The fire inside

Cedric signed up for a glassblowing class at Tulsa Community College as somewhat of a joke. He was an accounting major; he didn’t know glassblowing would stick.

For a moment, Cedric Mitchell was reduced to a number in a series. First, he was a case on a court docket, then an inmate number at David L. Moss after DUI No. 2. He was behind bars for thirty-three days. As Cedric sat and sketched images of spray-paint cans in jail, his art was being shown on HGTV, on “Texas Flip and Move.” Cedric sketched while life went on without him on the outside. He didn’t get to watch it.

Tulsa Glassblowing School, where Cedric and I met, is a far cry from the austerity of a cell. At first glance, it’s a humble building in Tulsa’s Brady district—an unassuming brick exterior, orange paint coating the trim, the sidewalk outside the latest stomping grounds of the Tulsa hip. Inside, multi-colored glass is on display, and furnaces hum, heated to 2,100 degrees. It’s like being around a campfire, except with glass art. And jazz.

On any given day, Cedric or one of the other six employees and teachers at the school can be found teaching the basics of glassblowing to youth who have been deemed “at risk” and are thus aided by organizations such as Street School, Salvation Army, Tulsa MET, Phoenix Rising, and Youth Services of Tulsa. Cedric signed up for a glassblowing class at Tulsa Community College as somewhat of a joke. He was an accounting major; he didn’t know glassblowing would stick.

“I’ve wanted to do a lot of things in life and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find myself before this. Glassblowing has helped me realize, ‘This is my purpose. This is what I’m supposed to do.’”

At first he interned at TGS, working for free to get more hours with the furnace and with the crew. Within six months, he was teaching.

“When Cedric started here a year and a half ago, he was pretty quiet. He didn’t talk much. Now he’s teaching others,” said Janet Duvall, Executive Director of the school. “I’ve seen tremendous changes in him. He can talk to anybody about glassblowing forever, he’s so passionate about it. He was coming in and volunteering on a daily basis in order to get more time in. He’s become a fixture here. He’s volunteered so consistently, he became a part-time employee. He’s focused and dedicated and he’s invested so much of his time that he has progressed very rapidly.”

“It’s a team-building exercise,” Cedric said. “You learn how to give direction and, actually, how to take direction, too. It’s an outlet to allow them to work with something and a chance to take their minds off what they might be dealing with in their personal lives or at home.”

“There are numerous studies which support the premise that the arts has a positive impact on youth, especially youth who may demonstrate difficulty learning in a ‘normal’ classroom environment where they are required to sit in a desk and assimilate information,” Duvall said. “At TGS we have seen first hand the impact that the art of glassblowing has on young people who otherwise may not be succeeding in the classroom. Students have better attendance, participation, and academic success after being involved in the collaborative glass art programming.”

“A lot of the kids who I teach don’t want to hear advice from somebody who hasn’t ever been through anything,” said Cedric.  

Cedric grew up in north Tulsa the son of a single parent. He found himself exposed to too much, too soon: gang violence, drugs, the shooting death of his brother when he was young. His father has been in prison for 26 years of Cedric’s life. “I started writing by writing my Dad in prison,” Cedric said. “He told me, ‘You can do anything in the world that you want to do as long as you put your mind to it.’ He encourages me.”

I watched as Cedric worked to create a 22-inch amber-colored cylinder—Cedric hopes to use it in an art project with some local graffiti artists— while Quade, a coworker, helped. Glassblowing is a refining process no man can do alone. It takes trust, teamwork, knowledge and confidence. Precision is key.

After nearly an hour, Cedric and Quade start to break a sweat. It is a painstaking process: into the furnace, out of the furnace. Roll, shape, press, tweeze, blow torch, cool, reheat, and repeat, and always turning, turning, turning. Glowing sparks fly off the work and singe Cedric’s shirt. He doesn’t flinch. The molten material began to surrender to a new shape. Luckily, if something goes awry, it can all be melted down and begun again.

What I observed was one out of 2,000 hours Cedric has invested in his craft over the course of the past year and a half. “In ‘Outliers,’ Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to become a Master,” he told me. “I’m working towards those 10,000 hours.”