Discover the magic of glass art at the Tacoma Museum of Glass

Last updated on June 24th, 2024

The Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, makes learning about glass and glass art fun for everyone through live demonstrations, hands-on activities, and stunning exhibits that feature work by some of the world’s most accomplished glass artists.

Tacoma’s Museum of Glass is surrounded by plazas with pools, fountains, and other open-air artwork that complement the art inside.

Tacoma’s Museum of Glass is regularly cited as one of the five best glass art museums in the USA. There’s a good reason for that! Keep reading to discover why.

I first visited Tacoma’s Museum of Glass in 2007. This spring I returned to get a much more complete picture of the museum and what it has to offer. This post dramatically expands my original story by adding images, information, and insights from my recent visit.

A world of magic awaits at the Museum of Glass

Creating objects from glass always seems like magic.

You can watch that magic as it happens (and learn more about it) at the Tacoma Museum of Glass. Or you can just enjoy the spectacular results created by Tacoma native Dale Chihuly and a host of other artists from around the world who create incredible works of art from glass.

You’ll probably want to do both.

Watch glass art take shape in the Hot Shop Amphitheater

The Museum of Glass Hot Shop Amphitheater is a working studio for making glass art. And it has plenty of seating to allow visitors to watch that magic happen.

The Hot Shop Amphitheater brings visitors right into the museum’s working glass studio.

Located inside the museum’s dramatic cone, the Hot Shop Amphitheater is, in many ways, the museum’s beating heart.

This isn’t just a demonstration space. It’s a fully functional studio that includes both the Hot Shop, where visitors watch artists work with molten glass, and a behind-the-scenes Cold Shop where finishing work is completed. These two spaces allow artists to take a piece of molten glass from idea to finished art without leaving the building.

But you don’t get to see what goes on in the Cold Shop, so let’s step into the Hot Shop.

The Hot Shop houses the studio’s large furnace, which is kept at a blistering 2100 degrees Fahrenheit and holds 1000 pounds of clear molten glass. But the focal point is the Glory Hole, a smaller, even hotter furnace where glass is reheated as it is worked.

To keep working on a piece of glass, it is repeatedly re-heated in a furnace called the Glory Hall.

What’s happening in the Hot Shop when you arrive is entirely dependent on who is in the studio that day. It may be an internationally recognized artist creating a piece for the museum or an international exhibit or local teens studying glassmaking or members of the Hot Shop team creating a glass masterpiece from a child’s drawing. Many of the pieces created here will one day end up in a museum exhibit or gallery. Some will be displayed in MOG’s own galleries as part of the museum’s permanent collection.

When I was at the glass museum this year, the visiting artist was Jiyong Lee, an artist and professor of art from Illinois who exhibits internationally. He did a residency at the museum in 2015, so is very familiar with the Hot Shop and its team of skilled glassmakers.

Jiyong Lee and the Hot Shop Team work on a piece of glass.

The day I visited, Lee was working with the Hot Shop Team (the museum’s team of glassmakers who work with both visiting artists and students) to create a large, solid piece to take back to his own studio to cut up and reassemble. It looks like it will become part of his Segmentation series.

Visitors get a good view of glass art being created from the walkway above the Hot Shop work area – along with a blast of hot air!

Audiences are encouraged to watch the action. There’s seating for almost 150 people around the Hot Shop’s work area and a video screen offers an even closer look at what’s going on. There’s also a walkway above the work area that gives you both a good view of what’s going on below and a blast of heat every time a piece goes into the Glory Hole. And an emcee is always on hand to explain what is happening and answer questions.

Here’s a quick look at what happens in the Hot Shop.

Can’t get to Tacoma but want to see what’s going on in the Hot Shop? The Museum of Glass has a Hot Shop Livestream. Tune in to watch what’s happening whenever the museum is open.

Check the Museum of Glass website for more information on upcoming visiting artists and interviews with past visiting artists.

See glass art by master artists from around the world

If an American knows the name of any glass artist, that artist is probably Dale Chihuly.

But the Museum of Glass in Tacoma isn’t the Chihuly Museum. (You have to go north to the Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle for that.) Chihuly was instrumental in founding the Tacoma glass museum, but the museum includes art by a diverse group of artists from around the world. These include respected masters like Chihuly, up-and-coming stars, and even a few pieces designed by children!

Museum exhibits include work from the museum’s impressive permanent collection of twentieth and twenty-first century glass, as well as pieces on loan for temporary exhibits. They cover a wide range of techniques and themes:

Exhibitions at Museum of Glass aim to highlight the diversity inherent to the material of glass and glassmaking techniques, and engage audiences who are unfamiliar with the art form.” – Museum of Glass

Australian artist Nick Mount combined a variety of techniques for glass art with found objects to create “Whispering Dome #010208.”

