Photo by Enrique Hernandez BJ Katz displays her work at her Tempe studio.

Glass artist BJ Katz’s creations spice up spaces, from homes to corporate boardrooms.


It’s too bad BJ Katz wasn’t at her craft in the 1980s when a “glass ceiling” impeded the career advancement of women. Katz would have simply fired up her 1,500-degree-Fahrenheit kiln, added color and texture, and made that glass ceiling something to behold. As it turns out, the Valley had to wait until 1996 for Katz to open Meltdown Glass Art & Design. She just opened her new 18,000-square-foot studio in Tempe.

Katz recently took some time with PHOENIX magazine to reflect on the glass that has been both her passion and her playground.

Photo by Enrique Hernandez Katz with partner Chris Klein

Breaking In

Immersed at a very young age into drawing, painting and sculpture, Katz says she knew she was an artist at the age of 3. Even during her “first career” as a marriage counselor, art – specifically glass blowing – provided an extra dimension to her life that allowed her to create and unwind. In 1990, she decided that “extra dimension” was the dimension.
 
“It’s very difficult to make a decision to make art your principal form of making a living. It took me a long time to make that decision,” she says.

In 1991, Katz attended Pilchuck, the American glass school in Seattle founded by renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly. By 1993, she had purchased her first kiln for her garage studio, where she spent 18-hour days testing ideas and honing her skills.
 

Photo by Enrique Hernandez glass pieces resembling running water

“Glass is a very seductive material. It’s both transparent and reflective. It is at the same time liquid, solid and viscous – it is changing and alive,” Katz says. Today, she specializes in kiln-cast, etched and colored glass. She can glaze, fuse, colorize or sandblast until glass bubbles, beads or casts waves of color through a room.
 
Her clients are A-list, including Oprah Winfrey, the Walt Disney Company and Epcot Center. “I would consider her one of the pioneers in this type of glass medium,” says art partner Chris Klein.
 
Katz and Klein just landed a $455,000 public art commission for the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s new Milpitas expansion hub station for the light rail system into Silicon Valley. The 2,000-square-foot concept incorporates the station’s backdrop, the Santa Clara mountains. “We take a lot of inspiration from nature. That, combined with this sense of the human hand, our handcraftedness, is what sets us apart,” Katz says.