Lost Coordinates

Bi-monthly essays by our in-house writer, Caterina Capelli, covering the most inspiring stories we find along the way.

I’ve always heard that making things with your hands could soothe your soul, and we probably all have that one friend who joined intensive ceramics classes after a painful breakup or a loss. The healing powers of crafting are nothing new. But this story is entirely different. It’s about glassmaking and how it seems to confer its practitioners powerful, transformative skills. It’s also about gun violence and profound community trauma.

Think for a minute about Murano’s traditional glassblowing. What do you see? Probably an old (white) man alone in a hot shop, like a sort of mythological creature on the brink of extinction, performing his centuries-old magic. Our story, however, is set in Chicago, a city often in the news because of its homicide rate (higher than that of L.A. and New York) and gang violence. There, you’ll find a thriving community of young glassmakers practicing glass blowing the traditional way – but in an entirely new context – pursuing an artistic and healing journey. Founded in 2015 by Pearl Dick and Brad Stolbach, Project FIRE is a glassmaking program aimed at empowering and healing Chicago youth injured by gun violence.

“In West-side Chicago neighborhoods with a lot of gang violence, young people don't have access to arts or opportunities,” says Pearl Dick, a 47-year-old glass artist and Project FIRE’s artistic director. She moved to Chicago in 2003, after years spent on a mission to build new studios, when “places where people could blow glass were a rarity.” She began to work with nonprofits and realized glassmaking’s potential to provide young people with much-needed violence-free zones. “I saw how glassblowing really brought them together and how working together brought them out of their shells.” Project FIRE evolved into a broader organization, empowering and connecting people through the healing practice of glassmaking and ceramics: Firebird Community Arts, of which Project FIRE remains the signature program.

Twice a week, 40 students – aged between 14 and 21 – follow four-hour classes, three in the hot shop and one in their group session. The activities range from glass sculpting – the school’s signature technique – to flameworking and glassblowing. They learn how to properly roll the heavy metal pipe into their hands to gather the thick, burning molten glass, how to blow into it – a skill that involves the entire body – and how to shape the glass. They learn how to “cook” it, putting the hot matter (in Murano, they call it pea) in and out of different ovens, rhythmically, moving slowly but firmly – making glassmaking look like a transformative ritual.

Handling amorphous blocks of lava requires focus, bravery, and a high level of alertness. When you’re carrying molten glass exceeding 2000°F (1000°C), you must stay focused if you don’t want to end up burning your peers or yourself. It requires an acute attention to the present moment. “A lot of the young people we worked with in Chicago, they’ve had lives where they’ve been on high alert all the time. Coming here, you wouldn’t think of this medium as something calming. But it is. It makes you focus on the moment; you don’t have time for distractions – like the worries of the outside world. I think that that’s very healing, just to be very present,” Pearl Dick explains.

However, Project FIRE is not just about glass. “Everybody in the program has been shot. They have this unique shared experience – that’s unfortunate, and I wish nobody had – that others don’t share or don’t understand. Even if you’re very different people with different backgrounds and different interests, you develop an affinity. As we found out, the young folks of Project FIRE bond over that injury,” she continues. Community moments are built into the program: “We do mental health, healing, and breathing exercises. But it’s not as stuffy as a therapy session. We eat dinner together, we involve mentors to facilitate activities, and we talk about what’s going on in their lives. It’s psycho-education. Part of the objective is to help people realize what’s going on in their bodies as a result of their trauma.”

Crucially, the program also provides a job option. “If someone applies for it, and they’re hired on, they’ll get paid for their time.” According to Pearl Dick, glass blowing gives her and her team the opportunity to teach the participants job skills while helping them heal and making art at the same time. N’Kosi Barber, a glass artist and teacher at Project FIRE since 2015, says that what he loves the most about working there is to “see somebody go all the way through the program and excel, and then just live their own life. And you know you had a hand in it a little bit.”

In mythology, firebirds are creatures who can constantly be reborn from their own ashes. The firebird symbolizes renewal, personal reinvention, and the burning passion for creativity, representing comfort and guidance in challenging times.