When I visited Museum of Glass museum in 2007, I not only had the bad luck of arriving when there wasn’t any work going on in the Hot Shop, but when they were also changing over all of their exhibits. Yeah, all the galleries were closed on my first visit.

Fortunately, this year the galleries were all but bursting with an incredible variety of glass art by a wide range of artists. Of my favorite glass artists, the only one missing was Preston Singletary – and I am guessing that’s because much of his work is headed to Oklahoma City as part of the (absolutely amazing) Raven and the Box of Daylight exhibit.

So, here’s some of what you can see into this fall at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. And if you miss this fall’s exhibits, don’t worry too much. Something equally fascinating is likely to be on exhibit whenever you arrive.

Out of the Vault: Family Meal

A quick look at the museum’s exhibition calendar left me confused. What is this show was about. Food? Family gatherings? And did I care about any of that?

(The answers are not really, sort of, and definitely.)

Art by Dale Chihuly, Toots Zynsky, and Kari Russell-Pool are part of MOG’s collection.

Once I figured out what the name related to, the exhibit made a lot more sense!

Illuminate: Glass Art for Early Learners

Here’s another exhibit with a deceptive name. Originally I thought I would skip this one, as it sounded like it was all things aimed at children. However, while it IS designed to teach children about glass and light, little about this exhibit is a typical kid’s exhibit. The art used to demonstrate various concepts is as fine as any on display elsewhere in the museum.

It does look like a fabulous exhibit for families willing to take a little time to play along with their children at the gallery’s experiential stations, but there is plenty here to delight everyone!

Beautiful pieces of glass art illustrate the lessons learned at hands-on stations that teach children (and adults) about light.

She Bends: Redefining Neon Legacy

The work featured in Redefining Neon Legacy is all by women and gender-expansive artists and the women who taught them to work in neon. It’s an interesting mix of things that seem kind of ordinary, ordinary but with an interesting twist, and completely unexpected.

In the realm of the completely unexpected, Sarah Blood’s “Echo” surely takes the prize.

Video showing a portion of “Echo,” a large work by British artist Sarah Blood created from convex mirror, neon, and VHS tape.

This enormous, mesmerizing piece was my favorite in the exhibit. I could have watched it for hours.

Boundless Curiosity: A Journey with Robert Minkoff

Robert Minkoff was a long-time trustee of the Museum of Glass and amassed an impressive collection of contemporary studio art glass by artists from the USA and beyond. That collection now belongs to MOG and is the basis for this expansive exhibit.

The pieces displayed represent such a wide range of artists, styles, and techniques that there’s no way to give you a sense of it in just a few photos. So, here are a few rather random items that caught my eye.

This is a bad picture of a stunning sculpture by German artist Wilfried Grootens. He created it by painting dozens of panes of glass and gluing them together to create a 3-dimensional work of art. It’s a painstaking process that leads to beautiful, mind-blowing art that changes as you move around the piece.

(I was completely unfamiliar with Grootens work, but will be seeking it out in the future!)

I’ve long been a fan of Shane Fero’s beautiful birds. MOG has a whole flock of them including this “Abstract Bluebird” and “Black-Backed Yellow Warbler.”

Kids Design Glass

The museum’s small  Kids Design Glass exhibit features glass art based on designs created by children under age 12.

An ongoing program encourages children to design something they want to see created in glass. Each month the Hot Shop Team creates one of these designs while the child who designed it supervises from a front row seat to make sure they get it right.

The MOG team creates two copies, one for the child who designed it and one for museum’s collection. A few are currently on display at the museum, along with the original design submitted by the young designer.

The lioncrab, as designed and described by 10-year-old Mason Winchell in 2011.

The lioncrab, as created by the museum’s Hot Shop Team.

This is a very small, on-going exhibit. If you’d like to see more pieces, check the Children’s Museum of Tacoma.

Watch for this: The Lino Tagliapietra Gallery

If you ask American museum-goers to name their favorite glass artist is, I’m sure Dale Chihuly would win in a landslide. I get that. Chihuly’s work was spectacularly innovative and dramatically changed the world of American art glass. And, as his work grew into large-scale installations, it brought art to new spaces and audiences far from the world of art museums and galleries. And I’ve enjoyed my share of Chihuly exhibits and installations over the years.

However, my favorite glass artist is Lino Tagliapietra.

“Mandara” is a classic example of Lino Tagliapietra’s art glass.

(Ignoring the weird reflection from the glass case, isn’t that about the most intricately elegant thing you’ve ever seen?)

See art glass without going into the museum itself.

Even in you can’t (or decided not to) visit the Museum of Glass, there are things outside the museum that you definitely should make time for. These include the Chihuly Bridge of Glass and several pools and fountains. There’s no charge to visit any of them and they are open 24/7. And, day or night, they are all worth seeing.

