Sculpted in Fire: Native Artists Redefining Glass Art

Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass, an exhibition at Mingei International Museum with featured guest Emily Hanna, Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator.

The show features stunning glass art by 29 Native artists from 26 different tribal cultures. It highlights decades of work, but emphasizes recent and contemporary creations. It all started when glass artist Dale Chihuly created a hot shop for blowing glass at the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1974. In elegant fashion, it traces how traditional forms have been given new life in glass, by leading artists in the medium like Preston Singletary, Dan Friday, and Raya Friday. Traditions and Native cultures come alive through these incredible works. On view through September 20, 2026. The show will move next to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane Washington, followed by the Museum of Glass in Tacoma.

Speaking of Washington, this is our 1st in a short series of video on glass art. Our next video will focus on Dale Chihuly. Subscribe to Art With Bob Pincus.

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In the video

Emily Hanna: You’re watching this transformation between molten, liquid molten glass, and then all of a sudden before your eyes, it takes shape, and they add frit and color is added. It’s just kind of miraculous.

Bob Pincus: Hi, this is Art with Bob Pincus and I’m standing at the entrance to the exhibition, “Clearly Indigenous,” which is a show of glass art, of 29 Native artists from 26 tribes and really represents kind of a explosion of creativity using glass as a medium for bringing in traditional forms of Native culture but also transforming them in the process.

Emily: The story of how it started with Dale Chihuly invited to teach, he was invited to teach at this little school in Santa Fe, a new school for students where they were really wanting Native American students to just break out, try new things, don’t be confined by history, by tradition, by what anyone thinks you should do. So they invited Dale to come teach and he established this hot shop and taught glassblowing. And little by little, people were taking the classes and then the people who took the classes were going out, starting their own workshops. You can interpret all of your own cultural motifs in that new medium.

Bob: I’m standing next to a Preston Singletary piece called Meditations with Fire. And the piece is very kind of strategically placed cause when you come into the galleries, it’s almost like this kind of greets you. Obviously, one bit of transformation is it’s glass. And using colors in a way that you couldn’t in wood, of course. And then the symbolism is both personal and archetypal.
Taking traditional symbolism within culture, obviously a traditional form the totem pole, but then transforming it.

Emily: You know, this one you can see has all of the killer whale, all of the animals that you recognize from his history, his family history, his lineage. But the totem pole at the front has a self-portrait of him in it.

Bob: A representation of him in here, as I think right there with a glass blower. The killer whale, the sun up above. And I think another thing that I respond to in these pieces is just how beautifully incised all these forms are on the totem. And the use of color, right? You can’t get away from the fact that he’s taking advantage of uses of color that are really either strikingly vibrant like here or using white in a very different kind of striking way.

Another interesting example is Dan Friday of the Lummi culture. This is called Aunt Fran’s Star Basket, and this actually does refer to his Aunt Fran. She was a basket maker, which was important to him in terms of when he thought about making art. And he wanted to adapt the way she used the woven basket into glass.

Emily: He could carry on her legacy, but through this fiery, hot medium that he specialized in.

Bob: It really, I wouldn’t say mimics, but it mirrors the form of using the weaving and then bringing it into the texture of the glass basket as it were. His sister, two pieces right next door here, Raya Friday. One interesting thing I read about them is that she actually, neither one was following in the footsteps of the other. They came to their interest in glass separately from each other. And her things are these very delicate looking forms, cloud basket, lattice basket, very pale kind of ethereal almost in the way she uses glass. But they’re very effective. And even though they are baskets, really they are like little sculptures.

For example, with Preston Singletary, I can recognize his pieces, but he’s certainly willing to collaborate with other artists and bring their talents to bear. And it seems like that’s true of a lot of these artists.

Emily: He maybe more than any other person has taken this art form out, introduced it to other people so that they can express themselves and their cultural history and iconography.

Bob: One of the interesting collaborations that I discovered was where Preston Singletary collaborated with Marcus Amerman. This is really more about the Choctaw ancient culture. They have discovered at the sites of these mounds, very monumental mounds, ceramic heads of people, not necessarily knowing what the function was. But they obviously wanted to evoke that with these ceramic heads that they made, which are quite distinctive. These ones are called Kill Bear, White Bear, and Morning Star. But clearly they almost evoke ancient-ness in the way that they look as well.

The Raven, which in Tlingit culture, which is Preston Singletary’s culture, is really important to the origin of the world. They use Raven as a symbol of how you brought light to the world, how you brought the moon into, how you brought the sun into the world. And this piece is titled Bringing Light to the World because the Raven figure was a trickster who tricked a greedy chief who was hoarding the light into opening his box that was containing the light and letting it out into the world. And so you’ll see this Raven appear both in a piece like this. And over here where it says Raven Steals the Sun. Well he’s not stealing the sun as from us, he’s stealing the sun from the guy who hoarded it and therefore giving it to the entire world. So it’s kind of like a really interesting origin story, but you have to think the Raven is an important figure, but also a bit of a trickster.

Emily: He created these new petroglyphs based on contemporary experience, which includes power lines and HOV lanes and biohazard symbols and trucks and hammers because those are the new signs on the land. A chain link fence becomes a basketry pattern. So it’s keeping the old technology and expressing the new reality,

Craft survived when a lot of other things got crushed in the whole colonial, moving people onto reservations, forcing them into residential schools. A lot of things got crushed and lost in that. But craft, pottery, basket weaving, that survived. Here’s a new form of craft and I want people to know that Native American artists are alive and well. They’re adapting, they’re changing, evolving, trying new things. That’s really interesting to me.

Bob: I want to thank you for spending a little time talking about the show and for bringing it here as well.

Emily: Thank you for coming and being interested.

Bob: Thanks.

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