Meet the Women of the American Studio Glass Movement

Tami Landis—the contemporary art curator at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York—spent last year on the road, traveling across the country. Her quest? To connect with the unsung heroines of American glass art, which burgeoned in the second half of the 20th century as artists opened their own studios and glassmaking entered the realm of fine art.

When Landis wasn’t driving around California in a rental car, she was hopping on and off planes to reach various far-flung locations. The curator could be in Washington state unboxing a work that hadn’t seen daylight in four decades; a few days later, she was in New Mexico with an artist who last exhibited her work in the late 1970s. “Listening,” the curator tells L’OFFICIEL, was the primary tool in her mission to connect with around 30 artists in total. “Many women would start the conversation by telling me about their male counterparts and where they were in association with them,” she recalls, but Landis always reminded them that she was there “to hear their stories and how they navigated being a woman artist in glass.”

The fruit of her ambitious journey is CMoG’s new exhibition, Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio, which explores the vibrant network of women artists who produced in glass throughout the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s. The decades coincide with a period coined the American Studio Glass Movement, when artist and educator Harvey Littleton spearheaded the development of glass studios, mainly around universities and museums. Up until then, glass in America was strictly a product of large factories, but after visiting Italy’s family-run hotshops in Murano, Littleton realized his peers were ripe for more thoughtful small production, with the freedom to add subjective touches to the medium. The movement as a whole produced significant male artists, and women were largely absent from storied exhibitions and glorifying catalogs. This exclusion was part of a larger stigma around women operating in a hotshop, which, as in other art forms, was generally considered a man’s realm for its seemingly intense environment. Women, however, did maneuver the toxicity of the studios, which were largely connected to university programs run by male deans.

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They knocked on doors and asked for slots with the furnace. The show, which also celebrates the museum’s 75th anniversary, sheds light on the rewards of these efforts for visibility with more than 100 works by some 50 female artists.

For Landis, solidarity was the women artists’ shared force. “Necessity to work in a community was fundamental,” she says. “Women connected with one another and [went] off in their own ways to find spaces to keep themselves safe.” Kathleen Mulcahy was one of these artists who claimed autonomy in her practice by taking part in the development of the first glass furnace at Kean University, where she received a BFA in 1969. Mulcahy, 75, who now lives outside Pittsburgh, had a career awakening as a student when she stumbled upon a glass studio run by “gray-haired older women with bouffants” in upstate New York. She watched them carry metal rods and shape the scorching molten glass. “If a woman can carry a baby for months in her body, she can handle the hot shop,” says Mulcahy. Encouraged by the connectivity among her women peers, she secured permission from Alfred University’s dean to be allowed to blow glass during her master’s education, and eventually rose to lead Bowling Green State University’s glass program—which was one of 70 university-led programs in the country—by 1978.

Years later, it was a similar camaraderie that inspired a turning point in her practice. A canoeist for three decades, she was paddling in a Western Pennsylvania river with a group of women when she was reminded of the fluidity of glass. The culmination of drops over a gentle surface during the expedition brought her to what she calls a “lucid state.” “All That Is I See” (2025) is a sculpture of stainless steel and bent and etched plate glass adorned with similar droplets, rendered in elegant oozes of glass. The work’s soothing aura speaks to the parallel the artist sees between water’s “life-giving” quality and the malleable liquidity of glass.

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The show gives CMoG a chance to reckon with its own record of collecting and contextualizing the medium’s recent history as the world’s largest museum dedicated to glass. The exhibition makes an effort to “fill the gaps,” according to Landis, who believes the show resonates with an institutional vision to “shift the narrative” and leave behind the assumption of a “singular history.” If long hours in a sweltering hotshop, which the artists often have to rent, makes glassmaking one of the most demanding and costly artistic practices, the show’s narrative reminds visitors that collaboration has long been a way of survival for its practitioners. “The team aspect evolved in the ’60s with furnaces being built together and even faculty teachers learning to blow glass with their students,” explains the curator. The enduring collaboration between Joey Kirkpatrick and Flora C. Mace, for example, dates back to 1979 at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, where they eventually became the first women to teach glassblowing. Their joint sculpture “Woman in a Suitcase” (1980) shows a female figure gently captured inside a glass jug, and alchemizes vulnerability with strength.

The work of women artists in the field took place during the height of second-wave feminism, which perhaps fueled the moment and encouraged artists to claim their footing in institutional settings and the overall cultural discourse. Landis adds that this was a turning point for many artists, who moved on from experimenting with at-home techniques such as slumping or fusing glass to pursue formal education.

Besides an initial workspace, home was the subject for a variety of artists, such as Audrey Handler, whose “Wedding Breakfast” (1980) installation illustrates a wedding tablescape for one. Beside a suite of elegant plates, wine glasses, and salt-and-pepper shakers (and even a fried egg) in glass, a set of sterling silver dinnerware occupies a wooden table. Handler, now 92, describes her practice as “storytelling”; her experience with divorce and starting over is embodied in the work, which is in CMoG’s collection. “I wanted to be taken seriously, not considered a token woman who happens to be an oddity next to male artists,” she says about becoming Littleton’s first woman graduate student in 1965. At the time, she felt energized by her mentor’s mission of educating others across the country about the material. Handler helped establish the Glass Art Society in 1971, with the mission of teaching artists how to find and build equipment. “We, as women, were always as capable as men, but we were told to step back and even bring coffee,” she remembers.

Landis built the show’s energetic network of artists with research as well as with organic connections formed through word-of-mouth suggestions. The process, which has been vulnerable, rewarding, and revelatory, exposed her to energy and enthusiasm that defied prejudice. “People keep asking where the women are when talking about the history of studio glass in America,” she says. Her answer is clear: “They were always there, and we are proving it here.”