Most Firebird students enter the program via a hospital-based violence intervention program, Healing Hurt People Chicago. Their social workers meet young people when they’re injured in the hospital and offer follow-up care services, like help getting back to school or help interacting with the doctors, as well as counseling and mentorship. HHPC also provides these young victims assistance, advocacy, and mental health support. Antonio Wheeler, one of HHPC’s trauma intervention specialists, says the moments when the patient is recovering from being shot are the most critical. He believes that when you’ve experienced violence all your life, realizing you nearly died might turn into a “crossroad moment.” “It’s the most fertile time for change” – and the best opportunity to break the circle of violence. “If you’re living your life and there are no consequences for your actions, I can give you all the talks in the world, but it’s different versus, you just got shot.”

Project FIRE and Healing Hurt People Chicago also respond to the very basic – but not granted – need for safe spaces. The majority of gunfire victims in Chicago are Black. “Then we wonder why so many Black men carry guns.” Wheeler continues. “When it's life or death, you’ll choose to go to jail rather than lose your life,” he says. “And when you don’t trust there will be someone to protect you, then you will have to protect yourself. That leads to the cycle of carrying guns yourself. I think some of the issues our youth and our program are having is that they don’t feel safe.”

For Dantrell Blake – a 24-year-old glass artist from Firebird who joined the program via HHPC – seeing glassblowing for the first time felt like seeing people playing with lava. And it struck him. “When I got shot in September 2016, I had just lost my little sister in a house fire. I had lost a few people before, too, due to gun violence. But playing with fire after losing my sister in a house fire, for me, it was like... boom.” Today, Blake works as a mentor and trauma specialist at Project FIRE. He’s also a professional songwriter, a yoga teacher, and one of the leaders at Pride Roc, working with youth who have been gang-affiliated out into nature for yoga and physical activity retreats.

There are many reasons behind glass-blowing’s healing powers. The first has to do with its riskiness and the idea that one can control something potentially dangerous. But working in a studio also requires good communication and collaborative efforts, and this, Dick thinks, helps create a sense of community, making the discipline inclusive by nature – a quality that this field is losing as it ages and fewer young devotees take it on. “Glassblowers are a really special kind of artists. We’re very generous, we’re very giving, we want to include people in our work. Art is often considered ‘exclusive.’ But glass artists, we want to bring people in.”

For N’Kosi Barber, however, it’s exactly this ‘exclusiveness’ that had appealed to him when he first began glassblowing 11 years ago. Not just learning about it but mastering these ancient and complicated techniques makes him feel empowered. “A lot of us had never seen glassmaking before we started working with it. I feel that [from it] comes a lot of confidence: You've never seen this art form before, and now you're doing it. And now you're good at it. Subconsciously, that shows you that you can do anything you put your mind to.” When we spoke last week, I asked him about his experience as a Black glass artist in a predominantly white field. “I don’t wanna say scary... But you feel alone a little bit,” he replied. “There’s so many white people in this sport. I don’t even know how to explain it, but it feels like you're not supposed to be there. I was at Pilchuck once, and I was the only Black person there.” In institutions and museums like the Corning, he rarely encounters more than two or three Black persons at a time. He says it can sometimes feel intimidating, but “there’s also a lot of great people in the community.” And things might begin to shift as an increasing number of projects and initiatives involving the BIPOC glass community unfold. In 2020, the Corning Museum presented Disclosure: The Whiteness of Glass, an exhibition based on research by the collective Related Tactics, highlighting the “lack of institutional representation of Black artists and other artists of color working in glass.”

“Another program called Crafting the Future focuses on bringing BIPOC glass artists and ceramicists together,” Barber says. “A year ago, I did a BIPOC residency at Penland. The premise was that it would be just Black glass art, and we were there for two weeks with each other, creating.” On Instagram – where he calls himself @glassmaniac – Barber posts his work, most of which speaks about addictions, like one piece featuring a street sign with people on the ground shooting dice and gambling. In another, a chunky composition of glass pills, glass cocaine lines, and glass mushrooms lay on top of a clear glass plate, with a glass ashtray and a glass cardboard cup to the sides. A third artwork honors his favorite cereals as a kid – Fruit Loops. “I really base my art around myself. Most of what I represent is part of my past. I just look within myself and try to bring it to life with glass.”