Collective Forms: Hennepin Made’s Jackson Schwartz on How Glassmaking Can Give Form to Light and Community
Originally from rural Wisconsin, Jackson Schwartz first discovered glassmaking as a teenager. His early interest led him to study around the globe before landing in the Twin Cities. Embracing the collaborative nature of creating glass, Schwartz co-founded Hennepin Made, a Minneapolis artisan factory that brings studio-art thinking to the creation of lighting. Sitting down with the Walker, Schwartz shared his thoughts around glassmaking’s ability to give form to communities and light alike.
Jake Yuzna
How did Hennepin Made come about?
Jackson Schwartz
I grew up about an hour outside Minneapolis and got into glassblowing as a teenager. Glassblowing led me to go to school abroad for several years. After returning, I was working at a local university, and the students I had were really, really talented with a lot of potential, but there was no opportunity for them to work in glass professionally. That made me want to start a glass studio. We rented space from a nonprofit, but quickly needed more capacity. That led to the decision to build our own studio with an emphasis on lighting to make a business out of our craft. It was a way I could help students with opportunities and a path to stay with glass while also making beautiful lights that we’re passionate about.
JY
How did you get into glass at such a young age?
JS
It happened in the earlier days of YouTube and videos on the internet. I remember seeing a video of glassblowing and thinking, “That is incredible. I have to try to figure out how to do that.” I was maybe 13 or 14 years old and really obsessed. Once I saw this magnetic process and material, I thought about it all the time, and I tried to read books as well as get as much information as I could. A couple years went by, and I was working in a restaurant with a chef who told me he was going to the glass studio at our local state university after work.
I just couldn’t believe that there was a program in this tiny little town, and that this person who I’ve become friends with was in the program. I asked if I could sneak in there at night because they had studio access 24 hours a day. We would go in there after work. That was my first experience with it.
The following year I got accepted, and I went to the university while I was still in high school. I pretty much hounded the professor until he let me into the glass program. After that first semester, when I was only 16 or 17, he invited me back because I was really passionate about glass. I was just fixated on it. So from there I started to get some experience built up at a pretty young age.
My path from that point was serendipitous because the small community I grew up in had a state university that had a glass program.
JY
What about working with glass drew you in?
JS
As a teenager I was transfixed by the fire. That’s the starting point—it’s dangerous. From there it’s a very visceral process. Once you start it, you can’t stop: it has to be completed from beginning to end, unlike other materials. If I’m working with wood, I can set it down and come back to it. Or if I’m working with ceramics, it’s not just immediately going to fall on the floor and be destroyed as soon as you stop working on it. That immediacy and gratification you get, of starting something and finishing something in one process, is a core element to glass.
Working with glass is a completely meditative experience because your focus has to be 100 percent on the material, because it commands that level of attention. You get in this flow state with the material itself. You have to respond to what’s happening with the material and how it’s working. The conditions are always a little bit different depending on the energy you’re bringing and what you’re trying to produce. When you enter a glassmaking studio, you become fully immersed, and the rest of the world just floats away.
The process of working with glass probably drew me in at first more than the end object. Over time, I became more enamored with the qualities of the material. Arguably, in my opinion, it’s the best material for light because it can really hold light or let light pass. There’s so many things you can do with opacity, layering, and density. As the studio moved into lighting, I fell back in love with the material in a different way.
JY
You mentioned creating the studio to give more opportunities in this area. What about the Midwest keeps you working here instead of another part of the country or world?
JS
That’s a really good question. I moved abroad and lived in Australia for about five years, and that was a very formative experience; I learned an incredible amount. What was unique about that experience is that there were a lot of visiting artists from all over the world, and I got to work on their teams.
All that exposure to international teams made me stop and think, “Where do I want to set up my creative life?” When I came back to the United States, I was trying to evaluate where that would be.
I evaluated some different things around feasibility, cost of living, and access and resources. I knew that other places already had infrastructure for what I wanted to do, but I felt there was opportunity to develop infrastructure in Minneapolis. I had been here for about a year and a half, and during that time I had flown back to Australia, spent time in New York, the Seattle area, and San Francisco, doing small workshops at different art centers. Nothing really called to me saying, “This is going to be the spot.”