Architecture

Of course, the first work of art you should take note of is the building itself.

You have to get on or across the Foss Waterway to get the best view of the whole museum. (This shot is from my visit on a rainy day in 2007.)

The Museum of Glass was designed by celebrated Canadian architect Arthur Erickson in collaboration with fellow Canadian Nick Milkovich and Thomas Cook Reed Reinvald Architects (now TCF) of Tacoma.

The project’s fundamental purpose was to create an exhibition space with a working glass studio. But jumpstarting redevelopment along the once highly polluted former industrial area was an important secondary goal. Thus, the decision to hire Erickson, known for eye-catching modernist buildings that fit their site and included terraces and other open-air public spaces. Clearly, local sponsors hoped for an architectural gem that would immediately attract visitors.

Despite waxing and waning enthusiasm by project backers (and resulting funding challenges), the completed building more than met all those goals. The $63 million dollar facility was an immediate hit when it opened in 2002.

Although most visitors probably won’t notice, the 75,000 square foot building is (barely) four stories.

• The parking garage is in the building’s lowest level.
• All of the public spaces – the Hot Shop Amphitheater, galleries, museum store, theater, and café – are one level above.
• I’m guessing the third level (which is mostly hidden when viewing the building from the plazas along the Foss Waterway) has office, storage, and other non-public spaces.
• The fourth level has the entrance pavilion (the elevator access) and roof-top plaza. Walkways connect it to the Chihuly Bridge of Glass.

About that cone

Thanks to the 90-foot angled stainless-steel cone that rises above the museum, the building is eye-catching from almost any angle.

MOG’s cone stands in stark contrast to the horizontal lines of the rest of the building, but also appears as if it is watching over the museum.

With Mount Rainier so near, one might suspect this was the inspiration for that distinctive cone.

And it was one inspiration. But the conical steel furnaces once used to burn waste wood at sawmills throughout the Pacific Northwest seem to have been the primary inspiration. While most are gone now, those furnaces were once distinctive features of the industrial area around the Foss Waterway and beyond. The cone acknowledges this history both in its form and its functional purpose as the chimney for the Hot Shop and its furnaces.

I love the way the cone’s graceful pattern of diamonds forms a skin that that seems to flow over the cone. But there’s a lot of complex geometry there. Because each row of diamond on the exterior is a different size, the engineering behind the design and construction of this project was pretty complicated. It would have been fun to watch them assemble this thing.

Chihuly Bridge of Glass

A 500-foot pedestrian overpass links the Museum of Glass and the Foss Waterway to Tacoma’s cultural corridor in the historic downtown. This is the Chihuly Bridge of Glass. It’s both a pedestrian bridge and a gallery showcasing Chihuly’s work.

The Chihuly bridge of glass has three exhibit areas: The Seaform Pavilon, Crystal Towers, and Venetian Wall. (That’s the US District Courthouse in the background – it keeps the Chihuly theme going with an enormous Chihuly chandelier.)

Pools and fountains around the Museum of Glass

The Museum of Glass has plazas that host a collection of outdoor art. Most of this art takes the form of fountains or installations in pools, but other exhibits show up from time to time.

Up on the roof, Buster Simpson’s “Incidence,” consists of 36 glass panels arranged to form peaks above a pool.

On the plaza below, Water Forest and Fluent Steps fill much of the area between MOG and the promenade along the Foss Waterway.

Water Forest

Created by Howard Ben Tré, “Water Forest” consists of 20 acrylic and bronze tubes that form a “grove.” Each is 10 feet tall and filled with seawater that fills the tubes and then overflows into drains. What makes this water feature unique is that the amount of water flowing out of each tube is driven by the ebb and flow of the tide.

The “Water Forest” fountains ebb and flow with the tide.

Waterforest is an environment, it is neither a decoration or statuary. Waterforest is about place, it is directly related to the changing tides in the basin along the esplanade, the water ebbs and flows within the cylinders of glass and bronze. The waterworks set up a ‘grove’ within which you can walk and come upon the bench in the center as a place to rest and observe.” – Howard Ben Tré

Fluent Steps

Created by Martin Blank, “Fluent Steps” is a complex glass installation in the large pool outside MOG’s waterside entrance. It consists of three sections: Cascades, Echo, and Wisps.

That “spray” rising from this pool is glass, not water!

Most of the 754 pieces in the installation were created in the Museum’s Hot Shop while Blank was a visiting artist at the museum.

The three sections are intended to represent water in different forms. “Cascades” rises 15-feet above the pool like a waterfall stopped in action. In contrast, “Echo” flows gently across the pool and “Wisps” is intended to evoke rising mist.

