Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio

By Tami Landis

A celebration of the women working in glass who shaped the early Studio Glass Movement

This lavishly illustrated volume is published to coincide with the first survey exhibition of women artists working in glass in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s--the breakthrough decades of the American Studio Glass Movement.

Essays based on archival research and artist interviews bring their stories to light, many for the first time. Tough Stuff champions the artists' lives and critical early work, bringing into view their formal and material ingenuity, historical impact, and profound conceptual frameworks in glass as an artistic medium. The essays are illustrated with reproductions of archival photographs of the women in the hot shop and nascent glassmaking centers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Pilchuck Glass School and University of Wisconsin-Madison. Plates alongside the artists' biographies display spectacular photography of the exhibited works, most loaned by artists or private collectors and never exhibited or published before.

Among the women highlighted are Sonja Blomdahl, Edris Eckhardt, Claire Falkenstein, Audrey Handler, Frances Higgins, Lucartha Kohler, Flora Mace and Joey Kirkpatrick, Kathleen Mulcahy, Ginny Ruffner, Mary Shaffer, Ruth Yone Tamura, and Toots Zynsky.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872902404
• ISBN13: 9780872902404
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Corning Museum of Glass
• Length: 212 Pages
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher