GEEX Flame Affinity Group
Facilitated by Amy Lemaire and Madeline Rile Smith
Featuring special guest Ghislaine Sabiti: artist, educator, and director of the Bead Project at UrbanGlass in New York.
Notes compiled by Amy Lemaire and Madeline Rile Smith
Each bullet point represents a comment by a participant and may be lightly edited for clarity.
Entries in quotes are copied directly from the chat.
Learn more about Ghislaine Sabiti:
- Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/ghislainesabiti/
- UrbanGlass: https://urbanglass.org/person/ghislaine-sabiti
- New York Foundation for the Arts interview (9/2024): https://www.nyfa.org/blog/integrating-perspectives-through-creativity-a-conversation-with-new-immigrant-artist-consultant-ghislaine-sabati/
All responses in this section from Ghislaine Sabiti, featured guest.
- Living on three different continents, I try to embrace the three different cultures in my art practice and also as an art educator.
- Embracing the multicultural aspect of your background & hybrid identity
- Each culture has something very special and important, as I have learned through my art practice and as an artist. So I need to use it as a tool and be proud of that. I can share with everybody.
- Students have different levels of background and knowledge regarding glassmaking and business skills.
- As an art educator and a mentor, I try to understand where they are coming from.
- I always make sure that the curriculum matches the students’ level, and adapt the curriculum by understanding the needs of every student.
- Being a good listener is very important.
- Remembering what it is like to be a student and understanding the student’s perspective and what they want to learn. Sometimes it could be a bit overwhelming, so you need to know how to navigate layers of the knowledge and learning process.
- Life is a learning process: you never finish learning.
Responses from this point on are aggregated, quoted text originated in the chat.
- If the student is experienced in another medium and tries glass for the first time, that can be humbling if you’re used to being a master in another discipline.
- It takes so much courage to become a beginner again. I like to create space for that by inviting students to show images of their work in another medium or discipline if they’d like. Sometimes it’s surprising what I find.
- Being humble is key to starting something new and being a beginner. Handle yourself.
- Fun and experimentation. When you have this mindset of experimenting, you give room for failure, it’s good for you because you are not being a perfectionist. Being a perfectionist doesn’t allow you to excel and be more open to exploring new techniques, new skills, new sizes, and failure. So experimentation is a key for me, and having fun. Don’t stress, because if you’re overthinking and stressed, you cannot achieve anything.
- Write words on the board in different languages that correspond to the forms you are making. You learn a little bit about different languages.
- Making room for the students to teach you something. Making space for an exchange to happen, ex: learning new words from another language, sharing food, beads, makes everyone feel comfortable. Then we can teach each other — in addition to the teacher teaching the students.
- Applying what you know from another field or working with other media than flameworking helps you remember that you aren’t starting from nothing. Even life experience helps because you have to be tough and stubborn to work the glass. You gotta stick with it.
- No one taught me, I saw glassblowing when I was a little kid and started playing around with it for fifty years. So the connection of the mind, the eyes, the hands, and the material and being willing to be led by the material. Chase your curiosity through the glass… that connection that you finally discover, that you’ve successfully communicated through the material.
- Glass is very abstract, so using metaphors and other things to explain what is happening is helpful. For example, moving from flameworking to the hot shop helped me understand the annealing flame — even though the glory hole and annealing flame were different, there are enough similarities that things started to click.
- Explaining the viscosity of glass in terms of sugar for a student who was a candy maker. Finding a common bridge.
- It’s always about building a bridge between communities, and even in my classroom I will build a bridge by always bringing in mentors and speakers to help the student learn and understand differently. Building bridges through partnership, mentorship, volunteers, and bringing in speakers to share another perspective and help students understand in another way. These connections outside the classroom are long-term and could be a collaboration in the future for an opportunity, an exhibition, or a job, you never know.
- You can bring glass to anything. I have a guest coming to the glass shop to talk about ancient glass, and how glass traveled throughout the world in ancient times. So you can really connect everything to everything. Not just glass materials, but ceramic, metal: it’s all connected. So you could connect it to other subjects.
- Challenge students to pay attention to how many things in your life are made of glass and make a list. It can change your perspective. It’s surprising how much we interact with glass daily, and how those are shared experiences.
- Glass can make people more accessible and diffuse racial tensions by focusing attention on the glass and having a shared experience. Having material to talk about in between cultural differences is helpful.
- “applying what you know from working with other media/in other fields to flameworking helps you remember you are not completely starting from nothing!”
- “Being willing to be led by the material”
- “Use of metaphor to explain/understand glass”
- Being an artist, you need an advisor. You need someone who can guide you and tell you the truth, and not just say everything’s fine.
