Blown Away: Open House at SMC
The Santa Monica College Glass Blowing class opened their studio alongside the annual Open House to showcase the glass blowing process and sell student and faculty art.
On Saturday, May 12, the main campus of Santa Monica College (SMC) buzzed as the annual Open House took place. The event offered students to aid in enrollment for the upcoming summer and fall semesters, as well as showcased insight into student resources and courses being offered.
Tucked in the back corner of the art building, the highly adored faculty members of the glass-blowing class presented the studio and classroom with student and faculty art for sale, as well as glass-blowing and torch work demonstrations.
The studio faculty includes four part-time employed technicians alongside glass instructor Terri Bromberg. There is a beginner and an advanced glass-blowing class which are both offered to all students at SMC.
Bromberg, who has taught the glass-blowing class for the past 15 years, found a passion for glass art when she returned to SMC as a student after getting her master's degree. The program was initially founded in 1982 by professor Don Hartman who then passed the instructing baton off to his former student, Bromberg, upon retirement.
“Having been a student in the class for a number of semesters, it was such a vibrant part of the art department,”Bromberg said.“There are so many people that are involved in an energetic, proactive kind of way that it needed to keep going.”
Upon failed program attempts at both USC and UCLA due to expenses and upkeep, SMC offers a one-of-a-kind class to students.
“It is really a unique program as there is not something like this in an educational institution in L.A. anywhere else,” she said.
Bromberg shared the demand she sees from students who want to repeat the class but are not permitted to upon completion.
“I wish they would allow more repeatability, but the college has gone in a different direction,” she said. “It’s just like learning piano, if you can only do it for two or three semesters, you’re not a virtuoso, you want to continue to get better.”
Visitors gathered around four illuminated glory holes — furnaces torched to a specific temperature — where technicians and students demonstrated how they heat the glass and performed various manipulation techniques, as well as answered questions from the audience.
Myles Freedman, one of the four part-time technicians who run the studio for Bromberg, switched between holding the rod into the furnace and handing it to his colleague who rolled and manipulated the glass. Freedman has been a glass-blowing technician at SMC for 15 years alongside Bromberg.
“The glass-blowing class, although popular, is extremely underrated, and everyone who comes in and takes it usually finds that as difficult as it might be, it is much more enjoyable than most things at school,” he said.
In the main classroom of the studio, student Kimberly Hansen sat at a smaller torch, manipulating a small glob of glass on the end of a very thin rod.
“I just started last semester, and this is my first time bead-working,” she said. Hansen is in her second semester as a student in the glass-blowing class.
“It was last year at the Open House that I found it, and now I am getting my own torch.” Hansen, who specializes in the intricate manipulation of smaller glass pieces, plans on continuing her newly sprouted glass-blowing career. “I want to be a glass-blowing teacher,” she said.
Students interested in enrolling in glass-blowing courses at SMC can find the classes under “Glass Sculpture I” and “Glass Sculpture II” on Corsair Connect.
