The Hot Shop

A stainless-steel cone, 90 feet tall and tilted, stands at the edge of the Thea Foss Waterway in Tacoma. Inside it the furnaces run from opening to closing. The Hot Shop of the Museum of Glass, formally the Jane Russell Hot Shop, is a working studio built with seats for an audience. The resident Hot Shop Team and the Visiting Artists work molten glass there all day, every day the museum is open, Wednesday through Sunday. “When we opened our doors, we set out to make the Hot Shop a glimpse into the working artist’s studio,” says Ben Cobb, the Hot Shop Director. “Our audience has the opportunity to watch the creative process happen.”

The cone holds two shops, a hot shop and a cold shop, and the museum says every piece of glass made there is finished, start to finish, within those two rooms. When the building opened in 2002, the Hot Shop Amphitheater held 140 seats, and cameras in fixed positions sent the work at the bench to large video screens just outside the studio. A livestream now carries the same view to the museum’s YouTube channel.

Most visitors coming from downtown cross the Chihuly Bridge of Glass, a 500-foot pedestrian span that rises 80 feet above Interstate 705 and several rail lines. On the way they pass under the Seaform Pavilion’s ceiling of colored glass, along the Venetian Wall of more than 100 vessels, and between two glacial-blue Crystal Towers. Stairs spiral around the base of the cone to the museum entrance, and the museum suggests climbing them before leaving. On the esplanade below stands Howard Ben Tre’s Water Forest, 20 bronze and glass towers set around a granite bench. Each tower fills with water, overflows, and fills again. Sliced Sandwiches runs the café inside.

The crew at the bench

The team visitors watch is small. Benjamin Cobb, director and lead gaffer, has spent 25 years in glassblowing and has demonstrated at studios in Sweden, the Czech Republic, Italy, and France. Gabe Feenan, the other gaffer, started in 1996 in production studios around San Francisco Bay, and his own work is built from stacked geometric shapes. Sarah Gilbert, the starter, took her BFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2005 and was a Hauberg Fellow at Pilchuck Glass School. Nick Davis, the lead technician, also makes tools to order for artists around the world. Kristin Elliot is the museum’s only coldworker and keeps a cold shop of her own in Tacoma. Walter Lieberman, the emcee, has worked in glass for 40 years as a glass painter. His work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The museum reports that Visiting Artists repeatedly name this crew among the best glassblowing groups in the world.

Those artists come from around the world, both established and emerging, for residencies that run from a single day to several weeks. Many give a presentation on their last day. Since 2007, when the museum began collecting, work by artists who completed Hot Shop residencies has gone into its permanent collection.

Phil Phibbs, who first proposed the museum, wrote in 2007 that he could “sit in the hot shop day after day and never be bored.” One Saturday the emcee asked the audience, “How many of you have been to this museum before?” Phibbs recalled that “all kinds of little hands went up; very few adult hands were in evidence.” Those children had come first on school tours and were now bringing their parents.

Galleries shut, furnace lit

In April 2026 the museum began its first capital renovation, a project of roughly $25 million. The traditional galleries closed and are expected to stay closed until December 2026. The Hot Shop, Education Studio, store, and café have kept their regular schedule, smaller exhibitions hang in the Grand Hall, and much of the construction takes place in the evening. Parking in the museum garage is limited while the work goes on. In March 2026 The Seattle Times reported that construction would take about six months. The museum’s own project page puts it at about eight. The old theater is becoming gallery space. A new Lino Tagliapietra Legacy Gallery of about 4,000 square feet will show more than 50 pieces at a time, opening with Lino Tagliapietra: Maestro. The museum lists that gallery as opening in fall 2026 and expects the rest of the galleries to reopen in December.

The crew also works outside the cone. At the 2026 Pumpkin Patch Festival on October 10, the Hot Shop Team is scheduled to make glass pumpkins live on the Grand Plaza. Katelyn Moody of Moody Studio Arts will give a flameworking demonstration, locally made glass pumpkins will be for sale, and there will be face painting, a bouncy house, and a tarot reader. The event depends on the weather.

A conversation in 1992

Accounts of the museum’s beginning differ in their wording. In his 2007 essay, Phibbs wrote that about a month after he retired as president of the University of Puget Sound in 1992, Dale Chihuly came to see him. Chihuly was thinking of moving part of his operation to Tacoma, including a hot shop. Phibbs recalled blurting out, “Dale, what we really should have in Tacoma is a museum devoted to your work.” The Seattle Times, writing in 2002, put the visit in late summer 1992 at Phibbs’s home and quoted him as saying, “What we really should have is a museum of glass.” The museum’s own history dates the conversation to August 1992.

Phibbs then called Erling Mork, a former Tacoma city manager, who sent him to a meeting of business and government leaders. Phibbs’s essay calls the group the Economic Development Council. The museum and the Times call it the Executive Council for a Greater Tacoma. Phibbs expected a polite dismissal. Instead the chairman, George Russell, asked him to stay for the next presentation, which was a plan to redevelop the Thea Foss Waterway. At the time the waterway was an empty industrial strip along a channel so polluted it qualified as a federal Superfund site. When the presentation ended, Phibbs wrote, Russell told him, “We would like your museum to be the anchor tenant.” Russell later gave his reason: “We had to bring business people together to see if we couldn’t get Tacoma to stop turning its lights off at 5.”

Chihuly, the museum says, insisted that the museum take in glass artists from around the world rather than his work alone. His own work went onto the bridge instead. The Times reported in 2002 that the city paid $3.7 million for the bridge, designed by Arthur Andersson of Austin, Texas. It also reported that Chihuly had asked that the bridge not carry his name and that the city overruled him. Through every change of plan, one element held. “The focus of the museum would be a hot shop,” Phibbs wrote. “The commitment of everyone never wavered on this point.”

A sawdust burner on the tide flats

The cone belongs to the Canadian architect Arthur Erickson, who unveiled the design in September 1997. Phibbs grew up in the Northwest and remembered the sawdust burners that once dotted the landscape, especially on Tacoma’s tide flats. He wrote that Erickson “used that history to link the new museum to Tacoma’s past with the dramatic cone for the hot shop.” Josi Callan became director in January 2000, construction began that June, and the cone’s steel frame was complete by March 2001. The $63 million museum opened on July 6, 2002. At a media preview that June, Callan told reporters, “This museum is a bit different, as you’re about to see.” Erickson pointed to the stairs climbing around the cone: “I think that’s the essence of this project.”

George and Jane Russell had agreed to co-chair the founding board in 1995. Jane died before the museum opened. Phibbs remembered her as usually a listener in the board’s arguments, until a critical point, when “she would quietly intervene with a comment or an idea that got us back in focus.” George named the Hot Shop for her because it had been her favorite place in the museum. Phibbs died in 2022, and George Russell in 2025. “The hot shop remains my favorite spot in the museum,” Phibbs had written.

Nineteen residencies

Lino Tagliapietra was born on Murano in 1934 and entered a glass workshop as an apprentice at 11. The museum’s history says he first came to Pilchuck Glass School in Washington in 1979. Cobb dates his first visit to the Northwest to the early 1980s. Tagliapietra completed 19 residencies in the Hot Shop and drew standing-room-only crowds in the amphitheater, with thousands more watching on the livestream. The museum mounted three major exhibitions of his work, in 2008, 2012, and 2014. In March 2023 he made his final blow in the United States in the Hot Shop. He later gave the museum 175 works from his archive. “He shared that with anyone who was willing to watch, listen, and understand what he was doing,” Cobb said.

Tagliapietra once explained his touch in one sentence: “For some reason, my hands stay a little bit light.”