light made solid

I recently discovered a stained glass museum in Chicago. The Smith Museum, the first museum dedicated solely to stained glass windows, features 150 secular and religious. Designed by local, national and European studios, most of the windows were originally installed in Chicago area residential, commercial and religious buildings. The windows were designed by artists such as Louis Comfort Tiffany and John LaFarge, as well as Chicago artists Ed Paschke and Roger Brown. The museum also includes stained glass portraits of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Michael Jordan and a window created from soda pop bottles.

Here is a extensive collection of photos of these windows.

Here is an interesting set of windows created from collected shards of stained glass from bombed churches in Europe right after WWII. Fred McDonald collected these shards in the forties which were built into The McDonald Memorial Peace Windows Project at the Main Post Chapel at the Presidio in San Francisco.

Army Chaplain Fred McDonald had just arrived in Normandy and reported to the 12th Army Group headed by Gen. Omar Bradley.

Periers had been flattened -- a sea of rubble spread out around a bombed out church. The place was deserted and silent except for the sound of a lone man trying to dig his house out from the debris.

McDonald walked up to the church, picked up some shards of stained glass, then headed back to camp.

He took some more glass and moved on, eventually collecting shards of glass from the rubble of two dozen churches and synagogues in France, Germany and Britain, shipping it all back home to his mother in Seattle.

Fifty-five years later, on an August evening in 1999, McDonald was having dinner at the Sequoias retirement home in San Francisco when one of his tablemates, art teacher Sue Tom, happened to say something about stained glass.

McDonald, now well into his 80s, looked up from his plate. "You know," he said with a smile, "I've got some stained glass I need to do something with."

His collection of shards, stuffed into envelopes and old shoeboxes, was upstairs under his bed in a room cluttered with books, war memorabilia, old menus and other irreplaceable stuff collected over a very long life.

"He wanted something beautiful to rise from all that destruction," Thomas said.

This spring, something beautiful is rising -- the McDonald Memorial Peace Windows Project. Stained-glass artists from Europe to Emeryville are completing a series of 26 windows using shards collected by the Rev. McDonald in 1944 and 1945. The windows tell the story of the time and place McDonald gathered up his treasured collection of broken glass.

Now the lead artist in the McDonald Peace Windows Project, LeRoux came up with the idea of 26 separate windows, each one with just a few shards from the individual sanctuaries where they had been found.

The original idea was to create one window with all the shards or perhaps a triptych, a three-sided altarpiece that could be placed inside a Christian church.

But before his death, McDonald signed off on the plan for individual windows, and for their use in an interfaith chapel.

If you're looking for stained glass work, I highly recommend heading over to Indeed.com where you can type in "stained glass" and find employment opportunities from all over the USA. The great part about Indeed.com is that they search other job sites and combine them all together in one easy location.

Here are the top five most recent opportunities:

1. STAINED GLASS INSTRUCTOR - Part time, Flexible - Indianapolis, IN


2. Retired Stained Glass Craftsman - New Haven, CT


3. Part Time Assistant for local Stained Glass Studio Image Library - Philadelphia, PA


4. Window and glass installer for custom glass company - Phoenix, AZ


5. Art Glass Fabricator/Installation Assistant - East Bay, CA

Happy job-hunting!

Two very brief stained glass items to share today:

1. At St. Blase Catholic Church in sub-urban Detroit, eight parishioners volunteered to make stained glass replicas for troops in Iraq, for Christmas holiday services.


2. Also check out this short religious poem about stained glass by Arlene Schwartzkopf

Recently, I visited the German city of Mainz, south west of Frankfurt. In St. Stephen's Church there are a dramatic stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall. They were created as a replacement for those destroyed in the Allied bombing of the city during World War II. St. Stephen is an example of the massive rebuilding of churches by the people of Germany.

St Stephen's is the only German church for which the Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall (1887-1985), who lived in France many years of his life, designed stained glass windows. Blue light shines into the church through these windows. This light brings the angels and other biblical images to life. "These colors address our vital consciousness directly because they express optimism, hope, and the love of life." said the priest Klaus Mayer, who through his books and meditations promotes Chagall's work. He contacted Chagall in 1973 and persuaded "the master of color and biblical tidings" to design a symbol of Jewish-Christian unity and peace amongst all peoples in the East Chancel.

The imagery in these windows looks broken and ghosty in a field of circling blues. The biblical figures are like puffs of smoke, circling spirits in the act of rising to heaven. The fabrication of the windows was done using a technique of acid etching on flashed glass.

As an American, I didn't realize how many historic sites in Germany were bombed to the ground and rebuilt from rubble after World War II. The scars and determination of the German people are largely hidden, simmering below the surface. Unfortunately the Germans' incredible reconstruction is often overlooked and eclipsed by the story of the rise and fall of the Nazi party. Personally, I have a strong admiration for the people of Germany and hope that other war torn societies can learn from their example. These windows are really a must see for the student/ admirer of stained glass windows.

Seems like I find stories about this all the time: a husband and wife pair who got into stained glass as a hobby, and now run a shop full time, several decades later. This story comes from the Marion Chronicle Tribune, out of Grant County, Indiana.

Over the past 25 years, Jackie and Ed Smith have managed to turn their glass hobby into a profession (even though they're technically retired), with a shop called Riverine Studios.

"This is retired," Jackie says, "because we're doing what we love to do and we're doing it on our own time. We always wanted a place where we had lots of room and could do larger pieces."

Five years ago, the couple moved from a room in their Marion home into a 4,000-square-foot building, which has been on its perch near the Mississinewa River since the late 1940s, Jackie says.

[...] They started out with one worktable in the center of an empty room. But now the two complete each other's sentences as they show projects-in-progress laid out on several worktables and a drafting table.

Should be an inspiring story for anyone who is struggling to make it on their own doing stained glass professionally.

Here's a good article from the Times-Picayune, a newspaper out of New Orleans. It features a story about the Attenhofer Stained Glass Restoration and Design Studio, run by Cindy Courage-Knezeak and her assistant Jackie Borrouso. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this shop has been dealing with an absolute avalanche of stained glass repair jobs. After initially fleeing the devastation of the storm, Courage-Knezeak has come back to help mend the city:

Courage-Knezeak and Borrouso have had little time to spare. Each week seems to bring new post-K glass disasters that require their attention, from wind-torn church windows to beveled vestibule windows broken by zealous animal rescuers to a flood-stained hand-made jewelry box that Courage-Knezeak said may be of no real monetary value but means a lot to the Broadmoor family that owned it.

"It's been a difficult ride," Courage-Knezeak said. "I was already set up and running, doing restoration before the storm, but who was prepared for this? . . . There are plenty of days I ask what's keeping me here. But I want to see the city come back. . . . If you're an artist, you're meant to be here.