[PA-NJ Glassblowers] When a Shipping Container Becomes a Mecca for Glass Blowing

Tony Patti gaffer at glassblower.info
Sun Nov 27 20:54:41 EST 2016


https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2016/11/16/when-a-shipping-container-becomes-a-mec
ca-for-glass-blowing/

 

BAGI Board Chair Steven Aldrich (l) and Executive Director Damon Gustafson
(r) say they're thrilled to have found a permanent home at History San José.
Another $90,000, and they'll be able to move out of shipping containers and
into a warehouse next door.

 

Seriously: if you didn’t know BAGI was in Kelley Park, on land owned by the
city run History San José, you wouldn’t stumble onto this scene. 

 

Seriously: if you didn’t know BAGI was in Kelley Park, on land owned by the
city-run History San José, 

you wouldn’t stumble onto this scene. (Photo: Rachael Myrow/KQED)

 


When a Shipping Container Becomes a Mecca for Glass Blowing

Imagine the distress you would feel hearing that a friend of yours had been
priced out of the rental market and taken to living in a temporary shelter
in some park nearby.

The <http://www.bagi.org/>  Bay Area Glass Institute (or BAGI to locals)
wants you to know things are not quite as dire as that might sound, although
the nonprofit arts organization is making do right now in a clutch of
shipping containers.

One container holds the office; another, the gift shop. A third houses the
studio, where senior instructor Treg Silkwood demonstrates his craft. He
makes glass-blowing look effortless.

“We melt glass here,” Silkwood says. “It comes out of the furnace in excess
of 2,000 degrees. At that temperature, it’s like honey or molasses. It’s a
thick, gooey liquid.”


An unorthodox arrangement


This kind of art is usually practiced in permanent buildings with
fireproofing and air conditioning — not in a shipping container with three
walls, open to the elements.

This is an unorthodox arrangement, to say the least. But Damon Gustafson,
BAGI’s executive director, says the organization is thrilled to be here. “We
looked at just about every space inside the city limits — where we needed to
stay, because we’re partially funded by the city,” Gustafson says. “It
quickly became very challenging to find a space that was going to suit our
needs.”

All this is happening on land owned by the city-run
<http://historysanjose.org/wp/> History San José, a museum hub in Kelley
Park. The city is not going to turn BAGI out, the way its former landlord in
Japantown did after 15 years. (The glass institute had 18 months to find a
new home after the space they used to rent was sold to a condo developer.)

BAGI Board chair Steven Aldrich says a nonprofit simply isn’t a competitive
applicant in today’s real estate market. “The options for developers to take
a space and turn it into housing or into office space is much more appealing
than what we could afford to pay as a nonprofit arts organization,” Aldrich
says.

BAGI’s annual budget is about $750,000. It has always been lean and
self-sufficient, subsisting largely on student fees for glass classes. That,
plus the fact that the organization’s glass pumpkins are very popular at art
fairs. Unless you’re a student studying glass art at
<http://ad.sjsu.edu/glass/> San Jose State, there’s little else like the Bay
Area Glass Institute in the South Bay.

Even in its modest new digs, the institute remains a hot spot for lovers of
glass blowers. For Dianne Weiss, a tech executive at Intuit, BAGI is not so
much a hobby as it is a family where she feels kinship with kindred spirits.
“Once a week, I meet my friends here and we blow glass,” Weiss says. “It
takes us outside of emails and business planning, and lets us do something
physical and creative. And you work in a team, so it’s a deep community. I
think of it as my church or temple.”

 


An existential issue


When BAGI was founded 20 years ago, real estate was expensive, but nobody
imagined it would become an existential issue. Renters are vulnerable to
eviction and price hikes. Buying is close to impossible without outside
help. In San Jose, that help is more likely than not to come from the city,
even after its redevelopment agency — like every other one in the state —
was disbanded a few years ago.

“If we had not been able to buy our building three years ago, we would be at
the mercy of the market,” says Anjee Helstrup-Alvarez, CEO of the Latino
cultural organization  <http://maclaarte.org/> Movimiento de Arte y Cultura
Latino Americana (MACLA), one of several San Jose nonprofits that moved from
renting to owning with a strong assist from the city. “The great thing about
owning is we control our destiny.”

So could San Jose help BAGI into home ownership? Not for a while. But BAGI’s
board doesn’t intend to remain in those shipping containers forever. Right
next door, there’s a giant warehouse that used to be filled with a motley
collection of historical artifacts from San Jose’s past, stored on dusty
shelves. The forgotten space is reminiscent of the
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdjf4lMmiiI> final scene in Raiders of the
Lost Ark.

 

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