Glass collectors

Fine art glass has a deep collector culture in Europe and a strong institutional presence in cities like Venice. In the United States, the picture is different. American glass has serious artists and collectors, but the museum and educational platform around it is narrower. The collector base that built the American market in the 1990s is now aging. Many of those collectors are in their later years, with full collections or works moving to the secondary market. If the medium is going to keep growing, it needs to reach a younger generation.

Travis Adams is building for that generation. He is the founder of Trifecta Design Studio, a glass art lounge, and his path into the medium did not start in a gallery.

Adams grew up around art. Joe Burks II, a mentor and close family friend, put a paintbrush in his hand at two years old and remained a lasting influence. Adams studied finance in college for the practicality of it. Then he took a glass class at Center College taught by Stephen Powell, an internationally collected glass artist and one of the pioneers of American studio glass. Adams finished his major early and spent his final semester in the studio. He went into finance, anyway, working with equity accounts and personal finance clients. He describes the work as something that did not fit.

Travis Adams

He emailed Powell and asked if he could come back, even if it meant pushing a broom. Powell said yes. That return became a career, and he later obtained a Master of Fine Arts.

Working alongside Powell, Adams was on the floor with Lino Tagliapietra, the Italian maestro widely described as one of the most important glassblowers of the modern era. He describes the experience as playing alongside Michael Jordan.

"I got to play ball with Michael Jordan," Adams says. "When you do that, you get hooked pretty quick." He also studied in China, originally for finance, and came away with a different education entirely. Traditional Chinese painting and master calligraphy became a lasting influence. The discipline of a single, deliberate mark shaped the way he thinks about gesture and form. His Gongshi series, named for the Chinese scholars' rocks used in meditation, is his longest-running body of work.

Today Adams runs Trifecta Design Studio with his business partner, Aaron Rowland. The studio represents Adams's own work and the work of other artists. It is also building an educational arm, with after-school programming and classes for students from across the country and internationally.

Adams describes Trifecta as a platform, not just a gallery. His own work alone could not sustain the business, and the model that emerged does something more useful. "There are so few platforms as we have," he says. "It's my duty to use it. Glass changed my life. If I don't promote the next wave, who will?"

American Glass

He draws a careful line between craft and fine art in glass. Craft is the technical foundation. It can be learned by making cups and vessels. Fine art emerges when the maker can answer a different question. Why glass, and not bronze or ceramic or paint? That question, he argues, is what separates a beautiful object from a considered one.

He brings the same standard to what the studio will and will not do. Adams accepts commissions that work within his own conceptual voice, such as a specific color family or a piece designed for a particular space. He does not accept commissions that ask him to copy another artist's work.

"We don't copy off other artists," he says. "If that's what you want, go to them. There's an educational component to this, and it matters."

The collector challenge is the reason the studio emphasizes experience. Glass is difficult to display, difficult to photograph, and easy to misunderstand. A finished piece on a white wall can feel unattainable. Seeing glass made, with the heat and the movement and the risk, changes how a collector understands the price of a finished object. Adams says the process is the education.

"I had to break six pieces to make one," he says. "People don't see that. When they do, the price starts to make sense."

The objective is bigger than selling more glass. Adams wants to expand awareness of the medium, educate collectors, give emerging artists a platform, and strengthen the position of glass within contemporary art. The studio is moving into a new space that will support classes, after-school programming, and larger collaborative projects. He has said he wants the studio to work as an incubator, not only a gallery.

The future he describes involves younger collectors, expanded education, international markets and art fairs, and Trifecta's continued evolution into a platform that serves artists and collectors at the same time. He is direct about what he owes to the people who came before him. Burks, Powell, Tagliapietra. The work he is doing now, he says, is built on theirs.

"I have such gratitude for the material itself," Adams says. "It saved me in some ways. I always try to acknowledge the people who gave this craft to us."

The question he is trying to answer is whether the next generation will have the same chance he did.