Tag: professional development

• I’m teaching at University of Massachusetts, and also Penland, Pilchuck, Pittsburgh Glass Center and UrbanGlass. I started teaching before I could get paid, and they saved my paycheck until I turned 15. So I’ve seen a lot of changes happen in the glass world, and that’s been really exciting.
• I teach Plasma Design at Salem Community College. I also teach around the country, various flameworking related workshops. I’ve been teaching for about 20 years. 
• I teach at Pittsburgh Glass Center, Pilchuck, and UrbanGlass. I also teach on the internet. The focus is primarily plasma. 
• I teach at Salem Community College.
• I teach at RIT, flameworking and kilncasting.
• I am not currently teaching, currently in grad school at RISD, but I’ve taught lampworking at UrbanGlass and Snow Farm.
• I’m a technician, not necessarily a flameworking educator, but I’ve been working with the University of Washington Glass program. 
• I started teaching earlier this year, out of Bay Area Glass Institute, they have a really cool program that is kind of developing. I’ve taught there twice, beginner classes. 
• I’m not currently teaching anywhere, but just got out of grad school at VCU so I was recently teaching. 
• I teach at Sheridan College, it’s my seventh year. I started teaching in 1999. 

• Crowdsourcing is great way to get in contact with your students before the class even starts so they can have a say in what you’re teaching. 
• Using the results of online polling, we ended up deciding on a kiln class (for plasma, instead of a hot shop based class). Seeing everyone else lean in that direction helped solidify that I wanted to build that class out. 
• Balancing meeting the expectations of your students, but also trying to bring your resources to the table too. 
• Instagram poll for crowdsourcing, and also put a poll on facebook, where it can stand a bit longer. You can also put a longer standing poll in your posts. I find it easier to grab people’s attention on facebook or Instagram than through email sometimes.  
• New model, where you’re in direct communication with your audience.

• I tell people they can video anything at any time. It’s an open book, and just go for it. If they want to share it, they can, I’m okay with that. 
• Video is helpful because when I teach at the university, I have them for such a short time, and they can practice forever, right? But if  I’m doing something else while they’re practicing, then they can refer to their video. 
• I feel comfortable with small snippets of video for the internet. I don’t want anyone to put the entire workshop online. I think short videos are more in line with people’s attention span for the internet. 
• For my college courses, we record all the demos and we have an archive that students can access for the semester asynchronously. 
• The one thing I make sure is that whoever is videotaping is focusing on me, and I’m the main focus, and anyone else that’s in the frame is ok with being filmed. 
• We have people pool their videos and images, so that everyone has access to it – because some people have a better angle than others.
• If the workshop or an entire demo was entirely online, I personally don’t feel worried about that. Part of the reason people come to those workshops is to be able to have easier access to that conversation.
• I teach at Salem Community College, and we have a camera for the instructor bench mounted in a bird’s eye view over the torch, which is an incredible angle that no one but you ever gets to see. 
• I always tell students to come around and stand over my shoulder, it’s ok. But they are really afraid to. It’s hard to get people to come closer. Maybe it’s a post-COVID thing.
  The camera is hooked up to the “Jumbotron”, a big TV screen, and people can watch that. Demos are recorded and uploaded to our institutional Canvas platform.  I also film on my phone with a DidyClip (neodymium filter), making videos that I put on YouTube as well. 
• Any student who missed anything can review the video.personally,  I’m an avid notetaker, but I can’t always watch and take notes at the same time. 
• If you put anything online, make sure I look good!
• The video aspect just adds another dimension to teaching. It’s another hat that we now wear as teachers. 
• The whole online thing  has changed the way classes have evolved. Now my students can just take video of my demos and have that. It’s really nice. 

