barrio glassworks

At 3060 Roosevelt Street in Carlsbad Village, a large open door on the face of the building shows passersby what is going on inside: glassblowers at work around the furnace. Barrio Glassworks is a public glassblowing studio, gallery and shop, and its viewing section is open to whoever walks in, with no reservation. “We knew we wanted public access where people could really watch what we were doing,” Mary Devlin, one of the owners, told KPBS in 2021.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in 2022 that a 2,125-degree furnace keeps 300 pounds of melted glass molten at the center of the shop. KPBS put the kilns known as “glory holes” at 2,200 degrees. Who works at the bench changes by the day, and the studio posts a weekly lineup on its website under “In the Studio.” In the week ending October 4, 2026, Taryn Jayne worked Tuesday and Thursday and Nic McGuire worked Wednesday, each with “Team Barrio.” Patty Yockey had Friday, a Make Your Own day, and Saturday was a sold-out pumpkin day. Mondays are listed as closed, “but sometimes open.” Drew Raskin, the owners’ son, is studio manager and principal gaffer.

The studio takes its name from the Barrio, which the Union-Tribune calls Carlsbad’s oldest residential neighborhood. The owners say they mean to honor the plain sense of the word, neighborhood in Spanish. The Carlsbad Historical Society traces the neighborhood to the exodus from Mexico that it ties to the 1916 Mexican Revolution. Families came looking for work in the fields and groves, and many settled at the south end of town near the railroad tracks and the bean and flower fields. Among the first were the Ramirez, Trejo, Acuña, Aguilar, Gastelum, Martinez, Mata and Soto families, and they called their neighborhood Barrio Carlos.

Paperweights, pumpkins and ornaments

Visitors ten and older can work the glass themselves. The introductory Make Your Own session, $85 a person, produces a solid paperweight or glass heart, made with staff at the maker’s elbow while friends and family watch and take pictures. Closed-toe shoes are required in the hot shop and loose hair must be tied back. Those who finish can go on to lessons in blown bowls, vases and cups.

Sophy Chaffee described the session for the Union-Tribune in 2022. Staff guided her to twist, pinch and poke color-flecked glass with long pointed tongs they call tweezers as it cooled “from the consistency of honey to taffy to rock candy.” At the end she struck the punty rod with a wooden dowel, and the piece came off “unshattered and still glowing like a baseball-size Earth on fire.” She called it “the most satisfactory thwack of my life.” Finished pieces take 24 to 48 hours to cool. The studio asks makers to return in two days or have the work shipped.

The calendar adds seasonal projects. Make Your Own Pumpkin Days produce a solid pumpkin paperweight at $65; the 2026 sessions sold out and a wait list was opened. Blow Your Own Ornament Days follow at $65 an ornament. Weekend dates run November 14 through December 20, 2026, subject to change, with registration opening Monday, November 2, at 9 a.m. The studio’s homepage also lists a holiday patio sale on Saturday, December 5. At the 2025 sale, local glass artists set out holiday pieces not usually stocked in the shop, and many were on hand to meet buyers.

Butterflies, stacked stones and Drew’s Blues

The gallery shows glass by artists from San Diego, Southern California and beyond, at every stage of a career. By its own account it has roots in the American studio glass movement. The gallery page listed no current exhibition in fall 2026. The most recent show was 30 Years of Madness, a retrospective of Mad Art Studios in Vista, where Rina Fehrensen and Michael Maddy have blown glass for three decades. The gallery page says the show was extended through mid-June 2026; the studio’s events page says through July 2026.

The first exhibition listed, in 2021, was Nic McGuire’s “Monarch Flutters,” a floor-to-ceiling installation of butterflies in motion. Kazuki Takizawa followed in 2022. He lives with bipolar disorder and uses glass to explore his inner reality and to destigmatize mental illness. That same year came Steven Ciezki’s “Meditation,” blown towers modeled on stacked stones. Ciezki told the Union-Tribune the idea came on a Carlsbad beach walk “where the walkway had washed away. There was a wooden stump and on it, someone had stacked stones.” He also showed kiln-flattened wall panels. One of them, “Sky Hawk,” came from his wife’s pilot’s license: “It’s this small little Cessna sandblasted and painted on this large faded blue panel.”

Later shows included the collaborative sculpture of Jennifer Caldwell and Jason Chakravarty and Drew Raskin’s “Teardrops.” In 2024 the gallery showed Buzz Blodgett, who has blown glass since 1969 and whose family studio is in Leucadia; his lines include Bubble Lites (1975) and Space Lites (1977). An underwater exhibition, “Carlsbad by the Sea,” ran the same year. Susan Hirsch’s fused glass, with poetry and lyrics set into its layers, was on view into spring 2025.