- A mentor will guide you and align you where you are supposed to be, without giving you all the answers. Being a mentor is not giving all the answers because you have to learn, but it’s to guide you and help you find the way and the tools and knowledge, the skills and the connection.
- I used to be a mentee, and am now a mentor. Doing both helped me to recognize the needs of what an artist is looking for and also the response. Follow your intuition and your instinct and being a good listener is the key for a mentee, and also as a mentor because you have to listen to the needs of the person in front of you and ask for help and guidance.
- For me, building a connection started within a community. Community is key for me as an artist. So my work is focused on community and it is also my everyday life philosophy. So I was looking for a different community. It wasn’t just in the glass community, it was in fine art, painting, ceramic, and also social justice. I feel that I’m connected, and I use this community to build a network, to build a presence. When you are a part of the community, it’s not just taking, you have to give back.
- Being in community could be volunteering, working, or just giving back and knowing that you are somebody and you come from somewhere. So don’t erase your past. Don’t erase your culture. Try to embrace the new culture with your roots. It’s a hybrid, like these two cultures.
- Mentorship is a way to transfer knowledge between someone with a lot of experience to someone who is just starting.
- As a consultant and a mentor, I always think about myself as an immigrant artist living on three different continents and also embracing my cultures. Using your experience and knowledge is key, but 100% understanding and listening to the needs of the person in front of you is important. I always remember what I went through, so I’m trying to have them not make the same mistakes I did in the past.
- Offering bilingual mentor sessions in French and English open to a big range of communities. It’s very helpful to be able to touch people all over the world. Some artists can be anywhere in the world and speak French or English in the session. That is amazing, it is global, international, and local.
- My mentor and I still get together. He’s old, he’s got a little dementia now, but he’s still a mentor to me. I’m still learning from him, and it’s not just glass that I’m learning.
- The best mentors that I’ve had are never just teaching you about glass, they are also teaching you about life and they show up right when you need them.
- Building a bridge between students and professionals
- I’m excited that it’s mostly women here. I’m living in Reno, and there are no formal education centers, so I’ve just started working with a couple of artists in their spaces. It’s informal mentorship. There is another male student who received more attention from the older male mentor, including free materials. They have very similar styles, whereas I’m coming in wanting to make cute pink things, I’m just looking at a different side of glass. Regardless of the discomfort, it is cool that we can share our passion for glass. Mentors teach you about life, and maybe about what you don’t want in life. Maybe this is not what I want for the glass scene going forward – I want people to feel more welcome.
- Having discussions like this where I get to meet people from places I would have never even gotten to know. It’s cool to be able to join y’all and maybe have mentorship from even just this discussion. This level of interaction is just as important as being in a classroom setting.
- Although glass is so unifying, it is very isolating in that it’s not accessible and a lot of people, especially with flameworking, will work out of their garage or some random warehouse, unless you’re in an urban center where there are a bunch of cool places that have huge shops.
- When I was first starting, I was intimidated by all the people who were my heroes. I see that still with my students. The very seasoned people are happy most of the time to have interactions with the new people. I think that both have a lot to learn from one another, in every sense of the word. How can we bridge the gap between different generations, and do these challenges exist outside of traditional learning spaces?
- I’ve experienced some of the community, but I’m gonna be a little bit cynical here and say that I’ve run into forces that weren’t so great. I started in flameworking, and was getting interested in color chemistry, and remember just completely getting shut down. Nobody I was able to talk to would give me any information. That’s part of why I got into ceramics, in addition to glass, to try and reverse engineer color chemistry. And there’s still a lot of weird secret-keeping. There’s a lot of cliques.
- I’ve found that a lot of what interests me doesn’t fit well with a lot of the established systems and hierarchies. I started in a craft center, and I took craft classes, eventually got into an MFA program. I got an MFA and a lot of my experience has been people kind of looking at me weirdly and saying, you’re not doing it “right.” And that cuts me off from a lot of things.
- I do believe in mentorship. I think that works well if you can find a mentor that works well with you. But there’s also this sense of looking to something that’s already established, that at least for me, shuts off some potential doors to other avenues. When I do something that I find compelling and talk to someone who is established, they look at it and say “What are you doing?” I don’t agree with it, and in odd cases, people can find it threatening.
- I’ve been in some places where I felt afraid to stand out or go against the grain. And then there are other places where it feels much more open.
- It’s difficult to be a trailblazer.
- Every voice is valuable, even if it’s brand new.
- “I feel like once you have a mentor, they are always a mentor (in the best case!)”
- There are lots of different paths of mentorship. I was, or still am, a pipemaker, and how I came into the industry was more garages in the forest and less big box kind of access. Looking back, I had a multi-mentor type of system, instead of having full investment in one because it wasn’t an institution I went to.
