Darkness is a fact of life in Seattle, but it doesn’t have to be all gloom. It makes this city the perfect backdrop for light-based art, in particular the warm radiance of neon. Several factors have converged in recent years, revealing neon glass as a medium ripe for a renaissance, even as industrial demand wanes. For illumination on the subject, we reached out to University of Washington’s Henry Jackon-Spieker, interdisciplinary artist and educator KCJ Szwedsinkski, and installation artist Kelsey Fernkopf. Each had a particular view into the reasons neon as an art form is undergoing renewed interest, and how that redounds to their own artistic processes.  

Of the three, Fernkopf has the longest tenure in the business. He’s seen many shifts throughout the decades, “It’s died many times and come back. We can’t put it in the ground yet,” he laughs. Fernkopf began working in 1985 creating and repairing signs by day and making multimedia sculpture by night. “In the beginning I didn’t want to make neon art because I was making neon all day long,” he explains. But in recent years, he has abandoned other media to work in neon exclusively, creating ever-more-impressive feats by installing oversized, minimal tubes against the Pacific Northwest’s breathtaking landscapes or cityscapes. The neon itself can’t remain long in such an environment, so Ferkopf’s friend and photographer Steve Gilbert documents the works. Sometimes it starts with a bike ride, which Fernkopf says is “about getting it out where you would never expect it.” An added benefit is the delight of random passersby, “Lot’s of time we’ve been out on trails. [other people] are kind of shocked! They say, ‘wow, that’s amazing!’” 

But like many artists, Ferkopf’s progress is impeded by lack of space and he has had some notable setbacks. In 2017 he and others launched the Western Neon School of Art to pass along the knowledge of the craft to a new generation of artists, but the school had to close because of COVID. “The price is very prohibitive,” he says of working in Seattle, “I’ve been lucky to have benefactors. The shop that I had my studio at closed. Luckily I’m good enough at what I do that people want me around,” he laughs. He credits organizations like She Bends with generating interest in the medium, “If a lot of people don’t pick up the mantle and carry the torch, it could go away.” he says.  

The University of Washington’s associate professor and Dale Chihuly Endowed Chair of Glass Henry Jackson-Spieker is one of the artists on track to pick up this mantle. With deep connections to various local institutions, Jackson-Spieker values collaboration and community. “My background and my upbringing was at Pratt,” he says. The local fine arts center is the place where he fell in love with making art. “I learned about neon in grad school at Alfred University, under Sarah Blood.” He says it “opened up a larger vocabulary for pushing depth of field and space” in his artwork. Now on the teaching side, Jackon-Spieker says, “we’ve always had a solid foundation of interest in glass [at UW]. The disciplines used to be more siloed.” But with artists like Jackson-Spieker using neon as an element in a much larger palette of sculptural modes (he uses metal, fiber, and glass among others), he sees a future for setting up a neon shop within the program. “In my mind there are certain levels to the process we can expose the students to. They could bend the tube. When it comes to bombarding (the process for removing impurities from the working gas of a sealed neon tube)…maybe here we only do plasma and backfill pieces with a kiln.” In this way, students can achieve various levels of experience and add neon to a panoply of artistic skills. Jackson-Spieker says it’s about asking the question, “How does light become a material?” 

Further proof that this is a burgeoning area of artistic interest comes from KCJ Szwedzinski, whose artwork explores sacred objects, belief, and memory. “Megan Stelljes and I facilitated a neon residency [at Pilchuck School of Glass]. We had identified this void,” she said. “We were so over-inundated with interest, there is really a desire to have education.” Szwedzinski began her artistic career as a printmaker, another discipline which requires lots of collaboration. “I went to Penland [School of Craft] in 2007,” she says, “the studio behind the print shop… there was always music and laughter coming out of there.” It was the glass studio, and Szwedzinski was irrevocably drawn in. “Neon,” however “is a bit more meditative,” she explains. Szwedzinski, Stelljes, and other artists have been working to “Light the Forest” for Pilchuck’s second iteration of the event, placing neon artworks around the glass school’s bucolic campus and inviting visitors for demos and a chance to see art well outside of the bounds of the big city. This event and others like it generate interest in the public at large, but specifically in glass art collectors and supporters. 

 Like other glass media, neon requires constant rejuvenation through the passing down of knowledge from one artistic generation to the next. The medium gains momentum through high profile artists who employ it for individual projects, from Nicolas Galanin’s breathtaking Neon American Anthem at the Seattle Art Museum to Glenn Ligon’s text based works, as well as those who use it almost exclusively like Cerith Wyn Evans and the late Greece-born, New York minted icon Chryssa. But where it “lives and dies,” is with its daily practitioners. As Szwedszinski puts it, “It’s my desire to keep the spaces inclusive,” she recalls,”when we taught people how to bombard, it was really magical to see people do that for themselves. I understand the barrier but it’s beautiful to see.”