• I require my students to take notes, but I find that I don’t know if it’s this generation of students, they just stare at you blankly and they don’t take notes. 
• I started breaking down making each step of a demo that I’m doing  and putting it on a little board so they have each step to follow and that seemed to help. 
• I have a larger group with different skill levels. I’ve been bringing in related objects that are in process, and I’ll pass them around while I’m demoing during the slow parts when we’re just watching the glass melt, to keep the students engaged.
• I love doing a little show and tell during demos. Whether or not I feel like they need to  see it up close, it also  gets them involved in some way. 
• (Note Taking) is a hit or miss for different groups. Some students are just amazing notetakers, and I don’t even have to ask them to. And then with some, I feel like I’m pulling teeth to get them to even bring a sketchbook. 
• Sometimes I will draw diagrams on the board if they’re simple to replicate. I think that’s very generous and a wonderful thing for a teacher to do. But it takes a lot of time before class to prepare for that.
• Before a demo I might ask, How would you do this? And we go around the class and speculate on what steps you would take to make it, just to get them talking and interacting with each other. 
• Tell jokes throughout the whole demo. Sometimes people miss the whole demo because they’re listening to the jokes. But you know, just lighten it up and get interaction between people. Somehow get vocabulary going. 
• Not everybody takes notes, and I don’t make them take notes if they don’t want to. They don’t want to sketch, they don’t sketch. People learn in different ways.
• Sometimes I provide handouts if there’s something I really want them to have a reference for.
• I like leading with an example and then finding ways to shift a mindset. There’s people with different learning methods. 
• I had a diverse group of people with different languages. I made sure everyone can access my lectures and slideshows before I actually do the lecture and the slideshow. And then I will work with them to see where they’re at, because maybe some people may need to have a text translator. Or they have to hear it again, they can’t just look at their writing. 
• The major note-taking that happens in the Plasma class was often during the super exciting part, when you’re filling with gasses and lighting it up. Harry (Schwarzrock) had this great sense of how to get students to take notes there, and that’s what allows you to repeat what steps are happening in the process. 
• I’m working with a few people to find out “What would a notebook look like? How would you organize your notes if you’re going to do that same process again?” It can be challenging to figure that out. 
• I think most of the drawing happens when you ask a student what they want to make and they draw it so I can help them break it down. And I’ll have them draw each step of the way. Then they can work through it. 
• Sometimes you just can’t force them to take notes and that’s on them at some point. 
• “Last summer I taught a workshop at PGC and one of my students took such neat and comprehensive notes, I asked her if I could scan her sketchbook and share it with future students! She said yes! Now I don’t have to make them myself”

• We have an active flameworking class right now, and a visitor here, Patricia Davidson, who just did a demo for KCJ Szwedinski who is currently teaching. 
• We have 14 stations, each outfitted with either a little torch or a national torch.
• We have a screen right next to the instructor’s station. 
• The gas is plumbed down the center. Each table has its own set of regulators and shut-off valves. 
• We’ve got a couple different annealers and a sandblaster in here. 

What do different structures for studio accessibility look like? How much access do you give outside of class? What do you feel is necessary for people to accomplish the goals of your curriculum in order to work outside of class?

• If I’m present, which is whenever the Glass Lab is open, students can come in and work. After their first lesson, they feel pretty confident turning on and off the torch, they each have their own regulators, so nothing’s going to flash back to the other stations, it feels pretty safe. So I just let them work.
• At the University, I had the science librarians come in, and do a little workshop. Different groups on campus are coming in and renting out the glass shop and I teach them a little bit about glass. You can relate your glass to history, to science, to archaeology, to just so many things. So you can bring those people in.
• Get as many people into the flame shop as possible, teach as many as you can about safety procedures, and spread the knowledge around.
• “I like to offer as much studio access outside of class as possible.
• For beginner students, I usually wait until the first few weeks are over when they have confidence. The buddy system is key!”
• “We normally require 10 hours per week outside of class. Still trying to figure out the best way to make that possible for our flameworking students.”
• “A studio monitor is a great standard for an education environment. whether its an academic or public teaching environment it keeps an eye on students of various experiences. This is slightly different compared to a renter of a public studio where someone checks in.
• The safety may not be the equipment itself, but human error or accidents. Create faster response time with some whose primary is to monitor.”
• “I would take into consideration any feedback where students would need more time than what is currently being offered.”
• “I encourage students to always ask each other questions and help one another outside of class (even beginners) because it makes them think critically about the info given in class!”
• “I have my kids have a group chat together and so they can always find a Buddy.”
• “Safety posters with basic set up/shut down procedures and leave books in the studio if you can so students can find their own answers”

• I’m a graduate student and a TA, and I’m twice the age of most of my peers and so I inevitably function as a TA in every class that I’m in, because the visiting artists are my friends and the people in the slideshows.
• If (students) need to be connected with resources, I can help you build a bridge to all of these artists that you’re learning about or that you should know about. It’s making me realize that I’m so much more qualified to be teaching at this (higher ed) level than I had realized. Because I’ve been in isolation in my studio by myself for 25 years. And to be mirrored by all of the young people around me or not to be mirrored is very fortifying for my sense of self, or helping me understand myself more.
• I love teaching and I really want to be here. I could teach in the glass department, I could teach in the jewelry department, I could teach in illustration. I don’t know what will happen, but I feel more driven to definitely teach here because my kid just said, “ Oh, I want to go to RISD.” If I’m faculty, they’d get a full ride.
• My favorite moments (of teaching) is when I can say, “I don’t know.” Because then we can all look at the same thing. It’s important to find a way to have students be able to navigate a problem or navigate learning something. 
• Some students want a lot of info, and some students just go for it. The students who just go for it and are not afraid to mess it up tend to improve exponentially faster. 
• I crack jokes, in the beginning of class I always try to have everyone introduce themselves. Just getting comfortable with people in the beginning seems to work.
• I don’t think I’ve ever not been a student. I learn a lot while I’m teaching. Learning and teaching are always happening simultaneously. They’re exchanging with each other constantly. 
• “I don’t know if it is about teaching or learning, but about the energy between”
• “When I teach, I feel like I learn just as much as the students! Teaching is an exchange, and it’s important to make space for the students to teach you too – reciprocation.”