- I had to be careful not to step on the toes of my mentors because it was a small town, and there were not a lot of places to sell, so I had to take what I learned and make something new out of it to keep it from becoming a bitter relationship.
- I broadened my search for mentorship and diversified my research to reach out beyond my local community. I learned so much through collaboration and the mentorship that developed as a result.
- One of my mentors was burnt out on glass, but became reinvigorated with my presence, we shared the love of glass. I feel that as a student, there’s a role to play. Some mentors have been in it for a long time. There’s a lot of nuance, a burden that comes along with that elongated process. A newcomer can bring that new energy to it. I think that mentorship, as much as it helps the student, can help the mentor and that relationship evolves and can make both find new facets of the material that they may not have found before.
- Glass has been a unifying thing, because I’ve learned from people who barely spoke the same language. We collaborated, and communicated through the glass, using drawings as a reference and making something together.
- Don’t be afraid to be shamelessly interested in glass and ask people you admire to have a conversation.
- Intergenerational collaboration and diversity are key. Sharing the same space as different people is a learning process, and you need each other to grow, so by being open to diversity and also having intergenerational conversations, you can learn from each other’s wisdom, knowledge, and creativity. This is key to building a community and also good for your art practice on an everyday basis.
- “If you’re a researcher, you are your teacher in a way”
- “It’s important to set the ego aside when you enter the classroom”
- I started teaching at 15, and I was teaching adults. The generation gap was challenging, I even had one guy say “I’m not listening to you, you’re just a kid.” You have to kind of roll with it. Now, I’m the same age as those adults, and the people I’m teaching are like my grandkids. You change how you are depending on your age I think, between your students.
- Sometimes it’s hard to bridge the gap with very new students, so I like to team teach with another teacher who has a different perspective, age, skill set, and background to give the students another perspective. Seeing us (the teachers) bridge the gap can then be scaled to us teaching the students and the students teaching us.
- From a student’s POV: sometimes the teachers or people in the community can be gatekeepers about certain things. They may withhold teaching certain things (like their signature techniques). At the end of the day, the teachers who are the most open in their teaching, and also open to let you mess up and experiment, play a huge role.
- No matter how much experience you have, if you can’t connect with a student and inspire them to feel excited, or not get discouraged, there is going to be a bridge created.
- I think it’s really important to learn from people who have different strengths.
- Sometimes having a young teacher can help connect with the younger students of a similar age.
- Being present, understanding the student’s needs, fostering diversity of perspectives and community, and having multiple teachers with different backgrounds are all keys for a successful class and improvement from the student. If a teacher can combine the background and the knowledge it becomes more powerful for the classroom and yields a better result at the end of the semester.
- As a teacher I never want to hold back information because you never know what people are capable of. If you are withholding info, you’re putting limits on the student capabilities, and judging them before even getting to know them. That’s not fair. I always think it’s the right move to share info and encourage students to come back again and again because maybe they’re not ready for the difficult moves yet, but with repetition, they’ll build that knowledge and eventually try it. Some are great glassblowers out of the gate, and the teacher has to also accept that as a possibility.
- I teach with another teacher who is so different from me. She gives a history lecture on glass that adds a complementary perspective when working with a group.
- There is some grey area in the spectrum between the student and the teacher. I’m to the point in a lot of areas I find interesting that I can’t find teachers or students to connect with, even though I am open to sharing all of my information. I rarely have anybody that listens.
- I think some of that is structural because there seems to be some kind of hierarchical authority about who gets to be a teacher. I’ve had some personal issues with having my qualified application to be a teacher tested. It’s hard for me to not think about the student-teacher kind of relationship and structure as not also being part of this established hierarchy that is designed to perpetuate itself.
- I agree with everything that’s being said about best teaching practices, but I’ve had teachers who went against all of those things, and those are the same teachers that I think want to dictate.
- For a student, it’s hard to find teachers who aren’t promoted (by an institution). If you want to teach, there’s little way that somebody who might be interested is going to find you.
- Unfortunately, not all teachers are good teachers.
- If the institution is set up for that hierarchy, it’s really hard to break through. Maybe look at some of the additional relationships for learning, like skill sharing, and collaboration.
- Passing the torch as an art instructor and a teacher, you have to recognize the skill of each student no matter the level of the skills.
- You always want success for your students, you want them to be better than you. This is why you teach.
- If you love what you are doing, you can pass that love onto the students.
- Having the feeling like somebody’s going to copy me or somebody is going to take over I think is the wrong mindset of an artist and a teacher.
- What are your goals as a teacher? Are you looking for a paycheck or do you want a successful student to be able to make a living with their art? Everybody has an agenda and it’s sad to say that not everybody is a good teacher, but how you can make a difference is very important.