During all of that, I kept returning to the Twin Cities, and I became more and more confident that this was the place. I made the decision to be all in. Within 18 months, I went from being a visiting professor to establishing a studio with a partner. Two or three years later, we had eight or nine people as part of the studio.
JY
How big is your team now?
JS
We’ve currently have 32 people in the organization. Glass is very much our core, but we like to collaborate and work with other practices, like architects. As our designs have gotten more complex and more sophisticated, we’ve developed in-house engineering and then full assembly of the fixtures as well.
JY
Since you come from both a fine arts and design background, I was curious if you [distinguish] between the two fields?
JS
The market drives a distinction. I don’t think necessarily all design is art and all art is design. I think the line is much more blended, especially in today’s world.
For instance, after a few years of focusing on building up the studio, I made a commitment in the last year to get reconnected with the making. This is more of an artistic pursuit than a product or a design pursuit. A lot of my roots are in the craft of glass, and I’ve been making a series of little time studies. Each one of these glass spheres is a time study that is sealed fully the day I make it. The idea has a couple different meanings for me, the first being that when you’re in a production mode, you time everything. And I really love that repetition. To me, it’s totally meditative to be focused on just that individual object. This gives me a way to reflect on that day and be fully present.
The time studies allow me to fully commit myself on that day, that specific moment, to do what I feel like is a really powerful act, which is creating and making glass. There is also the physicality of the air inside the glass that was captured on that exact day the object was made.
JY
How do you select the raw glass material you work with?
JS
The raw glass we get comes from Sweden. They make the most pure glass in the world. The reason is they have a really large cottage industry in glassmaking, and so they have a lot of refinement around their process of producing that raw material, called batch.
We take that raw material and we shovel it into a furnace that runs 24/7 at 2300 degrees. That furnace only has clear glass in it. The term furnace is used in a glass studio for what melts the glass. Then we have another chamber, called a heating chamber. That is what you work the glass in and out of. The glass only has probably about maybe 15 to 30 seconds of working time before it’s too cold.
Every 30 seconds you’re going back in and reheating the glass to a temperature where it’s workable. Once the piece is done, it goes into a thing called a kneeler or kiln, and that stays at 900 degrees. Pieces get loaded in there throughout the day. Then once you’re done with the day, you turn that kiln down, and it steps down the temperature several times to be able to pull the stress out of it.
The glass doesn’t just ramp straight down to room temperature. It pauses at 700 degrees, 500 degrees, 300 degrees, and that removes the stress and really settles the molecules of the glass so it doesn’t crack and break during the process. Typically, depending on the thickness of the glass, it can take anywhere from one to four or five days with most of the things we make.
JY
Was the work you’ve created for Idea House 3 an extension of this exploration of glass, a new direction for your work, or something else entirely?
JS
When I was approached to participate in Idea House 3, I saw it as a really good opportunity for me to be fully creative with the design work. A lot of times we have a brief or a client with aesthetic parameters we have to work within, so it was fun to have something open-ended.
Naturally I thought what I designed should be a light. This led me to think about the different types of lights that we have in our lives. A night-light was an object I like because a lot of the things I like to create have a little bit of childishness or naiveness to them.
I started researching night-lights, and a lot of their history is that they’re there for protection. A night-light gently illuminates a space so that you can see enough to protect yourself and what’s in that space. I grew up in a forest of about five acres in the Midwest. Now I live and work in the city, and I really miss that interaction with the forest—how in the forest you feel you can be vulnerable because you’re protected in that space. It gives you shade and everything’s intertwined together. You start to immerse yourself in that environment, and you feel like you’re a part of it.
I thought, “What if I made a night-light for the forest rather than making a night-light for myself?” Essentially, I’m making it to illuminate the forest and give it safety and security. That feels like a poetic and naive idea—that making a night-light would actually protect the forest—but ultimately understanding that we as humans have the ability to protect nature. Our impact and the choices we make can protect ecosystems on a whole.
This led me to spend time in the forest I grew up in, and after that I wanted to incorporate something from that place into the actual light. I went around and found different tree branches that either had fallen off or weren’t living that I could harvest without negatively impacting the ecosystem. I brought those into the studio and then started to think about how to get glass to marry up with these pieces of wood.
JY
How long does it take to develop a mastery of working with glass?
JS
To develop the skill set of working with glass, even on a very expedited timeline, you’re probably three to four years if you’re doing it every single day in an environment where there’s really good instruction and a good level of discipline. On average, it’s more like seven to 10 years [to master] the craft. On average, teammates in our studio have between 12 and 15 years’ experience. It is a very long time commitment. That doesn’t even take into account being able to get the equipment, kilns, and other infrastructure needed to run a glass studio.
For instance, we built this large furnace about three years ago. It’s only been turned off for about a month for repairs, otherwise it’s been on continuously for three years. There is about 500 pounds of glass in there, which has the consistency of honey. The furnace needs to run 24 hours a day. It takes about 10 days to heat that up and fill it up with glass. Glass is a very corrosive material. When it’s at a temperature like 2000 degrees, it’ll dissolve any material it touches. Due to this, the furnace has a very hard ceramic refractory liner that keeps the glass from leaching out. That liner is very fragile with temperature swings, so it takes a long time to heat up. Additionally, once you get the glass hot, you don’t want to cool it down again until you’ve made the piece because it loses viscosity. If we were to pull glass just for a day and we turn the furnace off, we wouldn’t be able to blow a glass for probably another couple of weeks. Just paying the energy bills to keep that one furnace running is steep. Even though over 60 percent of our energy comes from solar panels we installed on the roof, it is still a barrier for most people to start a glass studio.
Our model is not a factory model, but an artisan factory. It isn’t just about sheer volume, but instead it is about the right volume of the right objects. Typically, a team will produce anywhere from about 30 to 40 pieces a day when we’re at full capacity running two teams. There are about 80 lights a day being made on average.
JY
You mentioned that the studio grew to also produce other elements for your lights and objects in-house. What might some of those be?
JS
We have a grinding, cutting, and drilling process, as well as a soldering wiring assembly. We also engineer and design all the hardware and components. For those, we do a lot of work with patinas. There is a wood and metal space where we do the finishing work that we call the cold shop. The hot shop has furnaces on all the time. Everything is made to order—full artisan craft. All the parts made from glass, metal, and wood are assembled one at a time with a really high level of care and focus on making sure that it’s the best quality we can do.
When we first started, we were really glassblowers making lights, and now we’re very much a lighting company that’s focused on glass, so it’s been a pretty big transformation.
JY
How did you come to select this space for your studio?
JS
One thing that is really cool about the building we are in is that it’s always been a glass factory. Before it was a factory that made windows, and all of the windows in the building were made on-site. It is a really nice continuation of the history of this site, for us to be able to bring a new energy and new life to making glass in a very different way than was before. And we have all these amazing windows that were produced here prior, but it was built in the ’50s. It’s really never been used for anything else but glass.
When we outgrew our studio and had to find a new space, I called the owners of this building and asked them if they wanted to sell it to us. And the gentleman said, “What do you guys do?” I told him glass and he said, “Why don’t you come over?”
When we entered this building for the first time, the gentleman rolled back the mat covering the entrance and showed me this mosaic of a glassblower and said, ”You said you were a glassblower, right?”
The mosaic is original with brass inlays and was installed when they built the building in 1954. That sort of serendipity was a signal to us that this is our home. We’ve had to figure out how to make this happen, and it all worked out.▪︎
Experience and shop for Schwartz's work in Idea House 3, located within the Walker Art Center. Open during regular museum hours, by appointment, or anytime on shop.walkerart.org.
Want to learn more about Idea House and the designer's involved? Discover the rest of the series Houses of Ideas on the Walker Reader.