• Finding ways in the teaching process where failure is going to exist, and to highlight those failures so that they can learn from it.
• Feedback from my students: when I have failure in a demo, it’s even more valuable to them because they can see how I overcome the failure. You don’t always see that in a master glassblower demo.
• I used to be scared to mess up on my demos when I was teaching. But now, it’s great that (the students) can see that I mess up and also can see how I fix it.
• Learning how to fix something is just as important if not more important than learning how to make something. 
• I teach a lot of classes and can make something quickly, because I’ve done it a thousand times. Students get so frustrated because it’s harder when they do it. 
• Students: Your goal should be to play around, and not make anything perfect for a few weeks. You have to learn to persevere. 
• Students suggested bringing in some of my earliest pieces from when I was starting vs. “Don’t show bad early work”.
• “It’s all about not freaking out.”
• I’ll blow a beautiful bubble, then mash it up. Then gather the glass and blow another beautiful bubble. Don’t worry, glass is forgiving. You just melt it in, blow it again. Don’t waste the glass, just keep going. 
• For frustrated students, I have a huge library on glass. So they go into the other room and look through the books for a while and just settle down.
• I assign technical assignments, making 10 or 20 of something, I found that when there’s multiples it is much harder to focus on the nitty gritty details of one thing. 
• I think things can get too “precious” with beginning students.
• With beginners, when they go to the studio in their free time, they might not know what to make, so I assign them multiples. 
• Make a new one, it’ll be better the second time. 
• “Quality through quantity!” 
• These days I’m more focused on 3D modeling with the CNC machining than flameworking, but I think it would be interesting to merge those things together to create some fusions out of it. 
•  When I teach workshops, I don’t finish my demos. I’ll leave it unfinished because it puts less pressure on the student to try something new. I noticed more people trying the technique when I left the demo unfinished, or messed it up. 
•  “In class we review all the failures and try to identify what was missed and why it happened and now I find them correcting/reminding each other to say oh remember when we did that and it failed, don’t forget to do”
• “I love intentionally messing up. Sometimes you have to model intentional failure for students!”

• At RISD, we did a “factory day” in the hotshop. Each person did one step on the factory line, so one person is continuously doing one part of the process. The final result, if it’s weird, it’s not your fault, it’s everybody’s fault. 
• Group project exercise as a diffusion of responsibility. So if the end result isn’t perfect,  the responsibility is shared. It’s not about the end result, it’s about the journey, right?
• Punti ball – you practice a cold seal, then practice puntying the same piece like 10 times, transferring the punti. 
• I think collaboration can be a great way to mitigate failure, and play to people’s strengths. 
• The author can be more than one person. Collaboration and fabrication are also worth exploring. 
• Make a musical instrument that can be played by many people at once.
• I collaborated with an art therapist. We gave out materials that I knew were difficult to work with – that were beyond the students skill levels. Difficult color. We all had our experiences, then we regrouped after to reflect and express our frustration. That turned into a much deeper conversation about where the frustration around failure was coming from. The art therapist was able to help maintain the teacher-student boundaries as emotion was coming up. 
• I try to get students to collaborate with somebody else in another class. How can we bring weaving to glass?
• Through collaboration, hopefully the students will feel more connected as a community throughout the class. 
• Collaborative projects can be an icebreaker, so students can feel comfortable interacting. They tend to feel more comfortable asking each other for help, making for a safer environment after hours. 
• In neon, I’ve heard some classes will do group end to end seals of tubing with teams to see who can make the longest sealed tubing. In neon, you’re always shifting leverage points as you work on the glass, so no one feels the same.

What do your students want you to teach?

