Kate Vogel

When it came time to select a course of study in college, John Littleton, in a bid to establish his identity apart from that of his father, majored in photography with Cavalierre Ketchum (b. 1934) and did independent study in glass with David Willard.

Kate Vogel was born in 1956 in Cambridgeshire, England, to David and Patricia Vogel.

David Vogel, who studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on an ROTC scholarship, was serving in the U.S. Army there.

Vogel and his young family returned to the United States when Kate was about two years old.

They settled in Madison, Wisconsin, where David went to work for the family-owned Vogel Brothers Building Company.

John Littleton (born 1957) and Kate Vogel (born 1956) are American studio glass artists who have worked collaboratively since 1979.

He was born in 1957 in Madison, Wisconsin, where his father was a professor of art at the University of Wisconsin.

They are considered to be among the third generation of American Studio Glass Movement artists who trace their roots to the work of Harvey Littleton in the 1960s.

John Littleton, the youngest child of Harvey Littleton, grew up in the shadow of his father's accomplishments in Madison, Wisconsin, where he experienced first-hand the personalities and events of the early glass movement.

Glass, however, was not John Littleton's first medium of choice when it came time for him to select a career.

It was only after majoring in photography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison that he began to create in glass.

He soon formed a collaborative partnership with another art student, Kate Vogel, who had exchanged her study of two dimensional art for glass.

The artists' earliest collaborations in glass were the bag forms for which they are now well known.

Known as the father of the Studio Glass Movement, Harvey Littleton had introduced glass as a medium for the studio artist in two workshops that he organized on the grounds the Toledo Museum of Art in 1962.

That fall, Littleton began teaching glass in a garage at his rural Wisconsin home and later secured University of Wisconsin funding to rent and equip an off-campus glass department in Madison.

Harvey Littleton soon gained significant exposure for his artwork in glass and became a self-described "evangelist" for the medium, lecturing about its potential for the studio artist throughout the Midwest and Northeastern United States.

As a boy John Littleton grew up around glass art and his father's colleagues in glass, including Dale Chihuly, Fritz Dreisbach, Erwin Eisch, Robert C. Fritz and Marvin Lipofsky.

In 1977 she was enrolled in a summer course at Santa Reperata Graphic Arts Center in Florence, Italy.

While in Italy she took a trip to the Venetian island of Murano where she visited some of the glass factories.

On the recommendation of a fellow student, Vogel enrolled in the University of Wisconsin's glass program under David Willard.

She received the Bachelor of Science in art in 1978.

Vogel and Littleton met while both were in college.

He graduated in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science in art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Their first collaboration in glass took place in 1979 at the Spruce Pine, North Carolina studio of Harvey Littleton, who had relocated there three years earlier, after his retirement from the University of Wisconsin.

John Littleton and Kate Vogel moved to North Carolina in the summer of 1979, eventually settling in Bakersville, where they built their studio and hot shop.

In North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains they found themselves in the midst of a growing community of glass artists, including Rick and Valerie Beck, Gary Beecham, Katherine and William Bernstein, Shane Fero, Rob Levin, Mark Peiser, Richard Ritter, Jeffrey M. Todd, Yaffa Sikorsky-Todd and Jan Williams.

For Kate Vogel, the sense of community was "wonderful" because it not only allowed her to see what her peers were doing aesthetically, but also to consult with them on technical questions.

Littleton and Vogel's first successful sculptures took the form of "Bags"; blown glass bubbles that were shaped to look like soft fabric bundles "tied" at the neck with a loop of glass and terminating in a flared ruff.

The bags were quickly followed by two series of forms that had elements in common with them.

"Handkerchiefs" took the form of soft inverted cones with flared, undulating lips; "Favors" featured an ovoid or lobed form with two flared rills of glass on either side, resembling a lump of candy twisted in colorful paper.

At the beginning of their collaborative career Littleton and Vogel exploited the ability of glass to retain the appearance of its hot fluidity even after cooling into a solid.

In a catalog statement for the first exhibition of their collaborative work the artists wrote, "With the bag, handkerchief and favor forms we try to freeze some of the molten quality of the glass."

It was the bags, however, that presented the most possibilities for variation and evolution.

The artists' sense of play became more evident as the bags referred less to their inanimate prototypes than to biopomorphic forms.

Since 2000 their work has included a series of arms and hands cast in amber-colored glass.

Over the years the hands have held various objects, including river stones, large faceted glass "jewels", and colorful cast glass leaves.

In recent years Littleton and Vogel have also become known for their series of functional glass and wrought iron side tables.

John Littleton is the son of glass artist Harvey Littleton and his wife, Bess Tamura Littleton.

He served as president of the company, and, as of 2017, was chairman of the board.

As a college student at the University of Wisconsin, Kate Vogel initially studied two-dimensional art, specifically drawing and painting.