The shop carries glass for home and garden and one-of-a-kind glassware, along with unity vases made for wedding ceremonies. Devlin told the Union-Tribune that the model she was advised to follow needed “a gallery with price points from $25 to $10,000.” The studio’s posts in summer 2026 showed new bowls and an ongoing series called “Drew’s Blues” by Drew Raskin, glass garden art, and new pieces by Blodgett. In 2022 the shelves held Taryn Jayne’s speckled bowls. Jayne drove from San Diego twice a week to work here, and she said, “I’m primarily drawn by color and pattern, and then I will think about the form that would display it best.” Her partner at the bench, Logan Nash Groupé, likes glass in a well-lit room: “The shadows of glass and color on the wall.” McGuire’s butterflies sell here too. The Union-Tribune reported that one buyer started with a single butterfly and now has a flight of them on his condo wall.

The studio also holds evenings in the hot shop. The 2026 tequila and mezcal tasting brought live mariachi music and glassblowing demonstrations, and a portion of proceeds went to Feeding San Diego.

Hearts hidden in the Village

Each February the studio’s work goes out into the streets. Hearts of Carlsbad Village began in 2021, during COVID, when the Carlsbad Village Association hid 50 hand-blown hearts from Barrio Glassworks to draw people back downtown. By 2024 the count was 400. For the week of February 7 to 14, 2026, the team made 700 hearts, starting the previous November. “It’s 10, it’s 10, it’s 10. Uh oh. Now we move to 50,” Devlin told The Coast News. Each heart cooled for 24 hours at roughly 50 degrees an hour, “otherwise it cracks.”

The hearts were hidden in plain sight around the Village, handed out at the farmers market and given to blood donors. More went to 265 scavenger-hunt players on Valentine’s Day. One of them, Kandi McKinney, a Carlsbad preschool teacher, chose a clear blue heart because “it reminds me of the ocean.”

From Murano to Roosevelt Street

The family dates the studio to the winter of 2012. A serendipitous accident, as the studio’s own account puts it, derailed their winter plans and landed the Raskin/Devlin family on Murano, the glassblowing island off Venice. Drew, then a teenager, fell in love with the work. The Union-Tribune says he came home while still in high school and took classes in Seattle. “It was one of those moments as a parent when you get to watch the magic happen,” Devlin said. “And along the way, I got bit by it.”

Devlin grew up in the Mission Hills neighborhood of San Diego. In Seattle’s glass community she was taken with the intricacy and collaborative spirit of the craft. Drew went on to California College of the Arts in Oakland and studied at Pilchuck, Penland, Corning and Haystack. Gary Raskin had begun as a CPA, earned an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and founded the Colors by Design greeting card and stationery company. After retiring in 2015 he took glass classes at Palomar College, and he designed the layout of the studio building. The studio says Devlin worked corporate jobs until the opening; the Union-Tribune identifies her as an HBO lawyer. “We kept taking seminars and so when we got ready for our second act, we decided to be glassblowers,” she told KPBS.

The couple, then living in Los Angeles, found a lot on Roosevelt Street that held Mixed Vapes and a former skateboard business. They planned a 2,323-square-foot building to replace them. Devlin went door to door among the neighboring merchants and told The Coast News that the region had only about half a dozen glass studios. The Carlsbad Planning Commission approved the project on September 5, 2018, after 29 people spoke against it and three in favor. Cameron Wetzler, owner of the Elm Street Boardshop, appealed, citing public safety and chemicals.

Before the City Council, Gary Raskin read a letter of support from Michael Hernandez, who taught glassblowing at Palomar College: “Electric furnaces … are non-combustive and only need to circulate fresh air three to four times per hour.” Wetzler had moved his shop across from the Village Faire and did not appear. The council denied the appeal 4-0, with Mayor Matt Hall recused, and The Coast News reported the result on January 15, 2019. Hernandez would later show neon in the gallery, in 2023.

Barrio Glassworks opened in December 2020, just before California’s second stay-at-home order, and ran at limited capacity. The first project offered to the public was a paperweight, Devlin explained, “mostly because you can stay masked and it’s on a solid pipe so there’s no blowing involved.”

The first resident artist, Nao Yamamoto of Los Angeles, came May 25 to 28, 2021. She had recently appeared on the Netflix glassblowing competition “Blown Away,” and she built an installation in front of the public. “When people come over they can see us working on the glass and more than anything people get to see our teamwork,” she said, “because even though I’m the artist it’s not just me making the art, it’s about the teamwork and the community.”