Captions: (featured image) The SF district attorney’s office unveiled an initiative and programs to address implicit bias in 2018. They approached Jason McDonald and myself about using our positions as perhaps the only African American Glass Makers in the Bay Area to create often unseen images of POC’s creating art.
(top left) Difficulty Rightly Framing It, is a response to the expectation that I would construct a personal identity, art practice, and narrative within the architecture and mindset of institutions formed from origins that are not mine. This can reference advanced arts education, the glass community, the greater arts community, or the capitalist forces that guide our social architecture. This work evolved from a practice of extracting history and meaning from glass and glass history, following techniques and forms as they evolved along trade routes only to realize that those vessels were not designed to carry my story.
(top right) Monotone funnel study references the pedestals of Brancusi and the re contextualizing of Fred Wilson by spotlighting a form that is as much a theoretical diagram of the universe as it is a way to get water into a jar. For me the funnel is a form that provides a visualization for learning and condensing our narratives into the moment in front of us. It is a diagram for experiencing a work of art in the way that what we see is a manifestation of all that an artist may have experienced, processed through the accumulation of the experiences of a viewer.
(middle left) Container #1 is a construction that places the body into a contained visual. It is a reflection on “Glass” and the concept of vessel, and how glass as art oftentimes begins with material and technical limitations that must be reckoned with. This work illustrates my process of breaking down the limitations learned in my indoctrination into the “glass world.”
(mid upper and lower) SFSU Glass photo is a picture from the last semester that San Francisco State had a glass program… The class that I was teaching went over by an hour and the only people who bothered to stay until the end were all women. It struck me later how interesting and how important this was. 3 of the women in that photo, Minami Oya, Megan Dykema, and Sara Band, are still working professionally in glass and therefore this image is one that I’m possible most proud of.
(mid right) Synapse is a work derived from the idea of a union or pathway between elements. I intended it to reference process, practice, learning, and living.
(lower left) The megaphone cart was created by the Related Tactics Collective(Michele Carlson, Weston Teruya, and Nate Watson) for an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center titled READY. Ready presents mobile stations created by Related Tactics that gather and deploy a collection of artists’ interventions, tools, and strategies that can be used to interrupt systems of marginalization, exploitation, and erasure, large and small.
(lower right) During their medal ceremony in the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City on October 16, 1968, two African-American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, each raised a black-gloved fist during the playing of the US national anthem. This gesture was in protest to the treatment of Black people around the world and was met with mixed reaction similar to the Black Lives Movement today. A statue on the San Jose State campus memoriales this happening and was the inspiration for my presentation and demo at the 2015 GAS Conference. During the presentation in 2015 the nation was gripped by an onslaught of police killings and violence against POC’s similar to what is happening today. After this event, there was no mention of it again until a few weeks ago, when GAS, Corning, and Bullseye Projects unburied the image to make statements about diversity. I can’t recall any significant dialogs or advances in regard to diversity, access, or implicit bias in the Glass community between 2015 & today and I’m skeptical about whether this moment we’re having now will be sustained or make a significant difference beyond uncovering projects by POC’s that were ignored until now.
Nathan Watson: Achieving Equity through Community Building and Art Making
Investigating a range of issues from equity and privilege to materiality and labor, Nathan Watson’s artwork addresses complex social issues through a combination of monochromatic glass and compelling form. After directing San Francisco State University’s small glass program for five years, the artist, designer, and educator became Executive Director of Public Glass, the city’s only public access glass making facility. As the director of an arts non-profit and in his life as an artist, Watson’s current practice continues to move intuitively between community building and art making as a way to examine and imagine how we might offer each other the same attention and regard as we do the object.
A Kentucky native, Watson received a BA in history from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, where he also began investigating glass as a way to transform storied narratives into a visual medium. Before pursuing his graduate studies at California College of Arts in 2004, Watson received grants and awards from the Rhode Island Foundation and the Rhode Island Council for the Arts for his work concerning local crafts, identity, and immigration. Often formed by constructed architectural interventions and poetic imagery, Watson’s work in glass has been the subject of exhibitions at the Noma Gallery and Refusalon in San Francisco, POST in Los Angeles, and numerous surveys of contemporary artists using glass as an element in their practices.
