Harvey Littleton - 1962 Glass Workshop

1962 Glass Workshop

In March 1962, Otto Wittmann, director of the Toledo Museum of Art, offered Littleton the use of a storage shed on the grounds of the museum for a one-week glassblowing workshop.

According to former student and Littleton biographer Joan Falconer Byrd, "Littleton brought a small pot furnace he had built at his farm and hooked it up in the museum garage with the help of Norm Schulman, pottery instructor at the museum school. Dominick Labino, then director of research for Johns Manville Corporation...volunteered a low-melting glass formula."

Because of a misreading of Labino's formula, the first batch of glass was ruined. Labino himself oversaw the conversion of the pot furnace into a day tank, supplying it with low-melting-point glass marbles he had developed for use in the production of fiberglass. This glass proved easy to work for glass blowing, and the workshop participants experimented with it in shifts for the remainder of the week. On the final day of the workshop, Harvey Leafgreen, a retired glassblower from the Libbey glass plant in Toledo, presented an unexpected two-hour demonstration of the craft.

The ten attendees at the March 1962 Toledo workshop included Littleton, Dominick Labino, Norm Schulman, Tom McGlauchlin from the University of Iowa, Karl Martz from Indiana University, John Stephenson from the University of Michigan, William Pitney from Wayne State University, Clayton Bailey, Littleton's Graduate Assistant from the University of Wisconsin, artist Dora Reynolds and Edith Franklin, one of Schulman's ceramics students at the Toledo Museum of Art. A second, better advertised Toledo workshop that attracted more participants was held that June. Littleton, Labino, Leafgreen and Schulman shared teaching duties at the second workshop.