50 sparkling years Glass program inspires passion, innovation, community and teamwork

By Karen Sandstrom

Call it kismet or even a series of fortunate events, but the origin story of Cleveland Institute of Art’s Glass program practically glistens with a sense of the inevitable.

It was 1971, and artist Dale Chihuly had just cofounded the Pilchuk Glass School in Stanwood, Washington. To gin up business, he invited members of the Union of Independent Colleges of Art to send two students to Pilchuk for a summer workshop.

Joseph Zeller was chair of CIA’s Ceramics program at the time. CIA had no Glass department then, but Zeller did have two ambitious and energetic Ceramics students:

Christine Federighi ’72, and William Carlson ’73. At Pilchuk that summer, they were bitten by the glass bug. They called Zeller in the middle of one night with something of a demand.

“They told me that unless there was some kind of glass facility when they came back, they weren’t coming back,” Zeller says.

Without seeking permission from College leadership, Zeller quietly built a small glass furnace in the kiln room in Ceramics. It stayed hidden and dormant during the day. “Unless you were coming in at night, you never knew anything was going on,” Zeller says.

Before long, though, President Joseph McCullough caught wind and asked Zeller what was going on. When Zeller told him about the furnace, McCullough authorized him to turn a three-car garage on CIA’s property in University Circle into a glass studio. To this day, Zeller heaps credit on McCullough for his enthusiastic support.

“Joe was all about offering a full menu of opportunities at CIA,” Zeller says. “But I also think he liked glass. It’s so tactile and mesmerizing.”

McCullough’s support for the department never flagged. “He didn’t quite give us a blank check,” he adds, “but he never said no to a bill that crossed his desk.”

In 1973, the College hired Brent Kee Young, who had just earned his MFA at Alfred University in

New York. From that point until his retirement from CIA in 2014, Young built the curriculum, found students to become new voices in studio glass, and established an undergraduate glass program to take seriously.

Federighi went onto a successful studio career in ceramics and was a professor at the University of Miami in Florida; she died in 2006. Carlson became a sculptor and glassmaker, and led departments at University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign and the University of Miami.

This year, CIA’s Reinberger Gallery will mount the exhibition Risk + Discovery: Glass Innovation at CIA, from April 6 through June 16. The show will include work by Young, who handed department leadership to Marc Petrovic ’91 in 2014; by Benjamin Johnson, current chair of CIA’s Craft + Design Department and academic coordinator of Glass; and by other current and former faculty, technical specialists, alumni and students.

CIA Glass alumni have had their work collected by museums and sold in galleries around the world. They have forged careers in housewares