Tamah Graber

I became fascinated by glass the first time I went into the Steuben Glass store on Fifth Avenue in New York. The glass there was magnificent. I was a teenager, but every time after that first one whenever I was in the city, I went to the store to look. I worked in fiber arts and batik before discovering that I actually wanted to work in glass and have been doing so ever since. It is especially difficult to understand how people so long ago were able to craft the delicate vessels that we see in museums, using sand and heat and little else. The satisfaction that comes with creating with glass evokes a connection with those ancient people.

I began working in stained glass in the early 1980s and joined Metropolitan Stained Glass Association. That later merged into the National Capital Art Glass Guild. Although my academic training was in Russian and library science, glass has been a fascination for many years, and I have been fortunate to be able to take classes from glass artists from all over the US and Europe, and have tried to expand my knowledge and practice with each of these classes. Although I work mainly in fused glass at this time, I continue to make stained glass pieces and occasionally blow glass as well. Two recent stained glass pieces were made for Tikvat Israel Congregation in Rockville, Maryland My work has been shown in local galleries as an individual artist and as part of the National Capital Art Glass Guild.