- Making a bridge like empowering the next generation to do better than you I think is one of the keys.
- As the community is growing, we don’t want the younger generation to feel cut off. We want knowledge to travel in both directions because all voices are valuable. Sometimes you have a top down approach to teaching, and sometimes it’s more omnidirectional. How do we address building bridges between levels of experience?
- Tracing bodies of the students and using this space in between us as a template for making neon. It’s not about glass, it’s not about teaching, it’s just this space between us and the trust between us and that’s pretty beautiful.
- Encouraging folx to work in pairs or small groups, in class and out of class. Having a torch buddy is helpful for safety, and can also turn into a long term support system that includes peer support, intergeneration and intercultural wisdom, and skill sharing.
- Communication building is one of the keys. Skill sharing and exchange is one of the keys. Organizing exchanges for artwork, skills, and tools with your friends and coworkers helps build bridges and relationships and improves your classroom.
- I try to adopt the attitude: “There’s no wrong answers, just variable results.” Especially for beginners. Treat every hurdle with curiosity to make a safe space for landing when they’re in the air. Helping students navigate the unknown. Amplifying that safely makes the relationship with the student feel stronger.
- It can be intimidating as a student to meet the teacher where they are at (in an institution, maybe with a prescribed technique). Teachers could try leaving the classroom and meeting the students elsewhere where they are at. Both could benefit by sharing what they have to offer. Insider vs outsider
- There is a big insider faction in glass that can be intimidating and limited in what’s explored. I want to encourage people to go out and play. Don’t focus on inviting people in. Go out and forge the connections for yourself outside and see what else is out there.
- Instead of saying come to me at the institution, you can show up and say here’s what I am offering, let’s figure it out. Change the paradigm and remove yourself from the oppressive system.
- Get out of your comfort zone and into the community.
- Regarding glass, there are limited facilities and safety that are needed to make glass. The internet opened up those spaces for teaching and learning in the virtual space. How can we bridge these spaces to bring the freedom of free knowledge exchanges on you tube and social media with the physical spaces (mostly institutions) in order to access students in a physical space for hands-on material experiences?
- In the 70s, we would set up the torches anywhere, and people would just come. One time we set up in front of a slaughterhouse, the library, and craft shows. Racial tensions could be eased by sharing glassblowing with the public and bringing humor to the situation.
- Reinvent the way you connect with the community. Be bold, and think of new ideas to connect with your community. You are always going to find some help, so look for those people.
- Local arts councils may have grants for these kinds of things. To bring teaching into the schools and give you the opportunity to get out there.
- “cross pollinate with other mediums! Glass can be combined with any other material”
- “Seeing hot glass blown outside at the renaissance faire as a child is what lit my fire!”
- You have an establishment that is struggling with inclusion and diversity and wanting to get more people inside. Personally, I’m not looking to go inside, I think it’s a little stuffy. If people want to find some new techniques, new ideas, people doing different things, you gotta come out from where the establishment is.
- I have the credential that says I should be able to teach (MFA), but I’m not very interested in teaching in the established venues, because I really don’t get to teach, and some of the ideas are not very popular (incorporating 3D printing into craft material). This is how you get to teach and have a reputation, but it’s still within that kind of structure, and I’m still not interested in that structure.
- I resonate with that feeling of being an outsider and looking in at these big institutions. I’ve been a pipemaker my whole career, and going for my MFA was a big decision to enter into the institutions. I thought that by doing this I could try and be a bridge between the inside and outside. When I say something that was missing, I thought maybe I can be the missing thing that can fill that gap.
- Seeking out where you can be bold. As an instructor it’s important to be bold and to stay true to your guts.
- When you’re not ready to teach because you don’t trust the institution, try to find a safe place. How can you make a safe place, even inside an institution where you are working, how can you make it better and safer for everybody? It could be more diverse. Inclusion is always a component to making it welcoming. You can create it inside the institution, and you can do with that also outside the institution. So you cannot do it by yourself. Sometimes you need the community.
- Building a bridge, having the connection, having the partnership is one of the keys, because sometimes your voice is not enough. You need many voices to make a difference. And one key as an instructor is to teach in a safe place for you and for your student. If you don’t feel like it’s safe enough for you, address the issue.
- One of the keys for building a bridge, building a community is removing the fear, and don’t sabotage yourself. Always feel like your voice is important and somebody will hear your voice no matter what is going to be here, and you cannot walk by yourself. You need a community. So don’t be afraid to ask for help, any collaboration is the only way you can grow as a human being.
LINK TO RESOURCE: MEETING NOTES (GOOGLE DOC)
Last updated: 3/19/25
