Sam Herman was a multi-talented artist whose work with glass, together with his influence as a teacher, freed that medium from the confines of the factory and enabled the nascent studio glass movement to flourish internationally in the 1960s and 1970s.
The combined development of a suitable glass formula and the “small furnace” first demonstrated by the studio glass pioneer Harvey Littleton at Toledo Museum of Art in 1962 allowed artists to work directly in the mercurial medium of hot, molten glass, where before they might typically have passed drawn designs to professional glassmakers, restricting their creativity. Herman studied with Littleton, and with the sculptor Leo Steppat, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he seized the opportunity, as one of Littleton’s first students, to develop studio glass techniques, and received a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Glass in 1965. He then won a Fulbright Scholarship to study cold-working glass techniques with Helen M