Meet the Contemporary Artists Reinventing Stained Glass for the 21st Century

A growing desire for craft

A longing for craftsmanship and meaningful resonance drives many of the artists leading the revival. Such is the case for the renowned Philadelphia-based artist Judith Schaechter. “There’s a psychic change that happens when someone beholds radiant colored glass,” she told Artsy. “We go totally crazy, as far as I can tell; it shuts off our intelligence.” While attending art school, Schaechter became frustrated with painting’s oppressive, male-dominated history; after shifting her focus to glass in the craft department, she never looked back. Nearly 50 years later, she finds working with the material gives her faith in the power of art, allowing her to illustrate our place in the cosmos.

This idea is at the heart of her latest large-scale project, Super/Natural (2025), an immersive stained-glass dome produced during a residency at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, on view at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design (MCD) through February 8, 2026. The illuminated, eight-foot-tall “secular temple” is covered in a mesmerizing, polychromatic pattern etched and painted onto the glass. The riot of flowers, insects, rodents, stars, and birds—drawn from 17th- and 18th-century natural history prints by women—celebrates the beauty and brutality of nature. “I’m a little uncomfortable saying I’m channeling spiritual experience through my art,” she acknowledged. “But that’s at least what I’m striving for here.”

This use of glass is becoming more common in the art world, according to David Judson, president of Los Angeles’s Judson Studios, the oldest family-run stained glass studio in America. “The gallery world and collector sensibilities are changing,” he said. “I think there’s a real desire for the handmade, for materials that feel real and lasting.”

Interdisciplinary artist Raúl de Nieves is likewise interested in the ways stained glass transforms space. His kaleidoscopic windows and murals borrow motifs from Catholicism, Mexican folklore, and occult practices like tarot cards. By combining iconography from various traditions, the Mexican American artist envisions a spirituality that is expansive and communal. Staying true to his practice of using accessible, modest materials, de Nieves substitutes glass and lead with acetate and tape. “The labor is no different than crafting ‘real’ stained glass,” he explained. “The steps are essentially the same: drawing, cutting, reconstructing,” he said. “But this way, I don’t need machinery; the material transformation is all by hand.”

De Nieves began experimenting with stained glass after fashioning a holiday window display from colored tissue paper at the antique shop where he worked. “I saw how this very simple material could create illusions that altered our perception of reality,” he recalled. For him, part of the medium’s magic lies in light; as the day progresses, so does the work. His current exhibition, “In Light of Innocence,” at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, on view through December 14, features 50 “faux” acetate stained-glass panels. In vibrant shades of fuchsia, cobalt, and carmine red, these works prove that paper and plastic can evoke transcendent experiences as much as glass can.

Sculptures with stained glass

Sculptor Timo Fahler modernizes the medieval art form by incorporating salvaged materials such as window grates and chain-link fences. These familiar trappings of domestic life are retrofitted with pieces of colorful glass, creating sculptures that are ornamental and utilitarian, sacred and profane. “Glass is this liquid medium,” said Fahler. “It energizes and enlivens other materials, even rusted wire bed springs abandoned on the side of the road.” For the American artist, currently based in Amsterdam, stained glass is a storytelling medium. With it, he’s able to synthesize the many distinctive aspects of his identity and cultural heritage, drawing on a wide array of sources, from Mesoamerican mythology to big tech corporations.

In his upcoming exhibition at Sebastian Gladstone in New York, Fahler employs the Tiffany technique, which involves wrapping the edges of individual glass pieces with copper foil before soldering them together. Juxtaposing American symbols with Mayan imagery, he draws parallels between the destabilization that preceded the collapse of the ancient civilization and the political turmoil of today. For instance, flag (2025), composed of a box spring fitted with red, white, and blue glass discs, depicts an enormous American flag slumped against the wall. Equally imposing, AH MUZEN CAB (2025) shows the Mayan god of bees upside down and enclosed within a rusted chain-wire gate.

For artist David Apakidze, using found materials like car doors and street signs is a way to root his practice in his city, Tbilisi, Georgia. “As a queer artist in an Orthodox Christian country, I first felt very alienated,” Apakidze explained. “But as I studied our history, I realized there was a lot that I could identify with and make my own.” After encountering a particularly meaningful stained glass window in a church, he sought out one of the few artisans in the country working with glass and began the process of “queering the craft.”

In a recent exhibition at project space KVOST in Berlin, two- and three-dimensional sculptures present the vulnerable and resilient sides of the body. For example, Untitled (2025), a wall-based work, depicts a woman with a sword through her neck and a drop of blood falling into a chalice. Another untitled work from 2025 consists of a metallic motorcycle helmet with a mosaic of shattered, pink-and-blue glass in the visor. Through the painstaking process of cutting and grinding glass, the artist finds solace and refuge amid the political instability around him. “I don’t always feel connected to my body,” he said. “But when I’m working with my hands, I can feel my physical power.”

Abstraction in stained glass

New York artist Kristi Cavataro trades the figuration of traditional stained glass for large, abstract, tubular constructions. Her modular sculptures recall children’s playground equipment, surrealistic machinery, and alien life-forms. Despite their futuristic appearance, Cavataro crafts them entirely by hand, carefully flexing and shaping the reticular glass pieces before soldering them with zinc, tin, and copper.

For her recent exhibition with Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne, Cavataro took a more organic approach. Realized in pale pink, carmine red, and emerald, these smaller works with tapered appendages and curved lines feel fluid and sensuous. In Untitled (2025), a cobalt wall-mounted sculpture, three tubes radiate out from a central ring, while in another untitled work from 2025, two conjoined amber loops arc up off the wall. As the light shimmers across their opaque and translucent surfaces, the forms appear to stir with life.