Blenko Designers

A Massachusetts native and wartime Army topographical draughtsman, Anderson came to Milton directly from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1947. His most famous design was an accident: a decanter whose neck slumped sideways before it had cooled. Anderson saw a better bottle in the mistake, and the bent-neck No. 948 decanter entered the line, was selected for the Museum of Modern Art's Good Design program in 1950, and remains one of the most recognized shapes in American glass.

He left in 1953 for Lenox China and Crystal, where he directed design until 1980, then did what few careers permit: he retired back to Milton, the town where his work began. He remained a fixture of the community until his death in December 2007, at ninety. His estate, including a renowned collection of Haitian art assembled over trips begun in 1948, went largely to the Huntington Museum of Art with a named endowment.

Sources: Herald-Dispatch 2007⁶ · MoMA⁷ · Huntington Museum⁹

Wayne Dale Husted, another Alfred graduate, joined on April 1, 1952 by his own account, signed the cover of the 1955 catalog as Designer, and was carrying the printed title Design Director by 1958. His decade produced some six hundred designs, and his signature contribution was scale: the "architectural" floor decanters, twenty-seven to thirty-eight inches tall, that define the era for collectors. His bifurcated bud vase was chosen for the Corning Museum of Glass survey Glass 1959, and in 1961 he initiated Blenko's centrifugal spin molds, a production method the factory still uses.

Husted left in 1963 to head design at Lancaster Colony, but the relationship never ended. He returned around 2001, designed the Olana art-glass group and the Patriot line commemorating September 11, and in 2004 reimagined the 384 water bottle as a twelve-design "Variations" series. The company's files preserve the terms: a design royalty agreement between Husted and Blenko remained in force as late as 2003. His own papers also correct a collector legend, stating plainly that the original designer of the 384 is unknown. One curiosity of his tenure entered the Smithsonian: a 1956 decanter Husted credited entirely to his wife Betty Baugh, an Alfred-trained designer, was accessioned by Cooper Hewitt as her only Blenko design. Husted died in 2022, at ninety-five.

Sources: company catalogs¹ · Crain 2004⁵ · Corning Museum⁸ · Bard Graduate Center² · Heart of Glass archive⁴ · Cooper Hewitt¹⁰ · company records¹⁶

Myers arrived with degrees from Parsons and Alfred and no experience blowing glass. He taught himself at the Milton furnaces, staying late and coming in on weekends to watch the crews work, and became the first Blenko designer to both design and personally execute his pieces. Under his tenure the factory doubled as an unofficial laboratory for the young studio glass movement: Myers invited artists including Marvin Lipofsky, Henry Halem, and Fritz Dreisbach to work after hours on the factory floor.

He left in 1970 to found the glass program at Illinois State University, where he taught for nearly three decades and built an international studio career; his work is held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corning Museum of Glass, and museums in Prague and Hokkaido. The glass in the Garden of Glass beside the factory pond is his: nine hundred and ninety-nine abstracts set into thirty-seven panels of bleached redwood, made for the 1966 Visitor Center to a design by the landscape architects Boggs and Rehm, in a garden Marion Blenko had championed.

Sources: Bard Graduate Center² · Heart of Glass archive⁴ · Archives of American Art¹¹

John H. Nickerson Jr. studied ceramics at Montana State, served in the Navy, modeled clay for General Motors, and took his MFA at Alfred, making him the fourth consecutive Alfred-trained designer to hold the Blenko post. The company credits him with more than 150 designs, including the Charisma line and the Forté and Consorzio series, and his floor decanters of the early 1970s are held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

His most visible legacy is not a vessel. Nickerson designed the "Block B" paper label used on Blenko glass from 1982 to 1999: an orange ball for the hot gather, a line through the B for the blowpipe. After Blenko he received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and taught at Alfred, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Colorado State.

Sources: Blenko Project³ · company catalogs¹ · Heart of Glass archive⁴

A Californian trained at the California School of Fine Arts, Shepherd came to design from the architectural arts, and it showed: he experimented with unconventional mold materials, including bent coat hangers, and thought in structures as much as vessels. The 1980 catalog devoted a full page to his designer's studio series and his inclusion in Corning's New Glass: A Worldwide Survey.

Two institutions trace to his tenure. In 1980 he designed the first West Virginia Day birthday piece, beginning the state's longest-running annual limited edition. And in 1981 he co-built a specialized annealing oven with sculptor Howard Ben Tré, enabling cast works of unprecedented size and making the factory a resource for a generation of studio artists. After Blenko he consulted for Herman Miller. He died in 2002.

Sources: Bard Graduate Center² · company catalogs¹ · Blenko Project³ · Heart of Glass archive⁴

Adams trained in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design during Dale Chihuly's years there, and brought a sculptor's sensibility to the production line. His printed credit runs through the 1989 to 1994 catalogs, and his limited edition cast-face vases have become some of the most sought-after late-century Blenko.

His subsequent career confirmed the trajectory: three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, election as a Fellow of the American Craft Council, fifteen years as creative director of WheatonArts, and sculpture in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Corning Museum of Glass. He returned for special castings in 2000 and a large-scale glass sculpture commission in 2001.

Sources: Smithsonian American Art¹² · company catalogs¹ · Heart of Glass archive⁴

Carter, a 1994 graduate of Anderson University in Indiana, is credited from the 1996 catalog (jointly, that first year, with Trey Gott) and carried the Design Director title from 1997, doubling as the catalogs' graphic designer from 1998. His Millennium Vase of 1999, an edition of two thousand numbered pieces, and the signed Kuroi Kabin and Pangaea designer series bracket a tenure of more than one hundred designs.

He later moved west, and has overseen public art for the City of Albuquerque since 2008. Blenko has since reissued his 9711 vase as a designer-emeritus edition.

Sources: company catalogs¹ · Heart of Glass archive⁴ · Bard Graduate Center² · Blenko Project³

The chair was filled again in 2007 by Arlon Bayliss, a British-born designer with an MA in Glass from the Royal College of Art and a professorship at Anderson University, where he had founded the glass program in 1990, and where Matt Carter had trained. He worked as the Bayliss Design Team, an outside studio arrangement new to the company, with his wife, sculptor Mary Jo, and student assistants.

Bayliss designed every West Virginia Day birthday piece from 2007 through 2016, including the 2009 "Aqua Luna," the first decanter in the series' history, and the sesquicentennial "Birthday Hearts" of 2013. His Bravo! collection paid open homage to the Husted-era forms of the 1950s. Beyond Blenko, his monumental public glass includes Flight Wave at the Indianapolis International Airport.

Sources: arlonbayliss.com¹⁵ · Heart of Glass archive⁴

In October 2017 the post became, for the first time, a partnership. Emma Walters, trained at the Maryland Institute College of Art with further study in Prague, had demonstrated glassblowing for the Corning Museum of Glass around the world; she is widely reported as the first woman to hold the Blenko designer's post. Andrew Shaffer, a Tyler School of Art graduate, came from Simon Pearce in Vermont; the two had run their own hot-glass and lighting studio in the Finger Lakes since 2014.

Their years brought a redesign of the full tableware line, more than one hundred items, new lighting, and the 2018 West Virginia Day decanter for the state's 155th birthday, signed jointly with the company president. Joint works carry the A+E mark. Their tenure ended in 2021, when layoffs forced by the COVID-19 pandemic eliminated the staff designer post.

Sources: 2017 press release¹⁴ · Heart of Glass archive⁴ · company records¹⁶