My intent. . . is to awaken the viewer’s eye to keenly observe, interact with, and respond to the emotive nature of water. Water can be placid, sublime, and — in an instant — uncompromisingly raw and powerful. It’s the vehicle for capturing light, motion, fluidity, and transparency. It’s the vehicle for life.” — Martin Blank

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a good look at any of these – they were cleaning the area on my last visit and I didn’t get back later. It looks like it is stunning – especially at night – and is one of the reasons I need to make a return trip to the Museum of Glass sooner, rather than later!

Plan your trip to the Tacoma’s Museum of Glass

Tacoma is located about 40 miles south of Seattle on Puget Sound.

The Puyallup Tribe and Coast Salish people have called this area home since the since the beginning of time. However, with the arrival of the railroad, Tacoma became a major logging center in the 19^th century. Booms and busts in logging, ship building, and shipping left much of the historic downtown and industrial waterfront dilapidated and abandoned. Fortunately, things began to turn around in the 1990s when urban renewal plans that would have demolished much of the city’s historic center were stopped and attention turned to preserving the city’s historic buildings and revitalizing the area as a cultural corridor. This is when planning for the Museum of Glass began.

If the last time you were in downtown Tacoma was before 2000, you need to return. You’ll be astounded by the change.

Because a friend in Seattle lived in Tacoma in the late 1980s (when it definitely was not a place to go on vacation), it’s taken me a while to think of Tacoma as a vacation destination. I was intrigued by what I found in 2007, but this 2023 trip has convinced me that I really, really need to spend more time exploring Tacoma. If you’re into the arts and great urban spaces, I think you’ll feel the same.

How to get to the Museum of Glass

The Museum of Glass is located at 1801 Dock Street in Tacoma’s old warehouse district along the Thea Foss Waterway. Tacoma. I-705 separates MOG from Tacoma’s historic downtown and the Tacoma Art Museum. The Thea Foss Waterway and a very large rail yard on the other side, so street access is really limited.

All of this means it is easy to walk to the museum from the downtown cultural district, but driving there from anywhere is challenging. Transit is the best option, although some of those connections are also a little funky.

Learn about glass or create your own masterpiece

While the Museum of Glass welcomes professional artists to its facilities, it also offers a range of lectures, artist talks, and glassmaking classes. Classes are available for teens and adults with no glassmaking experience, as well as for more advanced artists.

And there are lots of programs aimed at children, as the museum has close relationship with the Hilltop Artists program that teaches glass arts to area youth through school-based programs.

Visit after dark!

I haven’t had a chance to visit Tacoma after dark, but it’s now on the top of my list for my next visit.

Features around the museum, including the fountains and Chihuly Bridge of Glass are all lit at night. It looks like it would be absolutely gorgeous after dark.

Other things to do in Tacoma

The Museum of Glass is located in the Tacoma Museum District, so once you arrive in the area, you’ll find more than enough to keep you busy for a day (or two). Museums in the area include:

• The Tacoma Art Museum, which has a permanent exhibit of Chihuly’s work as well as other glass and a wide range of other art.
• Those kid-designed glass pieces are on display at the Children’s Museum of Tacoma, although the rest of the museum probably doesn’t have a lot that is aimed at adults.
• The Washington State History Museum has a wide range of exhibits that both celebrate and critique the state’s history.
• LeMay – America’s Car Museum is a huge facility that features 12 rotating exhibits on a wide variety of cars and aspects of car culture.
• The Foss Waterway Seaport is a marine museum in a fully restored historic building that includes a wooden boat shop and a functioning dock.

Once a month Tacoma has a Free Third Thursday and Downtown Artwalk when local museums offer free or discounted admission and special activities during the afternoon and evening. In addition, downtown art galleries open their doors and invite visitors to stop in to enjoy the art and meet the artists.

Eating in Tacoma

Across from the Bridge of Glass, Pacific Avenue has a lot of restaurants of all types and at a variety of price points.

Your options are more limited if you want to dine along the water. My 2023 recommendation is The Fish Peddler on Foss Waterway, located a few long blocks down the waterfront from the museum. It’s a popular bar and restaurant with indoor and outdoor dining, great staff, and good seafood and not much of a website.

Lodging in Tacoma

Despite talking about it for years, I’ve never stayed in downtown Tacoma. I always seem to end up here at the end of my trip with a very early morning flight out. And, with transit connections that usually aren’t always particularly convenient, I want to stay as close to the airport as possible. So maybe next time I’ll START my Pacific Northwest trip in Tacoma and finally give this city the time it deserves.

When I do that, here’s where I’ll begin my search for the perfect hotel that is right in the heart of the action on Trip Advisor and Expedia. (Affiliate links.) These include both a highly-rated Courtyard by Marriott and a very affordable Holiday Inn Express.  Airbnb also has a few listings for downtown Tacoma.