Symposium
November 6-7, 2026
WheatonArts
Millville, New Jersey

WheatonArts Fall Symposium is led by Jocelyne Prince and Anna Riley in conjunction
with the Museum of American Glass special exhibitions Portals and Passages and Ghost Optics.

How can the history of window and flat glass technology reshape contemporary practice with glass across various fields? How can revisiting this history help reframe dominant narratives about the built and technological environment? This symposium examines the evolution of flat glass manufacturing with the goal of broadening our understanding of material, labor, and craft in a mechanized age. Central to the symposium will be the “think-and-do” sessions combining discussion and hands-on testing of these processes. Lubbers draw, Fourcault draw, rolled, cast, and cylinder production methods will be applied to studio-scale experimentation.

Transparent Thresholds aims to bring together artists, scholars, architects and engineers to explore the embodied intelligence of industrial glassmaking and reclaim this history as a source of creative and educational innovation. Presenters include researchers and practitioners from glass, archeology, and material science. By bringing historical and industrial knowledge into the studio, this collaborative event seeks to expand the vocabulary of glassmaking, foster interdisciplinary discussion, and generate new forms of creative and technical engagement.

How will the “think-and-do” session work? 

Unlike a traditional hot glass demonstration, a “think-and-do” session is a live problem-solving experiment. A designated team will work in the hot shop to enact processes based on industrial flat glass methods and test ideas guided by conversation with the wider group. This collaborative format seeks to engage expertise from everyone’s disciplines and to create a dialogue where material processes can be immediately tested.

Speakers

● Lindsy R. Parrott, Executive director and curator of The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass
● Mudit Trivedi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
● Peter Houk, Artistic director of the MIT Glass Lab and independent artist
● Michael Stern, Professor of Practice, Creative Technology, RIT and Founder/Lead of Evenline

Organizers & Consultants

• Jocelyne Prince, Artist & Professor, Glass Department, Rhode Island School of Design
• Anna Riley, Artist & Doctoral student, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
• Mary Mills, Director of Exhibitions and Collections, WheatonArts, and curator for the Museum of American Glass
• Peter Drobny, Designer and consultant on all things glass

Schedule

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6
11:00 am-1:00 pm
Check-in, Event Center

11:00 am
Museum of American Glass opens for visiting the permanent collection
and special exhibitions Portals and Passages and Ghost Optics.

12:30 pm-1:30 pm
Lunch (provided) and informal greetings, Event Center

1:30 pm-1:50 pm
Welcome and Symposium Introduction: Jocelyne Prince and Anna Riley,
Event Center

1:55 pm-2:55 pm
Speaker: Lindsy R. Parrott (The Neustadt), Event Center

Lindsy Parrott, Revolutionizing Stained Glass: American Innovation in the Gilded Age

In the late 1800s, American painters revolutionized the centuries-old art of stained glass. Dissatisfied with the limited options in flat glass, artists such as Louis C. Tiffany (1848-1933) worked closely with chemists and glassmakers to significantly expand the range of colors, textures, patterns, and degrees of translucency available to artists. These innovations allowed Tiffany and his contemporaries to move beyond the conventions of stained glass and create modern windows with painterly and sculptural effects.

3:15 pm-5:45 pm
“Think-and-Do” Round One, Glass Studio

7:00 pm-9:00 pm
Pizza Party, Glass Studio (back area)

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7
9:00 am-10:00 am
Speaker: Mudit Trivedi (Stanford), Event Center

Mudit Trivedi, Genealogies of Transparency

This talk examines the relationship between transparency and opacity in glassmaking, approaching transparency as not only a chemical state or technical achievement but also as an enigmatic moral-political idea. Bringing together the material and the moral it pauses over how our modern world is shaped, simultaneously, by the ubiquity of transparent flat glass and by the skeptical tendency to regard other minds as opaque.

Drawing on examples from Roman, medieval south Asian and early modern European contexts, it provides a comparative examination of the premodern preindustrial difficulties of achieving transparent glass. It contrasts the uses transparency was put to, and the desires and fears it unleashed. Towards the workshop’s aims it explores how aspects of these pasts have transitioned into our flat-glass culture, still informing how we experience the limits of transparency, or, the thresholds of opacity.

10:15 am-11:15 am
Speaker: Peter Houk (MIT) and Michael Stern (RIT), Event Center

Peter Houk & Michael Stern, Glass in Layers: 3D Printing, Industry, and New Forms

Glass 3D printing introduced an entirely new way of forming glass, opening a design space filled with previously impossible forms. Peter Houk and Michael Stern will trace G3DP’s place within the history of industrial glassmaking, share current research, and explore the new design paths it makes possible.

11:30 am-12:30 pm
Lunch, Event Center

1:15 pm-3:30 pm
“Think-and-Do” Round Two, Glass Studio

4:00 pm-5:30 pm
Public Closing Reception for Portals and Passages and Ghost Optics,
Museum of American Glass