Participants may select one workshop per session, during which they will be fully immersed in a vibrant educational environment on the breathtaking Pilchuck campus for the duration of the session. All participants eat, work, and sleep on campus for the entire session. Days include intensive instruction and demos throughout the day and evening, as well as ample opportunities for personal exploration and studio time. Housing is warm and rustic and most accommodations require a brief walk through fields and forest to reach the studios.
This workshop will examine the qualities that make glass such a powerful mode of expression and help students find an honest and natural relationship with the material. We will cover many techniques for creating glass sculpture, including glassblowing, adhesives and assemblage, color application, and coldworking. Traditional and nontraditional processes will help you access the expression that comes from a harmony between you and the material.
Join artist Kate Hush and immerse yourself in a luminous exploration of the subconscious world. Do you have visions of neon visiting in the night? A lucent trinket, or an image burned in light? Create the neon sculpture of your dreams based on artifact or image that resonates from within. Whether born from a bauble or borrowed from a blueprint of the mind, turn your fantasy into reality and learn all of the integral aspects of neon creation from design, to construction, to final installation, and bring home your very own radiant replica in glass.st one fully realized three-dimensional neon sculpture.
Celebrate the beauty of experimentation, growth through failures, and the boundless possibilities of working with molten glass. This course is designed to inspire both beginners and seasoned artists alike to push their creative boundaries while exploring the captivating interaction between glass and color. Through demonstrations and hands-on instruction, this course will focus on color theory, problem solving, risk taking, and a wide range of glassblowing techniques.
Combining the instructors' shared love of glass painting and stained glass, this class will focus on fired enamels painted onto a variety of sheet glass—clear and colored, transparent and opaque. Explore both black and colored enamels as well as silver stain in reflected and transmitted light, using traditional and experimental painting techniques. Students will have a variety of finished work for the wall and the window by the end of the class.
This course begins with the basics of silicone mold making and moves quickly into the fabrication of hanging/hollow core refractory molds. Advanced projects will include interlocking refractory molds used to cast a hollow form within a larger glass object. Students will learn silicone mold making, wax-working, glass-casting, refractory mixes, and some cold-working. They will walk away with silicone molds and cast glass objects.
Paul Simon, also known as notpaulsimon, is a Romanian-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. As a sculptor with a background in human biology and commercial photography, Simon creates a fantastical world in which materialities are present and absent, both hiding in plain sight and as objects of the digital imaginary.
Modou Dieng Yacine received a French Catholic education, while the majority of Senegal was Muslim. This created a foundational bond with France and its culture but also bred a deep alienation from his Senegalese and African identities. Alongside his entry into the National School of Art in Dakar, began the first Dak’Art African Art Biennale through which he was able to attend workshops with Joe Overstreet, Mildred Thompson, Leonardo Drew, Frank Bowling and Mary Lovelace O’Neal. Inspired, he began to personally explore the depth and possibility presented by a canvas, the imaginative lines and multiplicity of layers which can be continuously applied to its surface.Moving to the United States he earned his MFA at SFAI in San Francisco. Moving past the perspective he gained while in Dakar, he began to open up his practice to new mediums. His paintings became, and have since remained, a performative act themselves. The topic, emotions and concept dictating the medium.While accepting a position at PNCA, Portland, which he held for a decade, he began a deep exploration of the underground subcultures presented by the Pacific Northwest and its histories. Looking back on his experiences at SFAI and his time spent with Okwui Enwezor, he founded a gallery which would last for a decade as well.In his current studio practice, using and appropriating the history of both painting and photography, as two unique contemporary mediums, he is able to layer, sample, mix and play on the theater of his newly found Black diasporic voice. He currently lives in Chicago.
Danielle Brensinger received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Glass from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2012. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York where she works as a freelance glassblower, artist assistant and educator out of UrbanGlass. Brensinger also currently works as an adjunct professor at Salem Community College in New Jersey. She has received full scholarships from the Celebrity Fund and the Tommie Rush and Richard Jolley Scholarship Fund to attend classes at the Corning Museum of Glass and the Penland School of Crafts. Danielle has also been able to attend Pilchuck Glass School and the Bild-Werk Academy in Frauenau, Germany as a teaching assistant for both glass blowing and bronze casting classes.
Every summer since 1971 the glass world has come together for innovative and rigorous workshops with an international cohort of instructors and artists. In 2025 we will host seven sessions.
The summer is filled with an all-star roster including Jen Elek, Annette Blair, Ben Edols, Jessica Loughlin, Sibelly, Danny Coyle, Dante Marioni and more. An advanced topics Spring Session will include an opportunity to be a part of Pilchuck history by rebuilding one of the program furnaces with Fred Metz. Session 3 will see the return of lampworking maestro Lucio Bubacco for a 30-year reunion of his Flame to Furnace collaboration with Brian Kerkvliet and Ed Schmid. Preston Singletary and Martin Janecký will bring their combined approach to Session 4. Silvia Levenson returns during Session 5, Pilchuck’s first bi-lingual (Spanish/English) session.
Join us for another transformative year on the hill.