• I love teaching beginner and intermediate students. I like to teach the fundamental building blocks of techniques.
• I love teaching networking because once they understand hot and cold seals, they can make anything, or start to go big, work sculpturally. 
• I’m really into improvising and pushing the envelope: What can be a blow mold? Can we blow into food? I try to introduce this way of working.
• Right now my class is into hollow sculpture. All the demo requests have been for animals, figures, sculpting from life. 
• As a student, I’ve found conflicting views. There are many “right” ways of doing things, take all the info and see what you can do with it. I try to remove a hierarchy of technique so that students don’t think there is just one way of doing things.
• Hollow networking
• Sculpting and networking
• From a drawing, break a sculpture down into various blobs and then teach them to hot seal those blobs together. 
• Teaching beadmaking, I get requests to demo other people’s beads and Italian technique, which I am able to do, but don’t feel a connection to. I would rather make up some new design. Now, I start with a generative design exercise that we can draw ideas from, in order to limit cultural appropriation and give artists agency over their own designs. Re-evaluating what success could be.
• When I teach ring seals, everybody makes the same little bubbler. Then I tell them, “OK now take those techniques and make something I’ve never seen before.”
• I began by asking “what is beautiful to you and why? For me that’s often gradients of color, smooth transitions, but there’s so many different answers. Challenge people to think about what they like and why. 
• “My students always want me to teach them implosions or heady pendant techniques lol. I always save that demo for the end of the semester as a “reward”; because I know some people would only make pendants all semester if I demo’ed it earlier!”
• “I also encourage healthy competition, we have a marble rolling contest :)”

• Scribble with a glass rod, dripping the glass to make a teardrop.
• Flame chemistry
• Gathering with one hand
• I like to walk around and observe every student. When I see them hanging up, I’ll let them do it, then I’ll ask them if they want help. Then sometimes, I’ll take the rod from them and execute that part they were hanging up on and then give it back to them. 
• I always try to show encouragement. 
• For advanced techniques, you might need some more information beyond just having fun and playing around. 
• Get students comfortable with lighting the torch. 
• Get students comfortable with messing up in front of one another. 
• “Anatomy of the flame, then compression and expansions, then making something functional with those compression and expansion”
• “A stir rod with a round sphere on the end..”
• “Rings – they can be as creative at you want, and lots of skills involved- hot seal, cold seal, bridging, sculpting, color application, sizing, revising…” 
• “The first thing I focus on is studio ice-breakers with a simple assignment, this helps me understand where people are mentally and technically, and give me insight on how to teach the course.”

If you’re self taught, are you your own teacher in some way?

• I think being an autodidact, or being self taught, you are your own teacher. I feel like it requires the same type of focus or structure of seeking out information.
• I’ve been trying to find a balance between having students teach themselves a little bit and giving tons of information. I want them to be able to think critically for themselves, and find that sweet balance where they can get the info they need, but also empower themselves to ask questions, so I’m not creating the questions and answers for them. 
• We’re all teaching ourselves, even students. We’re gonna be learning from somebody, but also teaching ourselves that that person is teaching us. 
• “I suppose the interesting position that I find myself in is that I’m looking at the stuff that hasn’t really been explored before, so I end up doing my own R&D and kind of pushing what I learn without there really being an established knowledge base.”

• I’ve found just being able to keep it short and simple on the demos, but letting them play is what my approach is. It’s a beginner class, so you’re not looking for advanced techniques. I just want them to get comfortable with the glass. 
• Even though I took traditional flameworking, (when I’m teaching) I’m like, here’s the basics, but also, you might discover something completely new. A lot of my classes are designed around play. 
• I’m in the process of working on some STEAM proposals, grants for kids of color to do science art camp, with glass and experiments, things like that. 
• I’m starting to dive more into that world of being able to pass the knowledge on. I feel like there’s a lack in the glass world, OG’s are still holding on to things and still wanting to support them and take their classes, they’re not like, “Hey, let me come through and help support you.”
• I will be consulting with my first tech company in San Francisco to teach the new employees some simple things about glass. 
• “I’m really grateful for this conversation and this opportunity because it’s kind of like new horizons for me to explore outside of, making stuff and selling it.”
• For me, it’s not about teaching glass. It’s just this zone that you get into if you’re a student, or if you’re a teacher, you’re working together in this energy zone that you have. So it could be anything. 
• I like showing one part of what I want them to learn, but I also don’t want to influence the students creatively to navigate strongly towards what I would personally do. 
• Sometimes students fly a little too close to the sun, or try something beyond their skill level. Teaching is about keeping the pace and managing expectations. 

