The heat hit him first. Furnaces roared and metal tools clanged as molten glass glowed in barely controlled shapes. Dan Friday hadn’t come to the hot shop for a class or to buy a sculpture. At the time, he was driving a tow truck and had only stopped in to meet a friend. But once he stepped inside, he couldn’t look away. He arrived curious and left unable to shake what he’d seen.
“I thought, this is what you do here? How do you do this?” Friday recalls. “I just knew I had to drop everything I was doing and put myself in a position to do it too.”
Soon after, Friday joined the Glass Eye Studio in Seattle as an apprentice. He learned glass the old way, working behind the scenes, repairing equipment, and absorbing the rhythms of the studio while creating small items for the gift shop. There were no shortcuts. “You can’t just take a weekend workshop; there’s a steep learning curve,” he says. “Working in a factory is a great way to start because you’re just continually exposed to it.”
Despite his creative nature, a career as an artist never seemed practical. Friday grew up in a single-parent household without a television, filling his time painting and sculpting. By 14, he was working odd jobs to make ends meet. Glass allowed him to combine necessity and imagination, blending physical labor with artistic expression, in a discipline that demanded teamwork as much as individual skill.
“Studio glasswork is unique because it’s like a team sport,” he says. “You rely on other people. It teaches you to communicate and ask for help, which are not my default settings.”
Long before glass entered the picture, working with his hands was already in his bloodline. Friday shares a traditional name with his great-grandfather, Kwul-Kwul’tw, also known as Joseph Hillaire, a Coast Salish sculptor whose cedar totem poles tell stories of his people in wood. While his great-grandfather carved and chiseled, Friday would later melt and blow, trading forests for furnaces. It wasn’t to abandon tradition, but to carry it forward in a new material and a contemporary voice.
After studying at the Pilchuck Glass School and working under artists such as Dale Chihuly, Friday built a 30-plus-year career that has seen his work appear in galleries worldwide, including an installation at the Seattle Aquarium’s Ocean Pavilion. He was even a contestant in season three of the Netflix series, Blown Away. Today, he runs Friday Glass Studio in Skagit Valley while also teaching and participating in cultural exchanges that connect Indigenous artists across communities.
But accolades are secondary to stewardship. His Lummi heritage shapes much of his imagery. Salmon and the sxwo’le (reef net), appear frequently in his work, reflecting their central role in Lummi life.
“We’re called the salmon people,” he says. “We’re stewards of the water, and our connection is through the reef net. We consider the Chinook as the Chief of the Salmon. They’re the big genetic breeders, and every time we’d do a catch, we had a loop at the front that released them back to the sea.”
Some of his creations, which he calls “sculptures of light,” include large-scale glass salmon that shine brightly with a multitude of colors, emphasizing their beauty as well as their shrinking presence in Puget Sound. They not only provide a window into his cultural past, but a warning for the future.
“A hundred years ago, the average size of salmon in Puget Sound was 80 to 90 pounds,” he says. “Now we’re lucky to see 30-pound salmon. And that’s just within a hundred years of overfishing.”
The declining salmon population isn’t abstract to him. It’s personal.
“The native people used the metric of seven generations to ensure the way of life for seven generations from now,” he says. “Even just in the last three or four generations, that way of life is dramatically being threatened.”
For Friday, his art is both about preservation and continuation.
“One of my elders said to me, you want to study the works of your ancestors but eventually, you come up on this ancestral wall,” he says. “You don’t want to recreate their work, but you’ve got to carry it forward. You’ve got to be a link in the chain, making it yours and contemporary at the same time.”
Despite his recognition and success, Friday’s focus remains forward. He describes his career as a journey rather than a destination. “I’m really fortunate and couldn’t have dreamed of having the life I have now,” he says. “I’m just trying to follow the guiding light and my ancestor’s footsteps.”
