Brent Kee Young Shapes Glass into Transcendent Artworks That Leverage Light and Classical Forms

With works in the permanent collections at The Cleveland Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art; Corning Museum of Glass; Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA; Imagine Museum: Contemporary glass art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Toledo Museum of Art; and Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in Sapporo, Japan, Cleveland Institute of Art professor Brent Kee Young is an icon of the art glass movement. A Cleveland Arts Prize winner, his work was featured in the CAP Show in 2025, and in Spring 2026 will be presented in GLASS54, an international glass art exhibition in Royal Oak Michigan, billed as the largest such event in the world.

Brent Kee Young uses customized surgical tweezers to shape, cut or manipulate flameworked glass rods into the exquisitely crafted glass sculptures known as his Matrix Series.

For his “scalpel,” Brent employs an oxygen and natural gas- or propane-fueled torch, gently and patiently guiding that 1,500- to 1,800-degree flame back and forth along the section of the glass rod he wants to twist, bend or cut. The glass must be heated to at least 1,000 degrees before it is malleable enough to shape. He uses Pyrex chemistry glass rods, typically of three, four or five millimeters in width, nothing smaller than three millimeters.

“I love the fluid nature of the material,” he observes. “Glass is a liquid; glass is a solid, and you can use it either way and in between. You can bend it and you can drip it, and you can cut it and break it. It’s pretty cool stuff.”

To fabricate one of his trademark geometric, abstract or everyday shapes, Brent first builds glass scaffolding to provide a form that will guide where he can work in space to create the shape he has envisioned. When you look at some of his pieces, the intricately woven borosilicate glass rods that flow into and around each other in web-like structures can appear “crazy,” he says, but the surrounding form or vessel that frames or contains those shapes is classical or easily recognizable, such as a cube, sphere, bowl or vase.

Referring to a piece that is two vases held within an open box, Brent explains: “My attention to form is there and the way I use form is pretty constant. When you look at the interior of the vases, when you look at the flamework, that’s crazy, but look at how clean the forms for the bases and the box are.”

For the familiar-shaped objects from everyday life, Brent is applying his concept of “illuminating the common.”

“You can look at the paper bag, ladder, chair or anvil I’ve made quite differently because you are not going to think about using them,” he says. “You recognize the form and what that means in terms of the industrial revolution, a hand working with a different material and what they can do with metal and the forging. Then the dialogue between myself as the maker and you as the viewer seeing an anvil constructed in glass engages you in a different way than you would associate with an iron anvil.”

Nikki Woods, director, Reinberger Gallery at Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA), says of his glasswork: “When you look at those Matrix pieces and the level of meticulous planning and construction involved, his craft is exceptional, and he’s always challenging himself to create new and different abstract forms to push the material in new ways. When you first look at it, it looks deceptively simple, but within that simplicity is a wealth of complexity and beauty.”

Brent built the first half of his career around cast or blown glass works, such as his Fossil Series of vases, bowls or cubes that feature colorful, abstract paintings inside the thick layers of glass. The designs reflect the ancient desert landscapes of the American Southwest and often include an archeological artifact that reveals Brent’s love of nature and history.

Brent’s flamework pieces, however, accentuate his distinctive convergence of engineering, construction and artful imagination. They also provide him more of an opportunity to continue shaping a piece than his earlier works, which he describes as “very solid, steady, muscular.”

“The Matrix pieces are constructed, which opens up a whole different way of thinking because all of the blown work and castings previous to these were monoliths,” he says. “The blown pieces were done in one sitting. With this series, if I don’t like one of the rods, I can take it out, so it’s like working with two-by-fours. Not really but . . .”

In addition to the forms, he also wants viewers to study the light. “These pieces are all clear, so what you are looking at is how the light is reflected and transmitted through all of those little elements,” he says. “Those forms are there just to gather the light and define the form in space.”

Wendy Earle, curator, Akron Art Museum, considers Brent’s work “mindblowing glassblowing,” pun intended.

“Brent just has this way of coaxing glass into these amazing shapes, so it’s just a testament to how long he’s worked on this to create this airiness and depth of space that’s so unique,” she says. “You’re really not seeing a lot of other glass blowers doing anything like this.”

