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Ed Streeter, left, and his grandson James Stevens are the glass artists behind Conway Glass.
Photo by Milton Morris
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“I call it painting a picture with my glass,” says glass-blower Ed Streeter, left, working with his grandson James Stevens.
Photo by Milton Morris
Ed Streeter and James Stevens
Ages: 65 and 31.
Hometown: Conway.
Claim to fame: Conway Glass artists.
Hot shop: The studio building, constructed in 1903, has hand-hewn wooden ceiling trusses fitted like a ship's timbers.
On the road: The grandfather-grandson duo travels up to 150 miles to restore stained glass windows in churches. "We can actually make a living just doing that," Streeter says.
Inside the Conway Glass studio, Ed Streeter watches his grandson James Stevens work the family craft. Wielding a steel rod with a bubble of glass on the end, James thrusts the instrument's tip into the hot kiln and turns it like a rotisserie spit. Two things are taking shape: a Christmas ornament, and their shared artistic vision.
But the piece that started everything didn't survive. At Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, Streeter once watched two women spend hours blowing a beautiful glass dish, only to see it shatter on the floor. One of them slid the shards aside with her foot and said, "Let's make another."
Streeter recalls telling his wife, Barbara, "We need to be doing this."
That was 1994. Streeter already had nearly two decades in the glass industry behind him. He'd started as a teenager working custom glass and mirrors in 1978, then he and Barbara launched Conway Glass a decade later. He knew commercial work, but those two women had shown him the artistic process mattered as much as the finished piece.
Thirty years later, their grandson Stevens—a PhD in mathematics who traded academia for the glass shop—works alongside Streeter daily, learning to shape molten glass the way his grandfather does: by feel.
"Math is very creative," Stevens says. "The math I did was geometric, so it's a lot of visualizing … being able to picture things in your head before you try to do it."
Now, in stained glass commissions that hang in Brookgreen Gardens and restaurants, in teaching ornament-making workshops, and in the hours Streeter and Stevens spend together in a century-old building, they work a craft that hasn't changed much since the Romans.
"I call it painting a picture with my glass," Streeter says. "That glass is what's going to make a mermaid's tail move. It could make her hair look like it's blowing. Just from a piece of glass."