March 7, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute
The Museum of Glass is located in Tacoma, Wash., but online visitors anywhere can watch streaming live video of its glass-blowing operations—held in one of the world’s largest glassblowing hot shops.
The museum made the video available two years ago after it tested the idea by showing an artist working on a commissioned sculpture for the museum’s reflecting pool and let its supporters send e-mail questions during the live show.
“It’s just a different way to visit the museum and to see glass blowing,” says Timothy Close, director of the museum, which opened in 2002. “It’s wonderful to hear from people who say, ‘I watched your streaming on the Web site.’”
The hot-shop amphitheater is something to marvel at: a stainless-steel conical room that reaches 90 feet and houses two furnaces, each of which holds 1,000 pounds of molten glass and reaches temperatures of up to 2,400 degrees. The theater can accommodate 200 visitors, and a JumboTron-style video screen above the hot-shop floor shows close-ups of works in progress.
The Museum of Glass operates on about $5-million annually and attracts about 175,000 visitors a year.
Online, the numbers of visitors varies. In some months, it has 3,000 visits and in others as many as 15,000. One Ohio couple who visited the museum in person several times and are now members have told the institution they watch the hot-shop action online over dinner at night.
The hot shop has on its staff a team of artists, including Alex Stisser, shown here during a live program, as well as visiting artists who work at the museum. During the live shows, an emcee narrates the artists’ work process to viewers in the hot shop and online.