• Jewelry:
  • Jewelry for the contemporary jewelry collector market and people who like large jewelry 
  • Make jewelry, trying to make things I haven’t really seen before, like unusual glass beads and chains
  • Production jewelry, which has a specific audience (ex. production implosion pendants) and contemporary jewelry
  • Make marbles and implosion pendants. Popular as far as jewelry goes, and a great way to get your stuff out there in the world
  • I’ve done beads and bead shows, did jewelry for many years
• Fabrication/consultation:
  • Consulting for shipping and crating of glass (particularly delicate and flameworked items)
  • Fabrication for other artists (contemporary art world) 
  • Spent a year making chains for Calvin Klein’s runway shows
  • Make prep for other artists who use glass parts in mixed media sculpture 
  • Fabrication for artists. The audience is the contemporary artist, or whoever their audience is, and that’s a bigger part of my income stream
• Gig work:
  • Pretty common to diversify your income stream
  • Glass adjacent gigs: public speaking, lecturing and teaching as an advocate for flameworking. All paid work. Audience largely institutional. 
  • I’ve been a gig worker for 25 years; lots of different income streams that are all flameworking related or adjacent
• Pipes:
  • Making pipes to bring in side-money, because renting time in the hot shop was expensive and I didn’t have access.
  • First Fridays in downtown LA, setting up a table and selling pipes.
  • I would do some consignment at pipe shops, and then also I was just hitting people up on the streets and asking hey are you interested in some glass
  • “Making pipes for a side hustle.”
• I am doing a lot of stuff around flameworking that I guess a lot of people don’t get involved with.
  • Would say my audience is myself, at this point, because I am really just interested in exploring the medium.
  • I do a lot of research and development, material science, trying to figure out and understand glass. I write up some of the stuff that I come up with so that other people can tread and hopefully use as a jumping off point.
  • Flameworking ceramics and glass 
• Teach glass and other things
• In grad school for illustration and making dioramas of handmade glass and laser cut textiles that I’m photographing to illustrate children’s books I’ve written 
• Sculptures and performance art with flameworking. Try to make my work accessible — the audience is the general public. Wanted to foster a wider entry point to glass.
• Including bits and pieces that are sculpted on the torch to use in my larger sculptures made in the hotshop
• Reusing glass from the hotshop to then repurpose and potentially making a product line
• Make work resembling plants, succulents, coral, etc.
• I worked at REI, and used to make snails with little pins on them and would sell these to my fellow employees at work. 
• Scientific glassworking:
  • I work in Research and development in Silicon Valley and that really set me up for where I am now- I have a corporate scientific job with Bruce Suba as my mentor doing glass to metal seals. That set me up to now be in a position to just make my own work for fun, to just be an artist. 
  • Scientific glassworking = flameworking for a living. Getting paid to practice your skills that you can then use for your side hustles. 
  • I still have my own (flameworking) business since the 70s, but I also do scientific apparatus and that gives me the ability to do whatever I want. 
• My husband and I run a glass art studio in British Columbia. It’s about building a community and learning what the community needs from you as a flameworker. Just find your niche within that.
  • My husband did a lot of goblets. We started teaching and building a community who appreciated art. 
  • We moved to a town of about 5000 people, going from doing big art shows to communicating directly with our customers, with walk-in traffic to our shop. Now we are dealing with distributors (pipes) 
  • Many revenue streams: we do scientific repair for local University, we do upcycled glass work from recycled bottles into reusable goods, pipes, that are sold mostly through distributors and the big trade shows.
• Podcasting:
  • I do a podcast (Taming Lightning) where I talk about neon and plasma. Skill sets are in the hotshop, but I also use flameworking principles to get a better overall seal in the hotshop and find ways I can use that in the flame shop as well.
  • Podcasting and lecturing as a glass adjacent income stream
  • Provide content for a YouTube producer to make a glassblowing YouTube show (Gather Glass with Wildfire) to educate the audience and community. Doesn’t really make money, but increases exposure. Started with a podcast, then a live show, now it’s monthly. Doing an interview with Marble Slinger who has a new movie coming out. Crosspollinate with other artists and producers. 
• Recently working on a commission for plasma chops, cups were fabricated, and I filled them with gasses. People reach out to me from IG, Facebook, etc.
• Portable glassblowing studio that we take into the community to demonstrate and share about glassblowing and flameworking and what we do.
• “Recycled glass production line.” 
• “Servicing other studios”
• Started with selling stuff out of my trunk, but I realized that I didn’t want to live this way.

• Impact of COVID-19:
  • When COVID hit there was a huge drop and supply chain issues, getting flameworking supplies and glass was difficult because color comes from the US so it is hard to be competitive with pricing. 
  • During COVID, we lost the ability to connect with our customers, people were not hanging out and sharing glass, that’s what the cannabis community is all about. 
  • When teaching went online it was an opportunity for students to learn about the history of glass. It really opened my mind up. I had everyone look at the history of painting, and look at the glass in paintings, and tell me how the glass was made.
  • During COVID we had to build out communities, both in person and online. Online we can connect with a global audience.

