Holdman Studios

On the Thanksgiving Point campus in Lehi, the floor of Holdman Studios stands open to anyone who walks in. Visitors watch the artisans at work, and the studio’s listing with the county visitors’ bureau says they can make a glass flower of their own. In November 2016 a newspaper photographer caught Tom Holdman, the founder, at the same bench, turning a glass flower for the camera.

For a closer look the studio gives private tours of 30 to 45 minutes. The route runs through the hot shop, where the studio’s blown glass is made, and through the steps of building a stained-glass window. Closed-toe shoes are required inside the glass studio. Two demonstrations can be added. In the first, a team member explains how tempered glass is made, then breaks a sheet to show why it is used as safety glass. In the second, artists show how glass is cut and give each visitor a cut piece to take home. The gallery sells studio glass, most of it from the Windows of Heaven collection. In September 2026 the studio added two windows to that collection, Ephraim, Utah, and Montpelier, Idaho, named for the temples whose glass it had just finished.

Pumpkins at 2,100 degrees

Classes run by the season. Blown-glass students handle molten glass at 2,100° as they “design and pull” their own piece. Stained-glass students cut, grind, build, and solder a panel of their own. There are separate classes for children. Blown-glass pumpkins returned in mid-August 2026, and the studio warned that each pumpkin would come out smaller than the one in its video. Evening sessions were added at the end of the month, and by September 28 only a few places were left, with ornament classes “right around the corner.” The October stained-glass classes were posted with ghosts and bats.

The hot shop also supplies the commissions. For a window installed in 2026 at The Tree Room, the restaurant at Sundance Mountain Resort, the shop blew custom rondels. By September 2026 the team had spent nearly a year learning to blow its own sheet glass, a skill it first took up for the Sphere of Light. The studio has described each step. Layers of glass frit go on for color and texture. The glassblower balances heat, gravity, airflow, and rotation to control the thickness of the sheet. Repeated heating and blowing stretch the bubble into a large cylinder. A single cut along its length lets the tube unfold, in time, into a flat sheet.

Peaches, cherries, and wheat

The studio’s own count of its work runs to all 50 states and 40 countries. Its commissions come from commercial buildings, private houses, churches, and public art programs. One residential window from 2026 shows Utah scenery with six peaches for the owners’ children and ten cherries for their grandchildren. Another, after Akhenaten and Nefertiti beneath the sun god Aten, was made to look like desert sandstone. Its hieroglyphs were sandblasted, its glass individually hand-beveled, and its “cracks” fused in on purpose.

Much of the work is for temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the count has climbed with each telling. The Deseret News gave 50 temples in 2017. A 2019 report gave 90, the most recent then the Rome Italy Temple, with its windows and a mural for its Visitors’ Center. The studio’s about page now says over 150. The Ephraim, Utah, glass of 2026 carries wheat motifs for the Ephraim Relief Society Granary, where generations of Relief Society sisters gathered and gave out wheat. Its flowers borrow from rosemaling, the Scandinavian folk painting of Sanpete County’s early pioneers, and forget-me-nots run throughout. The Montpelier Idaho Temple glass shows golden arrowleaf balsamroot, blue chicory, and Bear Lake set with round opal jewels. Youghiogheny made a custom glass for its blooms. For the Cambodia Phnom Penh Temple the artists drew on Khmer flower motifs from Kbach, Cambodia’s traditional decorative arts. Other work goes to the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches, among them a 2026 window for the Santuario de Guadalupe in San José de los Cabos.

Some of the glass stays close to home. In 2022 the studio and the Roots of Humanity Foundation unveiled a stained-glass work they had donated to the City of Lehi. It honors the city’s history, the Lehi Police Department, and officer Joseph D. Adams, and it hangs in the Broadbent room of the public safety building.

Tom and Gayle Holdman direct the studio, and Gayle designs its windows. Cameron Oscarson is lead artist, Arron Yorgason vice president, Amilia Smith office manager, and James Graham project manager. A second shop, Holdman South, works in Ensenada, Baja California.

A box of colored pencils

Tom Holdman was raised in Orem with a stutter that therapists and doctors could not cure. The Deseret News told the story in 2017. During a game of red rover he could not call out a name, and he ran to a corner of the playground while the other children laughed. A teacher he remembers only as Mrs. Wilcox followed him and handed him a box of colored pencils. “There are other ways to communicate,” she said. His father, Floyd, was a freelance cartoonist and photographer whose work appeared in National Geographic and Time. When Tom was seven, Floyd praised a set of rocks his son had painted and promised to put them in one of his photographs. “I didn’t think, ‘Hey, I can be an artist one day,’” Tom later told the Stained Glass Association of America. “I thought, ‘Hey, I already am an artist!’”

