MMC Professor Explores Hurricane Helene’s Impact on the World of Glass Art
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When Hurricane Helene, one of the deadliest storms of the 21st century, tore through the southeastern U.S. last fall, it hit a tiny mountain town of big significance to Associate Professor of Sociology Erin O’Connor, Ph.D, and her students: Spruce Pine, North Carolina.
With a population of just under 2,200, Spruce Pine has become a pivotal hub for the tech industry as well as the art world. It’s the leading global supplier of high-purity quartz, used to manufacture semiconductors, microchips, and other high-tech applications. And since the mid-80s, glass artists have looked here to procure glass batch—the dry, powdered minerals used to make glass—extracted from the town’s mines.
For Dr. O’Connor, who also teaches classes in MMC’s Environmental Studies and Art BFA programs and is herself a glassblower, the latter has made Spruce Pine a valuable field study site. Since 2023, she’s traveled to the town some half a dozen times, amassing research for an upcoming book, The Middle Mineral and the Mine: An Ethnogeology of Studio Glass, which explores environmental justice issues in the glass art world.
Looking closely at the process of manufacturing glass batch, Dr. O’Connor traces the interconnections between Studio Glass—an art movement that has sought to shift hot glassmaking from an industrial context into an art studio setting—the global mining industry, and the legacies of settler colonialism. The work, which she aims to complete this year, is funded by a research grant from the Corning Museum of Glass as well as MMC faculty scholarship awards she received in 2024 and 2025.
Dr. O’Connor has spent her trips to Spruce Pine combing through county archives, visiting local mines, and working out of a factory run by the Spruce Pine Batch Company, which supplies batch and other materials to glass artists and was established by the founding father of the Studio Glass Art Movement, Harvey Littleton. She wound up one of her last visits just weeks before Hurricane Helene hit—and inundated Spruce Pine with more than two feet of rain that destroyed roads, bridges, and homes and temporarily shuttered businesses, including the Spruce Pine Batch Company.
At the time, Dr. O’Connor had just returned to New York from a conference in Venice on glassmaking and mining and was giving a talk at the Bard Graduate Center. “I couldn’t reach anyone in Spruce Pine—all of it had been flooded and destroyed,” she said.
For glass artists, “a significant supply of glass batch would be cut off for a month,” she added. But the human toll weighed on her as much as the disruptions to the supply chain: In Spruce Pine, and particularly at the Spruce Pine Batch Company, she’d unexpectedly found a sense of community, building ties with mine and factory workers as well as local glass experts.
“It’s been one of the greatest pleasures of my career to go down there,” she said. “They know I’m not an art historian telling a normative story. They know I’m unpacking these connections, that I teach in the areas of social and environmental justice. Even so, they’ve been incredibly welcoming and supportive. So, I feel a debt of gratitude.”
To help her process the devastation of the hurricane and stay connected to a story and people who had become important to her life and career, she decided to document Helene’s aftermath, its impact on the art world, and how it laid bare Studio Glass’s reliance on mining, in an essay for the art and culture magazine Hyperallergic.
What’s more, Dr. O’Connor also saw an opportunity to involve her students. She used the article as an experiential learning exercise for her Politics & Art class, with students serving as editors and reviewers for early drafts.
“I’m a strong believer in teaching through doing, and this was a way to draw them into the process,” she said. “And they happened to be well prepared for it, given the readings and discussions we’d had thus far. They’ve been with me on this journey. They know the research I’m working on and the direction I’m going in. And they saw me not being able to get in touch with folks in Spruce Pine and being concerned about going into the hotshop because of the disruption to the supply chain.”
As they worked through the editing process together, Dr. O’Connor said she hoped that sharing her raw draft with students would encourage them to worry less about creating work that’s perfect from its onset and instead embrace the art of revision. “I was vulnerable with them—I shared a really rough draft and encouraged them to be honest, to tell me no, this part doesn’t make any sense. No, I love this part—expand on this. Nothing is perfect, so for me, it’s important that they see that writing can be rough initially.” The story was published in November.
Politics and Human Rights major Jody-Ann Hemmings ’25 said Dr. O’Connor’s hands-on approach and knack for storytelling had won fans among MMC students. “I’d always heard about her classes … and the stories of her teaching style, which combines art with philosophical techniques, intrigued me,” she said. Taking Dr. O’Connor’s Politics and Art class, she had not been disappointed. “When she teaches, it’s like listening to a captivating story about art—a story you cannot miss. She made me realize that art is everything.”
As part of the course, Dr. O’Connor also took students to the Brooklyn hotshop Urban Glass, where they spent two weeks learning how to blow glass and experimenting with it as a creative medium, though aware of the “very real possibility that the supply could be cut off because of the hurricane,” she said.
Still, it allowed them to experience what Dr. O’Connor loves most about the art form. She was a graduate student at The New School when she first embraced glass art after taking a comparative ethnographic craft course. She was drawn in by the collaboration, teamwork, and social life of a hotshop, while the physical process of glass blowing spoke to her academic focus.
“A lot of my research looks at undoing the traditional mind-body dualism, and glass is an amazing medium through which to explore those types of questions because it is so alive and animated, and it transforms in a way that’s not dissimilar to the way the human imagination transforms, or how the human body transforms through the process of making, whether that making is thought or with the hands or whatever it may be.”
Moreover, Dr. O’Connor hails from a long line of artists and makers, starting with her great-grandfather Frederick Papsdorf, a magic realist painter from Detroit, whose work now hangs in her home. “He’s someone who did what he loved to do, and I’m so inspired by that,” she said. “He wasn’t some famous, luxurious painter; he was a modest guy who worked for a milk bottle factory. He painted in a corner of the kitchen, mostly still-life flowers that he had mail-ordered from around the world. His story means a lot to me.” Dr. O’Connor’s grandfather was also an artist whose neon glass signs were known along the shores of Lake Huron in the mid-twentieth century.
Upcoming projects
Dr. O’Connor returned to Spruce Pine last December to directly observe the hurricane’s impact. From that research, she is now writing about the interrelatedness of water, minerals, and studio art in a piece titled “The Water Within: Glassmaking and the Hydrosphere.” She’ll discuss it and the mineral history of American Studio Glass at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture this month.
Later this fall, Dr. O’Connor will continue the conversation about the relationship between mines, minerals, and craft at the Society for Social Studies of Science’s annual conference in Seattle, where she’s organized a panel session on the topic. She hopes to produce an edited volume from it, among other projects. While she’s on the West Coast, she also plans to visit the Pilchuck Glass School, an international center for glass art education and experimentation, in Washington state.
At MMC, she’ll also be collaborating with this year’s Social Justice Academy, which she co-founded with other Politics and Human Rights faculty in 2021. The academy is an interdisciplinary, semester-long, and college-wide initiative that invites thought leaders to campus for talks and hands-on workshops. For Spring 2025, it turns its focus to the topic of housing, home, and belonging; details are forthcoming.
The academy began as a remote initiative during the pandemic, Dr. O’Connor said, “a way to form community, to stay connected as faculty, connect with our students, and connect with folks outside of MMC who are working on the pressing issues of the day.” She’s been pleased to see how it has grown over time, covering topics such as labor movements and migration.
“It has been an extraordinarily rewarding experience to be able to bring Marymount into the public realm and discourse in that way,” she said.
Published: February 05, 2025
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