• YouTube, TikTok, Livestreaming:
  • More and more folks are monetizing their YouTube channel, or live streaming, doing more income generating activities with social media and connecting with their audiences to sell their work through the internet. 
  • I started making TikTok videos – TikTok reached out to me to make educational videos during the pandemic. So I started making glass-related content for the general public as an audience. It has become a significant source of income for me. 
  • For a while it seemed like IG reels were paying a lot of money (“quit your day job’ money) TikTok tried to compete by paying creators. As a creator, I’m trying to take advantage of the giant companies competing with each other. 
  • Making content generates a significant amount of income, and also keeps your audience engaged, and potentially opportunities to sell your work. 
  • For the long run, I think YouTube has more potential for monetization
  • Live streams can be a good source of income, and people will send you gifts and flowers, products, etc.
• I’ve been talking about shifting towards online, but I was going in that direction anyways. 
• I did the UrbanGlass hotline where I talked about plasma, and combined a lecture and demonstration. I find that because of how spread out people are in neon and plasma, I have almost no choice but to reach people through online references. 
• @surfratglass at a previous meeting shared how he pivoted during the pandemic to find a new audience and ended up monetizing his IG account and creating content that way by live streaming and making videos. 
• The possibility of making objects to sell, but then also being able to monetize that time you are making by having a live stream. 
• Most of my work is going through a gallery or through a couple of art fairs that I do locally, but by galleries recently retired. I’m looking to get more things on. My online shop. 

Financing Your Art Practice

• Having a day job, like teaching or fabrication, takes the economic pressure off my art
• You really need to do what you love and finance it somehow
• Saving and planning ahead:
  • Spent over a decade in tech, managed to save up enough to not have to rely on making working in the glass sustainable
  • Interesting stuff not going to be sustainable in the beginning — so maybe finding some way to make the money beforehand
• Last year, saved up and took on a bunch of work so that this year I could take more creative risks and build a new audience with my own sculpture. I would put that in the research and development category.

• For production: think of an hourly minimum rate you want to make, then build in the cost of materials.
  • Develop a calculator: consider how much to pay yourself hourly, whether to hire an assistant, think through the steps to complete the project and estimate the time needed to complete the project.
  • If you work at an institution, factor in studio rental.
  • When selling art, look at what other people are doing for pricing info.
  • For fabrication and consulting: Add 20% for overhead, labor, materials (include shipping)
• For commissions, customs, fabrication, or services:
  • There’s a lot of R&D involved, there’s email communication, documenting and sending pictures of the progress. 
  • Sometimes clients have a fixed budget, like funding or grants from a museum
  • Find someone doing something similar, consider developing a mentorship
  • When fabricating or doing commissions, I am not doing the selling or marketing. When making my own work, I have to accommodate marketing. So I use a higher overhead because I’m wearing more hats as an artist than as a fabricator.
  • Repairs on a piece can be difficult to estimate (time and cost) if there are too many unknown variables, or if I’m asked to do something that is out of my wheelhouse. In those cases, start with a bigger number because project management is involved. 
  • Add in travel and build it into your contract. Include lodging.
  • Also set down some boundaries. I.E. Make sure they have all the parts first before you travel for install so you’re not wasting your time.
• Value of mentorship:
  • For a service I call “Technical Consultation” where I go service a manifold and organize an institution’s setup. Rusty Russo helped me first establish an hourly rate ($45/hr).
• Pricing artwork/jewelry and research:
  • For sculpture in the fine art market, there are some price breaks to know about. Small sculptures (under $3000) start here first. Once you’ve sold in that range, try $3000 to $5000, then $5000 to $10,000. Different collectors in each range. Galleries and art fairs use this pricing structure. 
  • Research who your peers/competitors are, and consider what the market will bear. Look at whose work is selling and for what in different venues like galleries and art fairs. A little bit of market research will take you a long way.
  • With contemporary jewelry, knowing your client and their price ranges so that you can make sure you’re marketing to the right client with your price point. 
  • What does the landscape of the market look like that you are trying to enter? Helps to be realistic about your price point (and confident about it, too.) If you’re not getting a good response to the work, it will be easier to troubleshoot because either your prices are out of whack, or it’s the wrong market for you.
  • Donating your work to auctions can be a good research tool to see what people will be willing to pay for a specific piece (can be incredibly valuable info)
  • I saw on an IG story an implosion pendant similar to mine going for double the price that I was selling at and decided to up my prices in my Etsy store. Learning what the market will bear is a valuable insight.
• Give yourself a buffer (of a few hundred $) if you need to reschedule or redo something
• I don’t make pieces as a commodity, and don’t want to put that pressure on this specific work. Tricky to price my performance art/sculpture because there are hundreds of hours on a piece. Ex: an object that is used on the body in a performance, that will be exhibited with the video performance — the price becomes a kind of token of the burden. 
• To survive: I teach, do production and fabrication. These income streams support my personal art practice which takes up an equal amount of time. 
• Not everybody is your client, and it’s really important to be able to separate yourself from your work, because it can get emotional when for example, with jewelry a client says “I love your work, but it’s way too expensive for me.” Consider the possibility that your prices may be fine, but this may not be your client/audience for the work. 
• When work sells at auction, contact the buyer because that adds to your audience.
• The 10% rule: If you have a business, you should always have sales goals. If you meet your yearly goal, then you raise your prices by 10%. When you raise your prices, you can expect to lose 10% of your clients, who are not able to grow with you. But you will still make the same amount of money. This is one way to build your business by elevating the value of your products incrementally based on sales performance. 
• “This might be from my esoteric position, but if I focus on economics, I find that it constrains what I can do too much. In order to take into account the economics means that I have to focus on a larger/popular audience… and I am not really interested in either consuming or producing things for that. My interests are very niche, and in order to be in that area, I cannot maximize economics. Those things seem to be mutually exclusive”