At Orem High a teacher, Mr. Cloward, introduced him to stained glass. “It’s a partnership of three — the artist, the glass and the light,” Holdman said. He served a two-year church mission in Dallas, knocking on doors. He came home in 1991 expecting to illustrate children’s books and, after weeks of prayer, turned to glass instead. When BYU rejected his application to study art, he flew to Paris with his brother Willie. They drove through France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, living on baguettes and cheese and sleeping in the rental car. In Prague he stood for hours before Mucha’s window in the national cathedral. At the end of the trip their passports and tickets were stolen, and the brothers slept under a staircase near the train station until they found a way home.

His parents gave him their two-car garage. “My parents parked their car out on the street for two years,” he said. His father’s advice was, “If you want to be successful as an artist, you have to want it more than air to breathe. And you must leave nothing to fall back on.” Holdman took an art glass course at what is now Utah Valley University, where he was the only student. He wanted the association’s $250 technical manual, so he went door to door selling windows he did not yet know how to make and bought the book with the deposits. That worn copy now sits on a shelf in his office.

The studio dates its founding to 1991. A 2016 Utah Valley University release gave 1988. Holdman’s first large job came when he drove past the Orem Library while it was under construction. He offered the head librarian windows that illustrated children’s stories, and when she said there was no money, he asked, “What if it were free?” He raised private donations to pay for them. A church official saw the library glass and invited a proposal for the Palmyra Temple, and the temple work began there. The studio and its Art Institute, which Holdman started so people could watch artists work, have been at Thanksgiving Point since 2005. Alan and Karen Ashton, who founded Thanksgiving Point, are named among his chief benefactors. By 2011 his younger brother Treavor ran the hot glass.

Eighty panels in Orem

Walking the BYU campus one day, Holdman noticed students bent over their phones and began to think about the long march of human knowledge. He drew sketches on a scroll and showed them to Utah Valley University president Matthew Holland, hoping for a sponsor. Holland, by the Deseret News account, thought the idea should be bigger. Roots of Knowledge took 12 years and $3 million. More than 80 artists worked on it, by the newspaper’s count, along with some 350 students. The studio served as headquarters, and the team was led by Cameron Oscarson, Trevor Petersen, and Nick Lawyer. Oscarson gave up a career in architectural engineering to join his former Boy Scout leader on the project.

The finished wall holds 80 panels and 60,000 pieces of glass, 200 feet long. UVU and the Deseret News give its height as 10 feet; the Stained Glass Association gives 9.5. It begins with a true-to-scale picture of the world’s oldest tree, which grows near Death Valley. Set into the glass are a meteorite, a Depression-era $1,000 bill, and two coins nearly 3,000 years old. The Sears Tower is built of computer circuit boards, and Alfred Hitchcock holds a knife behind his back. After someone compared the wall to Where’s Waldo, Holdman added Waldo, looking over the shoulder of an Iran hostage. The windows were shown in New York, Oxford, and London in October 2016 and unveiled at the UVU library in Orem on November 18. The Guardian called them “one of the most spectacular stained glass windows in the past century.” They are free to view and reach their tenth anniversary on November 18, 2026.

A sphere at Ashton Gardens

A week after the unveiling, Holdman told the Deseret News, “I have another idea that is even bigger than Roots.” The studio places its start in 2016, in London, when he stood on London Bridge watching lights shimmer on the Thames and thought of the billions of people with their own stories. From that moment, by the studio’s account, came the Roots of Humanity Foundation, a nonprofit the Holdmans founded. Its traveling exhibit Believe in Him, nine panels on the life of Jesus Christ, opened in Paris in 2023 and went on to England. It closed its last stop, at the Washington D.C. Temple Visitors’ Center, on October 29, 2025, and returned to Utah.

In 2023 the Kuwaiti calligrapher Ali Albaddah came to Lehi to work Arabic calligraphy into the glass. “I am feeling like you are my family,” he told KSL. Holdman showed the station the nearly finished Seven Pillars of Humanity, set with a piece of the Berlin Wall. “We are tearing down walls to build bridges,” he said.

In August 2026 Thanksgiving Point announced that the building, named The King and Diane Husein Sphere of Light, will stand in its Ashton Gardens. Plans call for more than 10,000 square feet of glass in over 300 panels, on four levels from a subterranean floor of creation up through “Me,” “Us,” and “Others.” Completion is projected for 2030. In the studio that summer, a panel built around Hansel and Gretel and Scheherazade lay on the light table, its forest plated for shadow. On August 7 the dragon scene of the Courage panel was lifted into the light for the first time.