Zen Glass Studio & Gallery - The Torch Keepers

The Torch Keepers - Zen Glass Studio & Gallery

Two artists who met at a master's workshop opened a flameworking studio in 2002 — years before the Warehouse Arts District had a name. Twenty-four years on, Zen Glass teaches the city to melt glass, supplies the region's torches, and runs one of the most quietly powerful veterans programs in Tampa Bay.

St. Petersburg's glass fame rests mostly on the furnace — the roaring hot shops of the Morean and Duncan McClellan, where teams gather molten gobs on long pipes. But the Glass Coast has a second tradition, older here than the district that contains it: the torch. Flameworking — lampworking, in the old term — is glass at the human scale, one artist at a bench shaping borosilicate rod in a focused flame, and its St. Petersburg home since 2002 has been a corner building at 600 27th Street South, where the sign reads Zen Glass Studio & Gallery and the door, helpfully, is around on 6th Avenue.

Zen Glass predates nearly everything around it. When founders David Walker and Joshua Michael Poll set up their torches, the Warehouse Arts District Association was a decade from existing; Duncan McClellan's campus was eight years away; the neighborhood was just warehouses. Twenty-four years later, The Artisan Magazine calls Zen one of Tampa Bay's premier glassworking facilities — and its founding story is a reminder that the district's history wasn't only sparked from porches and packing plants. Some of it was lit one torch at a time.

Two Roads to the Flame

The founders arrived from opposite directions, which is why the studio teaches so well. Josh Poll is the self-taught one: he melted his first glass in 1995 at Joliet Junior College in Illinois, got hooked, and built a basement studio in his parents' house where he became — his phrase — his own mentor, with music as the catalyst (jazz, soul, rock, world beat; no music, no flow). A family steeped in geology and archaeology gave him an unusually elemental understanding of his medium, and his mature work ranges across goblets, vessels, jewelry, and figures in styles he cheerfully catalogs as Tiki, botanical, African, Far East — and erotica.

David Walker took the formal road: an apprenticeship in glassmaking that led him to become studio assistant to Robert Mickelsen, one of American flameworking's most renowned figures. The two founders' paths crossed at a Mickelsen workshop in Melbourne, Florida, in March 2001 — Poll the attending student, Walker the master's assistant. A second Mickelsen workshop a year later, a figurative class with a live model, sent Poll (again, his phrase) over the edge into sculptural work, and very soon after, the student and the assistant combined forces. Zen Glass Studio and Gallery opened in 2002.

The division of civic labor has held ever since: both make and both teach, with Walker especially active as a public educator — his classes open to amateurs and professionals alike, with teaching stints through Eckerd College and civic involvement through the Chamber's Leadership St. Pete program.

The Teaching Machine

Zen Glass's daily business is arguably the most democratic on the Glass Coast: it will teach absolutely anyone, today. The signature one-hour beginner workshops — make your own wine glass, pint glass, pendant, paperweight, ornament, or bead — put first-timers at a torch under close instruction and send them home with the result. (The reviews are a wall of delighted date nights, bucket-list checkmarks, and bachelorette parties, with the studio's instructors — Austin, Katie, Kyle, Christian and company — earning the kind of by-name praise most businesses would kill for.) From there the ladder rises: multi-week beginner flameworking courses built as genuine education — running the torches, kilns, and tanks, not just supervised souvenir-making — plus kids' summer workshops, private group events, corporate team-building, and full studio rental with torch spots for independent artists.

Two standing traditions deserve their own line. Third Thursdays bring free open-torch nights from 7 to 11 p.m. — four hours when anyone curious can come watch, mingle, and catch the itch, which is precisely how flameworking communities reproduce. And the studio anchors the Second Saturday ArtWalk circuit, its gallery — a kaleidoscope of the founders' and local artists' blown and sculpted work, jewelry, marbles, and mixed media, with a plant-filled garden out back — open late.

The studio is also the region's supply depot: Zen sells flameworking supplies to the Bay Area's growing studio glass movement, playing for the torch community the role the Clay Co-op plays for potters. And its custom practice runs from commercial and residential installations to the most intimate commissions imaginable — one widow's account describes Poll crafting a collection of memorial figurines incorporating her late husband's ashes for their children, with careful updates through the whole process. Glass, at this studio, does every job the community asks of it.

Operation Zen

The program closest to the studio's soul carries its name. Operation Zen is Zen Glass's veterans initiative, providing active service members and veterans an artistic outlet at the torch — a place, in the program's words, to create, experiment, and find their own personal zen. It was founded not by the owners but by one of their students: Chris Stowe, a retired Marine and former explosive ordnance disposal technician whose combat deployments left him with traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. After traditional mental health therapies failed to bring relief, Stowe found his way to art — and then to the torch, and then to building a program so other service members could find the same door. There is something almost too apt in the arc: a man who spent his career disarming explosives, finding peace in the controlled application of fire.

For a region with one of the nation's largest veteran populations, Operation Zen joins the Morean's Operation: Art of Valor in a small, vital cohort of arts programs treating veterans not as a charity audience but as artists in the making. That two of the Glass Coast's major studios run such programs is one of the finer facts about this city's art scene.

Where It Fits

On the Glass Coast map this directory has been drawing — Chihuly for spectacle, Imagine for collection, McClellan and the Morean for the furnace, Glass of Life for stained glass — Zen Glass holds the torch-and-teaching corner, and has held it longest. It is where the ordinary person's glass journey most often starts: an hour, a flame, a slightly lopsided wine glass, and, for a meaningful few, everything after.

Visit: Zen Glass Studio & Gallery, 600 27th St. S. (enter on 6th Ave. S.), St. Petersburg, Warehouse Arts District. Gallery open Tuesday–Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Sunday noon–5 p.m.; classes and workshops daily by booking; free open-torch nights third Thursdays, 7–11 p.m.; open for Second Saturday ArtWalk, 5–9 p.m. Information: ZenGlass.com or (727) 323-3141.

Sources: Zen Glass Studio & Gallery materials (including Operation Zen program history); The Artisan Magazine; I Love the Burg; Visit St. Pete-Clearwater; St. Petersburg Arts Alliance; public reviews and listings.