[blowtorch hissing]
- Coming from a Mexican background,
I come from a culture that works with their hands.
That's something that gets passed down.
It's ingrained in your DNA.
When I discovered glass,
I realized that I was gonna be doing that
for the rest of my life.
The process of glass is very fascinating.
You basically go from a powder, to a liquid,
and then to a solid.
I'm working on a new body of work right now
that's children running, or congregating around a piņata,
which is normally seen as a celebration.
The pieces are referencing refugee children.
Refugees are trying to escape persecution or violence,
so the idea of, when you're a little kid,
and you're hitting a pinata,
you want what's in that piņata: it's hope.
I usually work on parts,
so I'll make a head, I'll make the arms.
I'll make the shirt, I'll make the pants and shoes.
And then, we attach them hot.
If you can imagine having four feet off of a blowpipe.
It takes a lot of skill and technical ability.
So working with a skilled team is very important.
Give me a little air, please, kinda hard.
It also requires a very well-equipped glass studio,
and Corning is one of the shops in this country
where you can go and make something incredible.
- We have the capability in the studio here
for artists to make big work, to really push the boundaries
of what they would typically do.
Jaime Guerrero's work is definitely
very technically challenging.
Anytime you bring multiple components together,
it's another risk.
- So now I'm gonna open up the neck,
and start working in some details,
the eyes, the nose, the mouth.
A little bit of the ears.
To make these pieces, I utilize a lot of different techniques
that I've learned over the years.
Some of them are acquired
from studying with Pino Signoretto,
the master Italian artist.
There's techniques that Billy Morris uses a little bit,
where you go inside the bubble and you push out the details
from the inside of the bubble.
Some of these tools are custom made,
so there are tools that have little balls at the end,
or little shapes to do noses, or ears,
but I also use your regular kitchen utensils.
There are some knives that I found
that have some really nice shapes on the backs
that I can shape little areas of the face with.
I use a fork, a lot, to kind of comb the hair,
and draw some hair in there.
So, it's pretty much whatever you need to do,
to be able to get the effect you want.
- Corning isn't right around the corner from everywhere,
especially from Los Angeles,
so it's great when Jaime comes out here to work with us,
recognizing the capability of the shop and the team.
- Being from California, some of the guys
were making fun of me,
because we were supposed to have a blizzard, and I asked,
"What exactly is a blizzard?" [laughs]
[jazzy bass music]
Hola, buenos dias.
I'm Mexican-American.
I was born here in Boyle Heights, actually.
My parents are from Mexico, from a state called Zacatecas,
and they come from a long lineage of Mexican charros,
which is cowboys, Mexican cowboys.
A lot of my work deals with borders and immigration,
in an attempt to humanize people migrating.
There's a lot of misinformation out there,
that says that a lot of these people are terrorists,
or that these people are criminals coming here.
Not the people that I know.
"The Farm Worker" expresses an immigrant
that came to this country to find work,
but he becomes criminalized.
So, in his arms, there are words that say
"Ni Aqui, Ni Alla"
which means neither here nor there.
I feel that these people have come here
to find an honest living and to work hard,
and they're being looked down upon.
It's an important piece for me
because my parents were immigrants,
they came to this country to work and find a livelihood,
and create an honest living for themselves.
- We hear a lot about the Boyle Heights Renaissance,
but the creative energy has been here all along,
and a lot of history does involve people
with working-class sympathies,
but the politics was always married, in my mind,
to something creative, either mural painting,
or community theater, or poetry of liberation.
One of the first sculptures that I saw
that Jaime made was a pair of combat boots.
[somber trumpet music]
And the unspoken truth, very poignant, very moving,
was here was a young Black or Latino kid
from one of these neighborhoods, who had been sent,
or whose only option was to join the military.
But this is all that was sent home.
This is all the mother in a neighborhood,
who had lost her son, had to remember him by.
I don't think I'd ever looked at anything made by hand
that moved me as close to tears
as those empty, unlaced combat boots made out of glass.
And that's an emotional depth
that moves Jaime Guerrero's work from craft to fine art.
- Yeah, okay, come out.
Keep it turning, go back to the bench.
Just keep it turning.
When you sit down,
your right hand is off the rail every time.
I don't want to see it over here, or over here,
'cause it's gonna be really easy for you
to burn yourself from there, 'kay?
No, keep it up.
Keep your hand on there.
Glass blowing is a very expensive medium to work with,
so it's not accessible to everyone,
and there's very few people of color working in glass,
so I have made it a personal duty
to share this resource with underserved communities.
- Normally, these things are not in the plan for us.
It's either sports, or it's music.
That's our only two options where we live,
so to have this in my life is like a blessing.
It makes me wonder, the level where I can push myself to,
if I just stick with it.
- The lessons of working with glass
are lessons that are important for youth
that have very little resources,
like working as a team, working together,
and building confidence.
These are things that are highly valuable
for a 12 to 14-year-old in an underserved community
that sees violence every day.
Good, that's it.
Hold onto the pipe; don't burn yourself.
[students applauding]
- Glass is very mysterious for many people,
even though we're surrounded by it
in our everyday environment.
When you pick up a juice glass
to drink your orange juice in the morning,
you don't necessarily think about
how it was shaped the way it was.
With the amphitheater hot shop at the Corning Museum of Glass,
we enable our visitors to really appreciate
what they're looking at in the gallery,
because they've seen someone prod, push, shape, pull, mold,
do miraculous things with this material
that not everybody can handle.
[bouncy string music]
- It's a lot of pre-planning in my mind.
How these parts are gonna go together,
because that's very important.
So now we're preparing for the shirt,
actually it's a sweater, that we're gonna put on.
And then, head, then hands, then hair.
So that's the order.
You can't just throw something together.
You really have to plan.
The shirt has to slide over the pants,
and it has to be the perfect size.
Okay, torch it.
The wrist has to be this big
to be able to slide into the sleeve.
And when you're working with something this size
and with so many different components,
it becomes super, super complex.
So when you connect all the components,
the timing of your team and the timing of the heating
has to be precise.
- Open him up, open him up.
Open him up.
Bob, come around here and open him up.
- I got it, coming out.
- Yeah.
Yeah, we're good.
That was a good, long flash.
- Whoo!
- What makes Jaime Guerrero's work unique
is the way that he's using sculptural glass
to talk about issues of race and identity and politics,
and in particular, he is using the fragility
and the clarity of glass to talk about things
that are often concealed, like the lives of immigrants,
and other migrants coming over the border.
We don't often see them, but in rendering them in glass,
he is allowing us to both see and not see them before us.
- To me, clear glass is the essence of what glass is.
It's a glass in its purest form, with no color, or no decoration
or any surface texture, or anything.
It's just, it is what it is,
and there's something beautiful about that.
I think there's something beautiful
about having a sculpture almost disappear,
you have to look a little harder to see the silhouette.
[gentle string music]
- These are works that speak to people
on a number of different levels,
both emotionally and intellectually.
We're living at a very turbulent time right now,
and we are seeing a lot of art being produced
as a result of that.
- Process is very important.
The idea is very important,
but also putting into a social context.
I think it's important for artists to talk about the things
that other people aren't talking about.
To address issues that are not being addressed,
and really, you know, I think there's a lot to be said.
[gentle string music]