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Shaping Perspectives: Glassblowing artist Jaime Guerrero

A group from the Boys and Girls Club of Door County walked down the street to the Popelka-Trenchard Glass Studio to watch and hear Jaime Guerrero, a guest glassblowing artist, demonstrate his craft. On this particular day, he was demonstrating his series titled Homies by crafting a head for one of the blown-glass sculptures.

As he worked, he explained that he likes his work to represent the Latino culture of East Los Angeles, where he grew up, and how he thinks it’s important that when Latinos go to an art museum, they can see people who look like them.

As Guerrero worked, Jeremy Popelka explained the process and the equipment, including the furnace that holds about 300 pounds of molten glass and reaches temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees.

“He’s going to be rotating the hot molten glass, and bring it over for you guys to see. But don’t touch it, right?” Popelka asked the children. “You have to keep the glass turning because if you stop, it’s going to fall to the ground.”

Guerrero, who now lives in Pittsburgh, spent two weeks as a guest artist at the Popelka-Trenchard Glass Studio working on his Homies series, which reflects some of the personalities he encountered growing up and living in Los Angeles. 

This was Guerrero’s second visit to the Popelka Trenchard studio. The connection between the two artists stems back some 30 years, when Popelka taught the then-second-year student at California College of the Arts (CCA) in Oakland. Popelka was impressed by Guerrero’s drive and curiosity. 

Guerrero said he enjoys getting out of his usual routine and working with Popelka, Stephanie Trenchard and Chelsea Littman, an assistant at the studio.

“It’s really exciting to be with other artists who are pushing the envelope in their own way,” he said. “I am doing a lot of very sculptural pieces, and they are doing this amazing quality work that is really high caliber.”

Guerrero’s interest in sculpture can be traced back in part to a class by master sculptor Pino Signoretto that he sat in on at CCA.

“In two weeks of watching Pino, I learned way more about technique than in four years of schooling,” Guerrero said. “Every move was masterful; every move had purpose; and I had never seen that before. Pino really set the foundation for my direction.”

It was a window into the work of the master glass craftspeople of Italy, who generally guarded the secret processes they used in their factories. 

“They all had their tricks and their craftsmen,” Popelka said, “and they didn’t want to share too much or let people watch them work. Slowly, they realized that things got stale, and their work lost its soul a bit. So when people like Lino [Tagliapietra] and Pino came to this country, and were very generous, and opened their hearts and their technical bravura to people like Jaime, it was this huge legacy that they left behind.” 

Popelka explained such encounters and learning opportunities as being “reborn” as an artist. 

“It’s not just the spirit; it’s not just that you’re with somebody who may not speak the same language, but you’re trying to talk through technique and through the glass,” Popelka said. “Glass becomes the common language, and you become part of a fraternity.”

The Studio Glass movement started in the United States 60 years ago at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when Professor Harvey Littleton, a ceramicist, went to Europe to learn glassmaking and started a studio class at his home. Graduates of that program, including Dale Chihuly, became leaders in this country’s art-glass movement.

That fraternity is expanding beyond glass artists to include contemporary artists who are starting to work with glass, Popelka said. Contemporary artists have been turned on by glass with help from the Venice Biennale, which has an exhibit dedicated to glass. It attracts not just glass artists, but also famous international artists, including Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei.

“It’s this cool mix of people who are coming to glass,” Popelka said. “They come in with this fresh, clean slate of what’s possible.” 

Guerrero is heading to a monthlong residency at StarWorks in North Carolina, where he’s planning a very large sculpture. He will start making pieces for it when he gets back to Pittsburgh. Then he has a week of teaching at the Pittsburgh Glass Center. Next year, he has a large show at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, which has a glass studio and a large glass collection.

In addition to pushing boundaries of the craft, Guerrero also likes to weave social commentary into his work, bringing to light current issues. His show at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, for example, highlighted the children who were separated from their parents at the U.S./Mexico border.

“I had a hundred letters written by children that have gone through that process, and those letters were mounted on the wall for people to read,” he said. “It was a firsthand account of that child’s story of struggle and why they left their country.”

As for his current series, Homies, Guerrero doesn’t expect all of his sculptures to sell, or at least not quickly.

“But it’s something that I feel needs to be made because I feel like the glass world, like all mediums in the art world, lacks representation of people of color,” he said. “Being a Latino artist, I feel that it’s kind of fun to play around with Latino stereotypes.”

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