Dan Friday | Fragile But Permanent

By Gussie Fauntleroy

Dan Friday remembers walking into a hot shop in Seattle and seeing glass being blown for the first time. “I felt like I grew an inch,” he says, meaning that an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “I had finally figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

Friday was 20 and had been moving along a path he believed he was meant to take. A Native of the Lummi Nation in western Washington, he grew up absorbing his tribe’s culture and traditions. Among these: After a person died, their possessions were burned so the deceased could have them in the next life. His father was an automotive mechanic who died when Friday was a boy. Because his tools couldn’t be burned, Friday inherited them and assumed he would follow his father into that trade.

Then he stepped into the hot shop. Immediately, he realized his hardworking hands could be put to a skill that required strength, precision and experience—as did mechanical work—yet would produce exquisite beauty. “It was an instant course change,” he says. “I was willing to do whatever it took to learn.” Through apprenticeships and training with master glassblowers and decades of practice and refinement, Friday has traveled farther along his chosen path than he ever could have imagined.

Today, his extraordinary glass art is in galleries and museums around the country, is collected internationally, and it has been commissioned by such institutions as the Seattle Aquarium and the Portland International Airport. At least as important for the award-winning artist is the fact that his creations emerge from and reflect the traditional culture, stories and lifeways of the Coast Salish tribes—in the form of contemporary art.

Even as a boy, Friday had an affinity for working with his hands creatively. Growing up in a Seattle suburb, he spent summers with his extended family on the Lummi Reservation along the coast. Among his earliest memories is sitting beside his grandmother, a ceramic artist, and making shapes out of clay. He heard many stories of his great-grandfather, Joseph Hillaire, a traditional totem carver famous among the Northwest Coast tribes. From him, Friday got his Lummi name, Kwul Kwul Tw (pronounced Kol kolt), meaning “spirit of the war club.”

As a young teen, Friday attended an alternative school that emphasized art, and among his teachers was a cousin who talked about their family as wood carvers. Friday always loved art. He remembers sitting for hours with his sister, Raya, who now is also an accomplished glass artist, listening to records and drawing. Still, he wasn’t able to envision an art career for himself. Like his father, what he understood best was cars. He opted for trade school instead of high school. At 16 years old he bought a tow truck, and by the age of 20 he was running a towing service and working as a mechanic. He had just been accepted into advanced mechanics training in transmissions, which he saw as a step up within his field. Then a friend working in a hot shop invited him to stop by.

Mesmerized by what he saw that day, Friday asked his friend how he could get any kind of job in the shop. The friend’s mother worked there as a designer and with her help he was hired on as part of a crew building a new glassblowing furnace. Every day, during every lunch hour and every break, he was out on the shop floor watching, assisting and learning. A few months into the job, the shop’s owner called renowned glass artist Paul Marioni and said, “I’ve got this kid here that you need to get into the Pilchuck Glass School,” one of the world’s most important glass art schools. Friday attended the school and later taught there.

Blowing glass is similar in many ways to playing in an orchestra, the artist says. Both are collaborative team efforts. Both require endless practice. And both involve becoming fluent in a medium, with an instrument, and with someone else’s vision, whether music or glass art, before you go on to produce your own. “At first I thought, if I could just make this one thing, I’d be happy, and that just continues and leads you down this road,” he says. Among those early objects were simple paperweights, eggs and ornaments, leading gradually to more complex and challenging forms.

Through it all, the artist says, “I couldn’t make any of it without these other glass artists and craftspeople.” His core team consists of six or seven men and women, some of whom have worked with him for more than 10 years. For 24 years, Friday was an integral member of a similar team when he was employed full-time as a glass fabricator for internationally acclaimed artist Dale Chihuly at Chihuly Studio in Seattle. Simultaneously, he was developing his own designs and producing them at various hot shops around Seattle. Now, he works exclusively on his own art and is in the process of building a hot shop on 5 acres where he lives with his family in rural Skagit County.

The sea, the Puget Sound and the rivers flowing into it have been central to the Coast Salish tribes for as long as people have lived in the Northwest. Fishing, especially for salmon, remains the Lummi tribe’s largest source of sustenance and income, Friday says. Along with other animals native to the region, the salmon is a fundamental element in the Coast Salish worldview, stories, symbolism and art. Over time, Friday developed an unusual twist on a traditional glassblowing technique that allowed him to produce his signature glass salmon, which in his Native language is called Schaenexw.

One such wall-mounted piece is a life size, 32-inch-long sockeye salmon with a hollow blown glass body and solid, blown glass head. Initially the artist considered creating the entire fish in solid glass but knew it would be much too heavy. He experimented with a venerable Italian technique called incalmo, which fuses two bubbles of hot glass to make a single form. Except that Friday joins a solid head to a cane-blown body, each part in a different color. “It’s my take on an old technique that I haven’t seen done before,” he says, adding with a smile, “I had to make a bunch of ugly fish before I figured it out.”

For Friday, one of the magical qualities of solid blown glass is that it acts as a lens, refracting light like a prism. “Glass needs light,” he says. The more light it receives, the more color and beauty it gives back. Color is an essential element in his work, with multiple hues in virtually every piece, sometimes blended and often in separately blown segments joined as a single form. Along with salmon, ravens, owls, totems and baskets, another ongoing series is the bear, the animal represented in Friday’s family crest. Early on, his bears were more detailed and included legs. Gradually, his designs became abstracted, highlighting the fluid quality of glass, making it more “glassy.” Today he creates what he calls “Lightning Bears” in both transparent and opaque glass.

He also reached into Coast Salish tradition as inspiration for an 8-foot-tall cast bronze anchor, a sculpture commissioned for the Gates Foundation. Representing the type of anchor used to hold down a traditional reef net for fishing, the piece is an appropriate symbol for his people, he says, noting, “It means steadfastness, to be secured in one place. It’s an image for Coast Salish revival.” Friday notes that these tribes have become increasingly acknowledged in recent years for their history and art. The sculpture also reflects his skill in diverse mediums, including bronze and other metals, and cedar weaving.

Friday now realizes that knowing about his great-grandfather was the first door in his mind that opened to the possibility that he, too, could become an artist and “orator” of his people’s story. His medium would end up being that of the gem-like shards of sea glass he found on the beach and treasured as a boy. “Most of my great-grandfather’s totem poles returned to the earth and decayed,” he says. “With glass, the medium is fragile but it’s permanent. My work is an intersection of Coast Salish stories and imagery, formed in glass. It can get broken, but the shards are permanent.”

Colorado-based Gussie Fauntleroy writes for a variety of art publications and is the author of three books on visual artists. Learn more at gussiefauntleroy.com.

Contact Informationfridayglass.com

RepresentationBlue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, & Durango, CO, blueraingallery.com.Stonington Gallery, Seattle, WA, stoningtongallery.com.Gallery Wild, Jackson Hole, WY, & Santa Fe, NM, gallerywild.com.Hawk Galleries, Columbus, OH, & Potomac, MD, hawkgalleries.com.Piece Art Gallery, Vail, CO, pieceartgallery.com.Habatat Galleries, Lewisville, NC, habatatgalleries.com.Sandra Ainsley Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, sandraainsleygallery.com.Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY, cmog.org.

Upcoming ShowsCoors Western Art Exhibit & Sale, January 8-27, Denver, CO.Prix de West Invitational Art Sale & Exhibition, June 2026, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK.Group Show, opens June 1, Bainbridge Arts & Crafts, Bainbridge Island, WA.

This story appeared in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

The post Dan Friday | Fragile But Permanent appeared first on Southwest Art Magazine.