From 1989 to 1991, Brent took a sabbatical from CIA to live in Kariya, Japan, where he directed the glass department at Aichi University of Education. He was responsible for establishing the studio, designing and implementing the curriculum, and teaching the first glass program at a national university in Japan.

Although deep, protracted concentration and exacting precision are hallmarks of his work, he says one lesson he learned from studying Japanese artists is extreme patience. Recognizing that thoughtful endurance just goes with the territory, he jokes that he’s even thought about curating a themed show for flamework artists entitled “No Stranger to Tedium.”

Brent began experimenting with his flameworking style in 2003 and knew he was onto something intriguing after a slightly unnerving experience with abstract painter Julian Stanczak, who had become a good friend as a colleague at CIA. They both had pieces in the 2003 faculty exhibition. Brent’s piece, Hemisphere, was the first in what became his Matrix Series, a bold, new approach first exhibited at CIA’s Glass Gallery in 2004.

Used to seeing Brent’s cast and blown pieces, Stanczak expressed concern about the novel style. At one point he locked Brent’s arm in the famous vice grip of his left hand.

“He practically broke my arm when he asked me very seriously what the hell I was doing.,” Brent recalls. “He was a terrific guy, so when he grabbed me and pulled me over, he wanted my attention! I was like, ‘Wait! Wait! Wait!’ I thought, he’s wondering what I’m doing, but I got his attention, and that could be either good or bad, so I took it to mean encouragement.”

Brent says that he “kind of dropped everything else I was doing,” such as the five art fairs or street shows around the country every year, to put his efforts into the innovative new body of work.

“It was like jumping off a diving board and not knowing exactly where you were going to land, which is not secure, but it’s good to do that,” he says. “It’s what experiments are about.”

“Brent is working on the highest level in the world with his sculpture in his own little world in Ohio,” says Aaron Schey, owner/director of Habatat Galleries in Royal Oak. “The work he makes is not only amazing to see and of museum-quality, but it’s technically life-changing because people can’t even fathom glass pieces like this.”

Aaron adds that his gallery has sold Brent’s work to private collections, public collections and museums across the world, and “it’s an amazing experience to have an artist of his level at Habatat.”

A native of Modesto, California, Brent’s high school years were distinguished by his ability to excel in math and drafting classes, and as a senior he worked part-time after school as a draftsman for the Stanislaus County Planning Commission. Because of a strong desire to make things, he decided to pursue a degree in engineering at San Jose State University. He transferred for a year at Oregon State University, then back to San Jose State, where he withdrew from the engineering program and enrolled in ceramics. Studio or art glass had emerged in the US in the early 1960s in Toledo, and San Jose had started a glass department. While completing his degree in ceramics, Brent was able to take a lot of glass courses.

 “I wasn’t even thinking about a career then but more about this is great, could I do this?” he says.

He enrolled as the second student in the new MFA program in glass at Alfred University in Upstate New York, with a minor in ceramic sculpture.

“I was just fascinated by materials, and Alfred had great teachers,” Brent says. “They also had ceramic engineering, ceramic science, glass engineering, glass science as part of the program there and would infiltrate the art side of glass.”

When one of the glass professors at Alfred had to take an emergency sabbatical, the department asked if he would manage the hot shop component of the program, even though he was only a graduate student.

In 1973, CIA ceramics program chair Joseph Zeller (also a graduate of Alfred), asked one of the professors there if they would bring Brent and visit CIA to teach a glass workshop. Brent soon became the first glass instructor a CIA. Three years later, he launched the pliable and magical material as a major.

Mark Sudduth studied glass at CIA, graduating in 1983. He says his former professor developed students as individual artists at a time when the studio glass movement was still young.

“A lot of faculty members at other schools, if you look at their students, they are making what that faculty person is making in glass and look like minions of that professor,” Mark says. “Brent never taught that way. He focused on not just the technical, but the conceptual or artistic side of developing thoughts and ideas into concepts into work, as well as being a technician and blowing glass well.”

Turning eighty this year and possessing a technique that is clearly identifiable, Brent doesn’t plan to change his style again.

“Early on in this series there was enough potential for a pretty long study, and I am still finding things that I want to make,” he concludes. “I am at the point where I don’t need to hustle. I never did follow that flow. I had kind of an outsider approach to things that served me well in being unique amongst all of the glassworkers around the world.”