Watson has lectured and taught nationally as a visiting artist at the Massachusetts College of Art, Centre College in Kentucky, UC Fullerton, San Francisco State University, and at conferences addressing issues surrounding arts education, youth programming and social justice. As a curator, he has contributed to exhibitions at Southern Exposure, Google, The Reclaimed Room at Building Resources, and directs the gallery and artist in residence programs at Public Glass.
In 2012, Watson co-founded Light A Spark, a glass-focused arts program that provides rare opportunities and resources for youth in the underserved communities of San Francisco. He’s also a member of an artist collective called Related Tactics, which brings together artists and cultural workers to collaborate on projects that deal with the intersection of race and culture.
Days before the most recent issue of GASnews was set to publish, the organization received a letter from Watson and published it in its entirety.
Watson wrote: “In this moment when all communities must ask, how did we get here, I think that it’s a meaningful statement in itself to say that I am one of two African Americans leading nonprofit glass organizations, and one of three helping to guide University glass programs in the entire United States. After sitting back and watching our glass community respond to the lynching of brown people and observing the social media-based processing of our complicity through inaction and a pervasive lack of inclusion, I’ve decided to put my heartache aside to share what it feels like from my perspective. With all of the wealth, privilege, and supposed progressive elements within our arts community, how could we let ourselves fall so far behind when it comes to supporting equity and opening doors for everyone?
Even when compared to the lack of representation across the art world as a whole, the glass community looks really bad. No words, propping up of black faces, or sudden unburying of works by black artists will solve this. We were wrong all along to be content amongst ourselves, content to peddle in shiny things with little connection to the realities of the world that is burning our eyes open now. We as artists, who are tasked with interpreting our collective condition, did not do our jobs, and the industry that supports us did not do theirs. The glass galleries did not look toward and support our futures, and our institutions looked to the past and the same sources for self-congratulation again and again until last week.
In the last few days my projects, my body, and the images of my black and brown colleagues have become all too popular in the social media posts of the many glass companies and organizations around the country who are trying to make a statement about how “woke” they are. If you use our bodies in your catalogues, in your posts, and in your applications for larger grants, YOU are responsible for helping to create a way forward for the many who have not been offered a seat at your table.
The leading nonprofit glass organizations from coast to coast who have been working on issues of access and diversity, lifting new voices, and supporting emerging artists for years with little to no contribution from our industry’s biggest donors and institutions have joined together to create the Give to Glass Campaign. We’ve united due to the devastating financial impacts of COVID-19 on our programs and studios, but also because our own glass community has never fully appreciated the value of what we’ve been working for all along. In this moment when everyone has
something to say about social justice, I ask….Do you see us now?!
If you as an individual or an institution have made a declaration about where you stand, then it’s your moral obligation to support change in our glass community. Words raise awareness, but contributions provide the resources for REAL CHANGE! Donate to Give to Glass, to Crafting the Future, or to any organization that is versed in fighting for those whose lives are compromised and voices muted, and for God’s sake, please VOTE!
If there is no action behind your statements, then please stop using our names, our black bodies, those of our youth, and the objects made from our alienation and pain, and step aside to let us build our own house.”
Talking Out Your Glass podcast and all of our sponsors have made donations to Give to Glass.
Give to Glass is a fundraising campaign created by and for Glass Impact, a nationwide coalition of nonprofit, community-focused glass organizations who are dedicated to equal access and uplifting diverse voices and ideas through glass. Each of the member studios is supported primarily through public programming, making the economic fallout of COVID-19 and social distancing particularly devastating.
By supporting Glass Impact through the Give to Glass Campaign, you are making a statement:
A diverse and accessible glass community is the best way that we can move the industry forward, and we cannot afford to allow COVID-19 to eliminate the studios that are fighting for inclusivity.
Glass Impact is:
Firebird Community Arts | Chicago, IL | @firebirdcommunityarts
Foci- Minnesota Center for Glass Art | Minneapolis, MN | @focimcga
GlassRoots | Newark, NJ | @GlassRootsinc
Hilltop Artists | Tacoma, WA | @hilltopartists
North Carolina Glass Center | Asheville, NC | @NCGlassCenter
Public Glass | San Francisco, CA | @PublicGlass
STARworks Glass | Star, NC | @STARworksglass
UrbanGlass | Brooklyn, NY | @UrbanGlass_nyc
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