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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Are you a hobbyist or would you like to be? All through this membership driver, looking at some of the popular ways we spend our time honing new skills and finding a community with other people as obsessed as we are, with turning yarn into sweaters, throwing a pot, or catching sight of a new bird, examples of some we've talked about already.

Today, we'll talk about working with glass, making that molten glass with Richard Paz, a teaching artist at GlassRoots. GlassRoots, a glass art center in Newark, where he himself was introduced to the craft at age nine. Hey, Richard, thanks for coming on with us today. Welcome to WNYC.

Richard Paz: Hi, Brian. How is it going?

Brian Lehrer: It's going great. Can you tell us about that first experience with making stuff from glass when you were a kid? Was it an after-school or something?

Richard Paz: Sure. I always tell the story. My mom signed me up for a summer camp, and she didn't really explain to me exactly what it was. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. At first, I thought it was just putting pre-made beads on a string, and I was like, "Oh, that sounds boring. I don't want to do that." Then when I got there, they sat me in front of a flameworking torch, and we turned it on and it got to the fire of 2,000 degrees. As a nine-year-old kid from New Jersey, I had a 2,000-degree fire in front of my face, and I learned how to melt and manipulate glass into beads, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I just kept coming back and taking more classes. I've taken classes all around the country learning glassmaking. Now I teach my own classes at GlassRoots.

Brian Lehrer: What do you make yourself? What do you tend to make?

Richard Paz: I dabble all over, but mostly I do jewelry-making, like statement pieces. Then also small sculptures. My expertise is flameworking, which is taking glass rods and melting them over that torch that I talked about, and creating either beads that I can turn into jewelry, or like I said, smaller sculpture that can be displayed on a shelf.

Brian Lehrer: You were talking about this extreme heat. I'm thinking of you as a nine-year-old working with this. How dangerous is working with molten glass?

Richard Paz: Yes. Like a lot of things, it is dangerous, but I like to think of it more of an excitement factor that you don't get with a lot of mediums. All of our instructors go over every safety precaution before class starts, and they're always there watching you, so they're never going to like leave you alone on the torch. Like I said, it's more of an excitement thing.

When I teach field trips, a group of kids will come in, and the kid that's always problematic in class or is talking too much or distracted, the teacher is like, "How did you get my students to be quiet?" I really think it's so dangerous that you have to focus on what you're doing. You can think about drama, you can think about work emails, you're focused totally. In that way, it's almost like a zen peaceful meditative kind of experience.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, yes. Gee. I was watching The Holdovers last night. I don't think they tried the molten glass trick with those kids to get their attention. Is there an age that's too young to start?

Richard Paz: Generally, at our studio, we work with kids 10 and up. In the glassblowing studio, the equipment is a little heavier, so the students have to be a little stronger to lift that equipment, but usually around 10. Then for people who are a little more trepidatious, we have things that are done completely cold construction, so either mosaics. Stained glass is not really in front of a fire even though it involves a soldering iron. There's alternatives for people who are even scared that they can try out glass, they don't have to be in front of an open flame.

Brian Lehrer: There are alternatives to working that close to flames.

Richard Paz: Right.

Brian Lehrer: That's good for people to know. Which do you teach at GlassRoots? All of the above?

Richard Paz: All of the above. We're actually always adding new classes. Even we're getting into resin. We have three main shops. We have the glassblowing, which is the more traditional furnace work that you might see videos of people glassblowing. We do those kinds of things in our hot shop. The flameworking, which is what I do, which is a little bit smaller, it's not as hot, even though it's the same temperature to melt the glass. It's a smaller scale, so people feel a little more comfortable starting with that.

For people who are completely afraid of flames and fire and heat, working in the flat shop, which is either doing fusing, which is cutting flat sheets of glass and melting them in a kiln, or cutting up the sheets of glass to make mosaics, that is completely cold construction and gets put into an oven later that gets brought up to temperature. There's options for everybody, and we do so much at GlassRoots.

Brian Lehrer: Did you create Ira Glass?

Richard Paz: Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: No, no, no. That's not an official question on this list. I'm sorry. What's your favorite part of working with glass, like the actual process?

Richard Paz: Oh, for me, it's just a really satisfying material to work with. The process itself is so hypnotic, and watching the glass go from a solid material to a liquid state, it's just so satisfying working with it that way. For me, too, glass is a material that works with light and refracts light in such a specific way that you take a piece of glass from inside and outside in the sun, and that material just takes on a whole new property, it's like very shimmery and beautiful in that sense.

Brian Lehrer: We have about 30 seconds left. Are there any controversies in the world of glass arts?

Richard Paz: I would say the biggest controversy now is about diversity and inclusion. This is a really expensive or can be a very expensive medium. GlassRoots tries to do their programming on getting the arts and getting glassblowing to people who might not have easily or it's not easily as accessible to those people. We have a partner called Crafting The Future where we have a glass arts internship where we take people, specifically BIPOC people, and we have one student now who is college-age, Angel, and he is working at GlassRoots and our art studio in Brooklyn, UrbanGlass. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: I have to jump in because we're out of time. Richard Paz, a teaching artist at GlassRoots, a glass art center in Newark. Thanks for coming on with us. This was great.

Richard Paz: Thank you so much.

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