May 31-June 1, 2025
It’s telling, how I get there: find the fortress of a big brick building just off the eastern end of the Bay Bridge, beep myself inside, and make my way along a long labyrinth of intersecting colorless corridors until my wandering walks me closer and closer to the welcoming whomp of a powwow drum, drawing me into California Native Glass’s work and display space, with Carina King ready to share it all.
“I base my music listening very much on my mood,” she tells me, “but also what I’m trying to accomplish. What you’re hearing is Halluci Nation, they’re contemporary, much more urban, and they help me get energized to work on this.” They're a First Nations aggregation from Canada. Their sounds played across an alluring display of decorated glasswork in a myriad of shapes, sizes, and colors arrayed on Carina’s grandmother’s hundred-year-old dining room table, among others.
But before we get into that, King is herself a display of indigenous art. “I’m wearing a ribbon skirt. Ribbons were often the trade when Native Americans were first trading with the colonizers, because we’d decorated our clothes for millennia. My necklace is five strands of abalone, with clamshells and pine nuts.” She trades for her clothing and accessories with other indigenous artists at exhibitions and powwows.
King’s cap is actually a small basket, more than a century old and bearing the design and handicraft of her maternal tribes, the Hoopa and Yurok, whose homeland lies along the valley wetlands at the mouth of the Klamath River, further north in California.
Pauli Carroll, Carina’s mother, fellow craftsperson, and business partner, still lives up there, in what is now Eureka. Carroll was a lapidary and silversmith until she lost her workspace and was advised by her daughter to turn to glass, an unusual medium for indigenous craftspeople. King started working with stained glass at age 13, at junior high in Santa Cruz.
“My mom learned this technique of fusing glass, and we do it in layers. I do designs with powdered glass mixed into a medium, the glass is colored with metals and minerals, and the powdered glass is adhered to the surface of clear glass and layered on top of colored glass, in a mold. That’s then stacked into kiln and heated to 1,500 degrees, and that makes everything into a solid piece of glass,” fashioned to functional purpose as serving plates, trinket plates, bowls, and the like. “They’re not microwave safe, but they are food safe.”
King puts on “Remember Me” by Cree and Salish singer/songwriter Fawn Wood. “It’s associated with the missing and murdered indigenous people’s movement. My [maternal] grandfather was professor of Native American studies up in Humboldt, who did his dissertation on the genocide of Northwestern California tribes.”
She goes on to talk about how, long before the arrival of the colonizers, the Yurok tribe was renown for weaving baskets for fishing, cooking. and transporting head-loads. She transfers many of these traditional patterns from the baskets to her glasswork. “The diamond pattern is a matter of geometrics. A significant pattern is the frog hand or frog foot, the imprint of a frog if it were stepping down onto the river bank, but very stylized over time. The frog is part of a creation story, from when animals and humans were first here on land.”
Carina's inspirations. by Jeff Kaliss
This session of East Bay Open Studios has been “an opportunity for me to get to know people outside of just the Native American community,” King said. “It’s more of a human touch thing. I’m here in the shop by myself for hours and hours on end, so it’s great to find out what other people are working on, what they’re inspired by, and what the resources are. I’ve noticed that the Dakota Access Pipeline protests [of 2016] started a resurgence of interest” in tribal concerns and culture. Just last week, while King was exhibiting at the Autry Indian Museum in the middle of LA’s Griffith Park, she got the good news that roughly 73 square miles of homelands were being returned to the Yurok, more than doubling the tribe’s land holdings along the lower Klamath River.
King’s craft is a stunning and vital representation of a culture unfamiliar to the non-native world. "A lot of times at art shows," she points out, "I end up becoming a teacher."
Learn more about California Native Glass and start shopping here.
This was our last stop for the spring East Bay Open Studios. Read our coverage of studio visits this month to Sarah Merola, ARTogether, and Alex da Silva, and all previous others here.
