2025
Through the Glass: Curating Material, Memory, and Place
NXTHVN
Rigoberto Luna | NXTHVN Yearbook 2024–25
On a sunny August afternoon our cohort participated in a Dixwell Walking Tour with Carolyn Baker, president of the Greater New Haven African American Historical Society. We gathered just outside the NXTHVN building on Henry Street when Ms. Baker pointed out a sign on the front of the building remnants of the previous tenant that read “Macalaster Bicknell Laboratory Supplies Glass Blowing.” I had been in New Haven for a week at that point, but I hadn’t noticed it. Despite the countless photos I had seen of the building’s facade, it was a detail I'd overlooked but one Ms. Baker felt important to point out while recalling the neighborhood's industrial past.
In those early days, still adjusting and full of nerves, I paid close attention to everything around me—advice from past cohort members, casual conversations and comments from staff members, and brief interactions with neighborhood residents. I may have been searching for familiarity, something to ground me in this new environment. And I found it. Dixwell reminded me of working-class neighborhoods I knew in San Antonio, Texas: tight-knit communities, places of faith, and community centers where people gathered to learn, celebrate, and support one another. Our demographics differ, but our aspirations are the same. We build communities for ourselves and by ourselves through hard work and shared commitment to collective growth.
I often seek commonalities to connect, though I realize the flaw in that approach. Every place has its own history, and it's important to see it for what it is rather than filter it through my personal experiences.
Yet, working in the arts and in what I would characterize as an artist-led community-based practice, I'm drawn to the untold stories of a place—who lived here, built it, and sustained it. At NXTHVN, I wondered what kind of exhibition I would create. I hadn't expected to return to the methods I employ back home in Texas: looking outward, learning from the community, and building through it.
After ten months of living here, I won't pretend to fully understand New Haven, but I've done my best to get to know this city and its people so that I can take something beyond the line on a CV when I leave. I didn’t come here solely to curate a show but to understand where I am and how my work fits into this context. I can't let a city define my practice, but I can let it inform it.
That warm August day, Ms. Baker told us that NXTHVN's building was once a glass company and an ice cream factory and that Dixwell was an industrial hub anchored by the former Winchester Factory during World War II. That's where All at Once, Reflected Through Glass began. Starting with Macalaster Bicknell, or MacBick, while no longer on Henry Street, they remain in operation as glass and laboratory equipment distributors. I dug deeper into the building's history; I discovered that before it housed MacBick, it was home to H. Puddicombe & Co. Puddicombe's presence in New Haven connected this site to a larger industrial past, specializing in art and leaded glass production until vacating the facility in 1945. Understanding this history added new layers to my curatorial concept—glass made here wasn't just for laboratories; art glass was once made here as early as the 1920s, deepening the roots of industry and glassmaking until 2012.
It didn’t take deep familiarity to notice that the neighborhood had changed and that more change was coming. NXTHVN is arguably a big part of that evolution. That idea makes me wonder what this building and neighborhood would look like when the factory was first established. I wanted to know more about the people working in New Haven’s manufacturing industry because labor is a funny thing—it takes so many people to run a factory. Yet, history only remembers the owners, the people at the top, and rarely the workers who kept it all running.
My interest wasn't rooted in nostalgia. I knew the stories I could find wouldn't be romantic. Honest hard work is rarely sentimental. I recall my parents reminiscing about the labor they and their parents did in their younger days. To them, it was just work—a necessity, not a memory to cherish. I didn't know where to start looking for the workers who staffed Dixwell’s factories from the 1920s through the early 2000s, but I felt compelled to try. It bothers me that their stories aren't recorded. I want to know what this block was like before I—and before NXTHVN—arrived: the good and the bad. I'm certain there were both. I hoped that through this project it might draw out some of the stories, family members familiar with the building's past, to share their memories or any details of the laborers or their relationship to glass production.
The thought of glass production in this building lingered with me. It made me think of contemporary glass artists, particularly artists of color, like the De la Torre brothers and Salvador Jiménez-Flores, whom I had recently met. As I considered artists for a potential exhibition, I realized how historically white-dominated the medium has been. Listening to podcast interviews with Black glass artists speaking about their surprise when learning there were others like themselves in the field perfectly illustrated the disparity in this and other mediums. It also made me think of NXTHVN and other organizations like Crafting the Future, based in Los Angeles, which have similar missions to mentor, incubate, and accelerate artists’ careers to level the playing field.