How do you handle extras/seconds that are nice but aren’t selling?

• Should we try to employ the bartering system more?
  • Barter the seconds, buy the firsts.
  • “The barter system is alive and well! I supplement my $ income with bartering.”
• Seconds sales online:
  • Saw another glass artist live on TikTok doing a studio cleanout sale, everything was around $5. Use the chat to buy, artist will ship it to you. 
  • Doing a clean out sale on social media – you don’t know who is watching.
  • Tempted to do online sales and would love to sell to my friends for cheap, but worried about degrading my prices.
• Ideas and concerns about selling/promotion:
  • Open house in our studio once a year — that’s the only time we put out the seconds. Connecting with people face to face shows dedication if client’s are willing to show up for the seconds sale.
  • Hide and Seek:
    • Hide your seconds in a park and take a picture to post online so someone can find it – stash and dash, geotagging.
    • Doing Hide and Seek and connecting with people online are about building community, and in turn, hopefully those people will buy your work. Also it helps value your product by boosting your visibility in the algorithm and linking and sharing your account with other people. All of these are marketing tools that we now have at our fingertips.
  • Hosting a dinner party and charging an entry fee and everyone can take an object home with them. 
• I’ll sell it to a friend for cheap, or give it away if it’s the difference between keeping it or throwing it away. 
• I destroy the seconds because after I’m gone they might become mixed up with the firsts. We don’t have control over what our legacy is. 
• I’ll cannibalize pieces and reconfigure them into new pieces of jewelry
• Being a glassworker, and having to deal with storage of first quality work, in addition to seconds. 
• Electrician working on my house bought a piece from me. I was excited because it was not my regular audience. I also bartered with the HVAC guy and made him a set of elephants.
• Recycling glass in a vitreograph kiln – making cane for bead makers, vitreograph paintings. All glass is recyclable, people!
• “Glass collage”
• “Brooklyn Glass! Hot Glass Cold Beer!”

Digital Income Streams

• Cameo App:
  • Pay celebrities/personalities for short custom messages.
  • Could it be an educational tool? On-demand educational videos, or tech support. An information sharing opportunity for custom glass videos. 
• Rights to content:
  • Consider if you are giving exclusive rights to your content or video.
  • Are you letting a big platform repost your videos for free? That allows others to profit from your content if their account is monetized.
  • Consider a Sole Licensing agreement, where you license rights to your content, but still retain rights to use it yourself as well.
  • I can change the content slightly and license it, or just recreate the content. 
• “Would this be the time to bring up the issue of how the net is pretty much dominated by a handful of companies, and have enormous amounts of influence on what gets seen and not seen? I feel like depending on these platforms to stay sustainable is a risky bet”

