Originally published in the 2024 issue of the School of Liberal Arts Magazine
“If you did not have a tool, make it. If you saw a limit, break it.” This was the ethos of Tulane’s glass studio, according to Mark Rosenbaum (MFA ’83), the university’s first student to earn an MFA degree in glass. One of the first studio art glass programs in the country, the esteemed reputation of Tulane’s studio is the legacy of Professor Gene Koss, who led the program for 47 years (1976-2024) and recently retired from teaching to pursue art making full-time.
In the past half-century, Koss has mounted 50 solo exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. As an artist, Koss is known for his monumental cast-glass and iron sculptures and his innovations in manipulating hot glass with custom-designed tools and machinery. His steel-fabricated gizmos, sculptures in themselves, mimicked the movements of farm implements he grew up with. But instead of hay, Koss used his tools to rake, bale, and mow hot glass.
As a teacher, Koss was known for his energy, vision, dedication, and drive. He has mentored generations of artists working in glass, who have gone on to teach, work as professional artists, and build their own studios — a testimony to Koss’s mentorship and support. After graduating from Tulane, Rosenbaum followed advice he received from Koss and built his own facility, Rosetree Glass Studio, in an abandoned cinema in historic Algiers Point in New Orleans.
Deborah Czeresko (MFA ’92), winner of the first season of Netflix’s Blown Away, recalls a day at Tulane when she was standing on a marver (a heavy steel table) blowing down into a mold. The glass had been overheated, so it was stretching too far and not going into the mold. Koss saw a potentially dangerous situation unfolding and jumped on the marver with Czeresko, lifting her up from under her arms, elevating her enough to get the glass into the mold. The “discipline, work ethic, and conceptual focus” she learned from Professor Koss have been critical to her success as an artist.
Glass is a very demanding material for expression. Tulane’s program teaches students the skills needed to create cast and blown glass sculptures, and to encourage their intellectual and creative development. “Listen to your drawings. Listen to your sketchbook,” Koss often advised his students, requiring them to carry a sketchbook and draw regularly so they always had something to draw from in the studio.
Other advice from Koss? “Invest in your work, in your time, in your tools, and connections joining materials together. It’s all about the connections,” as remembered by J.W. May (BFA ’05), artist and owner of ACME Artworks in Louisville, Kentucky. Another favorite Koss saying? “Don’t put a $5 saddle on a $50 horse,” recalls Malcolm Kreigel (BFA ’18), lead studio technician and freelance artist at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, New York.
Megan Hillerud (MFA ’07), visiting assistant professor of Glass at Tulane, credits Koss with being supportive of women in the studio, encouraging them to engage in a medium historically dominated by men. Hillerud recalls, “If I invited him for a studio visit to discuss my work, he was always so respectful, professional, and insightful. He consistently shows up for my exhibition openings. In my work, he would encourage me to take risks and stay prepared for contingencies by having a backup for my backup.”
A major retrospective of his work, “Farm to Flame: The Artwork of Gene Koss,” is currently on view at the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah, Wisconsin. A selection of Koss’ sculptures are also on view locally in “Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art” through February 2025.
Koss often pushed his students to create new work and break boundaries they unknowingly set for themselves. His belief in his students’ abilities often exceeded what they themselves conceived as possible. Christian Stock (MFA ’94) recalls being “thrown in the deep end” by Koss when he arrived to campus, two weeks early, as a graduate student from England in August 1992. He and Koss met in the glass studio on a Monday and Koss was off to Japan on Tuesday to teach a workshop. Before parting, Koss told Stock he had volunteered him to create a series of sculptures for a charity event — due in a week’s time. The bold sink-or-swim move proved successful: Stock’s sand-cast pieces sold out. Stock is currently a professor of practice of Glass at Tulane, and has had the opportunity to work alongside his mentor for nearly a decade.
This past spring Koss taught his last class. As a parting gift, he and his wife, Mary, established the Gene and Mary Koss Professorship in Glass, sowing the seeds for a long and fruitful future for the medium at Tulane.