focus very clearly on their skills, their ideas, and their motivations." Ms. Levy, a ceramic artist, is in her first summer of running the school. She came here from the University of Michigan, where she was dean of the School of Art.
The school has many advantages over most college settings, instructors say. For a start, few of the approximately 50 colleges in the country that offer instruction in glass art have anywhere near the equipment found here.
In addition, says Mr. Brock, courses are extremely intense. "We can come in here and really exhaust ourselves," he says. "We can just go day and night. And we don't have to try to keep this pace up for 15 weeks, we only have to keep it up for 15 days." Students, who take only one class per session and generally attend only one session each summer, typically work from sunrise until they roll into bed well after midnight.
Few classes have more than 10 people, and the ratio of students to faculty and staff members is one to one, far better than in most art departments. Each instructor is aided by teaching assistants, themselves talented young glass artists who typically are graduate students in art.
"It's real intense," says Helen Kovacs, who recently graduated from Alberta College of Art and is now setting up her own glass shop. "You pick up a lot of new techniques, and you meet a lot of people from all over the world."
The center of the campus is the "hot shop" -- an open-air, hexagonal structure housing furnaces and glass-blowing equipment. While molten glass, carried on long blowing rods, or punties, is shaped and blown, it is repeatedly returned to the ovens for reheating. Finished objects are laid in annealing ovens to cool slowly and harden.
The building closes only between 1 and 5 am. The studios where students work with less heat-intense methods are open round the clock.
Even under these working conditions, says Kate Elliott, the assistant director of the school, accidents are few. Students are drilled in safety procedures at the beginning of each course. They are, for example, warned that polyester clothes may melt when an oven is opened.
Students say another effect of standing by the ovens heating, reheating, and handling molten glass, is that they form a powerful attachment to the medium. "It's like an addiction; you begin to crave the glass and the fire," says Lauren Traub, who has been a student at Pratt Institute of Art and Seattle Central Community College.
The craft, concentration, and patience required, she says, is "like looking in a mirror -- you end up dealing with the glass and yoU When you focus that much energy into transforming the glass, a part of you transforms, too."
Copyright © 1991 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