As a Mexican American independent curator, I find opportunities like NXTHVN rare. The organization is designed to support artists of color who have historically lacked access to the art world's resources. Titus Kaphar and Jason Price, NXTHVN’s founders, are actively working to change that. The diversity of previous cohorts is proof of their commitment. In hindsight, I shouldn't have been surprised that glass, like many other fields, has struggled with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Access is everything. Without financial support, resources, space, mentorship, and community, it’s nearly impossible for artists, particularly of color, to break through. Artists have long relied on apprenticeships, learning from the guidance of master artists who train the next generation that would push mediums and conversations forward. Without those structures in place, entire communities are simply left out.
Can a community care about a building? A place they may have no sentimental attachment to; a place whose repurposing they may not fully understand? While I don't expect to answer these questions definitively, they are worth asking. These prompts and my ongoing reflections are the foundation for All at Once. Exploring the building's history through the lens of glass—its industrial past, its contemporary potential, and highlighting artists currently working to diversify the medium and expand its narratives. My goal was to learn more about what this building has meant and currently means to the Dixwell community by engaging directly with its residents.
In 2020, The Corning Museum of Glass published an essay in New Glass Review titled “The Whiteness of Glass” by Related Tactics in response to the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by Minneapolis police sparking protests nationwide. The essay states:
The current state of the field is grim, but it always has been. ‘The Whiteness of Glass’ emerged from a cursory assessment of demographic data because we asked ourselves: How bad is it? The data reveals a field that has failed to address issues of structural racism at all levels and across all aspects of the glass arts sector.
The findings were not shocking, but the visual data made the disparities undeniable. And yet, why was it surprising? These inequities exist well beyond the world of glass. Systemic racism is embedded in the foundation of this country, and it is continuously perpetuated and profited from.
This exhibition is not just about glass. It is about labor, access, visibility, and how history remembers—or fails to remember—the people who built the world around us. NXTHVN co-founder Titus Kaphar's practice interrogates these omissions, questioning whose stories are preserved and who can tell them. His sculpture A Pillow for Fragile Fictions (2016) presents a warped, hand-blown glass bust of George Washington, encasing a brown liquid—a mix of rum, tamarind, molasses, and lime—remnants of the goods he once accepted in exchange for an enslaved man. The piece distorts not just Washington's image but the sanitized narratives surrounding America’s origins, exposing the ways both visibility and erasure shape history.
Just as Kaphar exposes the erasures embedded in America’s founding mythology, Patrick Martinez interrogates the power of place and ownership—his neon-based works, inspired by commercial signage, critique histories of systematic displacement. In Black Owned 3 (2024), a piece modeled after classic motel “VACANCY/NO VACANCY” signage, Martinez’s sign reads: “BLACK OWNED.” and references Miami's Historic Hampton House, a vital refuge and meeting spot during segregation. Installed within NXTHVN's front lobby and visible from Henry Street through the building’s glass windows, the work boldly announces to the Dixwell community that this once white-owned manufacturing building is now a Black-led creative initiative—a beacon of reclamation and self-determination.
Like Martinez, Einar and Jamex De la Torre use their practice to critique systems of power and cultural narratives. Their mixed-media glass sculptures blend history, satire, and contemporary politics, subverting dominant narratives with biting humor. In works like Grand Old Party (2017), the De la Torre brothers construct a grotesque chimera—a demon-like bust fused with a red, white, and blue elephant—looming over a crowd of tiny Guatemalan worry dolls, symbols of manufactured fear and manipulated anxieties. The piece evokes an escalating political climate in which BIPOC communities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women face mounting threats and the daily erosion of rights under policies cloaked in Christian morality but driven by fearmongering and control.
This tension between fragility and power carries into Timo Fahler’s practice, where fear is not only a cultural force but an inherited one. In it’s happening, can you feel it (my inheritance) (2022-2023), a stainedglass replica of a 1911 .45 caliber pistol hangs precariously from the fingertip of a sculpted hand adhered to the wall, the title alluding to a growing unease confronting the weight of personal and national legacies. In transforming a weapon into a fragile yet loaded object, the work is blurring the line between protection and vulnerability. His work questions what we carry forward, what we discard, and what is imposed upon us, confronting the role of gun culture in American life and the burdens passed down through generations.
The weight of inherited violence extends beyond the personal—violence and loss shape entire communities. Angela Babby’s distinct glass-onglass technique combines traditional stained glass with kiln-fired enamel embellishments to confront the ongoing erasure of Indigenous people, particularly the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. A member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe, Babby’s Turtle Island War Party (2019) mourns those lost while celebrating the five Native women elected to Congress in 2018: Peri Pourier, Ruth Buffalo, Sharice Davids, Deb Haaland, and Red Dawn Foster. Her work reveals how representation and remembrance are acts of resistance, challenging the silence imposed by history. Like Fahler, Babby transforms glass into a symbol of fragility and resilience, using it to honor what has been lost and insist on a future where those most at risk are no longer invisible.
The weight of such violence and erasure is not confined to the past—it continues at our Southern borders, where lives are lost and identities are left unclaimed. Perla Segovia explores the delicate line between remembrance and loss through her sculptural installations, which honors casualties of migration. Drawing from her own experiences as an immigrant from Peru, she transforms the traditional retablo—once a tool of Catholic indoctrination during colonization—into a memorial for those who lost their lives crossing the Sonoran Desert. Retablo de Imagenes y Memorias (2022) presents three pairs of glass-cast children’s shoes facing niches that hold personal belongings: a contact lens case, a makeup compact, a perfume bottle, a toothbrush, and toothpaste— objects once carried by migrants, now preserved as glass icons. They recall the storage lockers at the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office, where the unclaimed possessions of deceased migrants are stored.’ Segovia compels us to confront the individual lives lost and the larger systems that render this human cost.
Cheryl Derricotte’s Future House (2009), echoes the ongoing quest for sustainability amidst crisis. The green house symbolizes the promise of environmentally friendly housing, reflecting the complex relationship between urban development and environmental responsibility. By casting this house in glass, she emphasizes the frailty of the promises that such housing models represent, serving as a metaphor for the broader, often unattainable, pursuit of sustainable futures. Nearly 20 years later, Future House stands as a reminder of the environmental challenges we continue to face and the need for economically viable and environmentally sustainable communities.
At a time when histories are actively being rewritten and contested, artists like Layo Bright and Salvador Jiménez-Flores offer visions of resilience and healing. In Bloom in Hues of Red, Pink, and Purple (2024), Bright layers delicate glass flowers around a portrait of her sister evoking themes of migration cycles, adaptation, and sisterhood. Her portrait is encased in a natural wall rub technique using osun camwood, also known as African red sandalwood, a native Nigerian bark used in traditional healing rituals, extending the ideas of transformation and cultural continuity. Meanwhile, Jiménez-Flores reimagines the nopal cactus—long a symbol of survival, able to withstand some of the harshest environments and conditions, able to adapt and persist when faced with adversity—as a series of seven blown glass forms in Nopales Seductores (2023). The tension between transparency and opacity, fragility and endurance, mirrors the struggles of immigrant communities navigating exclusion and resilience.
While working on this project, we uncovered objects tucked away in storage since 2018: two stained glass samples that a Dixwell resident had given to a NXTHVN staff member. The woman said an elder relative made them in this building. Once thought to be from the Macalaster Bicknell era, we now believe they date further back, likely to when H. Puddicombe’s art and leaded glass company was here. We also learned that Macalaster Bicknell supplied lab glass to Yale before the university opened its glassblowing department. At the opening, visitors shared memories—some recalled buying glass here, and others suggested several local churches may have sourced stained glass from this building. A guestbook collected these stories, sparking new conversations. I didn't learn as much about the people who once worked here, but I left feeling their legacy was honored all the same.
With its contradictions—delicate yet strong, transparent yet reflective—glass becomes an apt metaphor for these artists’ investigations into history, identity, and power through its materiality. Glass, for these artists is more than a medium—it is a means of transformation, a lens through which the past is made visible, and a reflection of the futures we are still shaping. In All at Once, this collective reimagining, glass functions not only as a surface but as a vessel— holding memory, protest, and possibility. Each artist bends its fragility toward strength, shaping it into forms that refuse to be ignored. Their work challenges us to see beyond the surface and acknowledge what has been shattered and can still be repaired. If history is written in glass, it remains forever at risk of breaking, but crucially, of being remade.