• In college, I learned how to make a business card and a resume. The niches of how to make a living never came up.
  • How do you keep up your social media? If you’re not into that, how do you develop a relationship with galleries?
  • How do you enter into a market?
  • What are the different types of markets?
  • How do you balance the right level of professional persona and also personal persona for the internet? How do you seem like a real person but also cultivate your own brand?
  • Teaching people how to be fluid with technology.
  • How to write a cover letter 
  • “I’m constantly surprised when artists don’t understand some tech standards… file formats, jpg tiff png, along with formatted text documents as MS word docs instead of standards like PDF”
• Documentation:
  • “I finally started to hire people to document exhibitions and it makes such a huge difference. I attribute those images to getting me additional opportunities. So definitely worth the money in the end.
  • Can you use the barter system to have a friend take pictures for you? Documentation is everything.
• I think it’s important to think about how we are using energy.
  • There is just so much waste and we need to get a hold of that. Glass is an incredibly recyclable material. Are we using it to its fullest potential?
  • What is the right COE for what you are trying to do? Where are we setting our torches? What torch?
  • What is the lowest temperature you can go to create what you want to make? Ex: murrini could be COE 96 or 104 instead of 33.
• Personal energy and the economics of personal time.
  • How are you spending your time? Do we have to do everything ourselves, or can we delegate? Recognizing when there is a huge learning curve that could be overcome by bringing in a collaborator, jobbing out a task. (tech, photography, etc.) When to spend the money.
  • You don’t have to do everything yourself, especially as your business grows 
  • Don’t waste your time reinventing the wheel — pay a professional to get it done.
  • Ex: Paying for a good photo of your work can then allow you to access more opportunities, and you are also supporting another artist (photographer)
  • Making things with intent (building things that are useful and thoughtful) as a way of talking about energy management.

Media Training

• Media training used to be done by PR firms in preparation for publicly representing an art center in the media, especially on live television, and in interviews where you are representing an institution. An extension of public speaking.
  • Handy for podcasting and lecturing
  • Also helpful for more spontaneous events, like receiving an award, where you set the tone and language with your audience.
• Social media, live streaming, “dos and don’ts” 
• When asked a question, repeat the question in your answer to provide context

• Material costs, cost of gas, inflation
• Flameworking is one of the most economic forms of hot glass working with much less overhead than other forms of hot glass working. 
• My middle range of sales haven’t been great, but the lesser priced items do well and the higher priced items do well. So, I’m better off spending my time cutting out the mid range and focusing on the top and bottom of the markets. 
• Starting a flameworking studio at home to offset costs and increase access to hot glass so I can make things in the $45-75 range, and I can sell a lot of those and they don’t take much time to make. Also, I can prep flameworked parts ahead of time to be used on bigger work in the hotshop. 

NFTs and energy usage

• NFTs as an alternative to print
  • Make glass lenses that I use on my camera to make digital images. Rather than making them into a physical print, I opted to make them into NFTs so they can stay in the digital realm.
  • Making a tool to generate art: I can blow one lens and use that to make an infinite amount of images.
• Carbon footprint:
  • Rarible platform allows you to list an NTF for sale, but with no blockchain activity until a sales transaction takes place. This way I can minimize the energy usage up front and be more intentional about how energy is used.
  • Joe Lee did some research and calculated that the gas usage for minting one NFT is about equal to firing two ceramic kilns. Translating into glassmaker and ceramic terminology.
• Projecting NFTs:
  • I like the idea that it doesn’t have a physical format but can exist into the physical world through projection. I’ve been projecting them onto sculptures. 
• NFTs have not been fruitful for me monetarily, but have been useful in community building. Value in opportunities to generate conversation.
• Proof of stake and proof of work on the blockchain
  • “tezos is proof of stake, and very low energy”

Is there an investment (i.e. a piece of stock/tool) you’ve made that you regret?

• Tools:
  • I’ve bought more pairs of grabbers than I will ever need. 
  • At what point are you just collecting tools?
  • A butter knife is gonna give you the same result (as a fancy tool). My favorite tool is my housemate’s butter knife. 
  • Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
• Conferences:
  • At conferences, I always buy the same colors and then never use them. Specifically, it’s a black glass that turns rainbow when you melt it. Apparently I am seduced by this color when shopping in person.
  • India green, it was super cheap at a conference. It is super ugly though. Now that it is out of production is it worth $$
• I hoard color and tools I’ll never use, just to collect.
• I think mine would be more like patternmaking. There’s this old type of pattern that neon people use that has fiberglass elements to it. It is noxious, and smells when you use it. Paper and a wire screen is all I need.
• “I have some lead paint powder”

• Heather Kraft’s Pricing Structure Worksheet (Glass Resource Exchange):
  • https://geex.glass/pricing-structure-worksheet/
• Taming Lightning Podcast (Percy Echols II):
  • www.taminglightning.net
• “The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech” by William Deresiewicz
  • https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250125514/thedeathoftheartist
• Example of NFT Marketplace (Amy Lemaire on Rarible):
  • https://rarible.com/amylemaire/owned

• If you are just starting out selling your work, reaching out to your community is a great way to start. People want to support you. Start small and local, branch out from there. 
• Hustle is like your building community, it’s you connecting with people, and that’s eventually going to be the people who carry you to where you want to be with glass. 
• “Support your contemporaries too by sharing their work, there are no competitors. When it comes back, they will think of you.”