Makers

A Neon Renaissance

Meet the new generation of makers transforming a glass art tradition.

By Jon Spayde
February 14, 2025

Spring 2025

Craft Communities

Free To Read

Cluster of words in neon connected by dotted lines

Photo courtesy of Dallas Willard and the Museum of Craft and Design

Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez and mentee Christen Baker created You Are Here, 2024 for Neon as Soulcraft at the Museum of Craft and Design.

Danielle “Dani” Kaes loves neon. Glass tubes, bent into the shapes of letters and objects and filled with glowing gas, have fascinated her since she was a kid. “Neon’s attractive—it’s all about attracting attention, right?” she says. “That’s why it’s so great for advertisements. I was always really, really drawn to it, as a function of light.”

Today, Kaes is a full-time neon tube bender—she applies fire and skill to make shapes and letters. Using colored glass tubes with phosphorescent coating activated by UV light for different colors, she fills the tubes with a range of gases—neon, of course, but also argon, helium, xenon, and mercury vapor. Then she hooks the tubes up to electricity to make the magic happen. Her day job is at National Sign, a major Seattle sign shop.

“Women have long played an important but little-known role in neon sign shops. A key example is Betty Willis, who designed the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign, and Bea Haverfield, who designed many Seattle icons,” says Corrie Siegel, executive director of the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, California. Yet it’s hard for anyone to come by an apprenticeship at a traditionally male-dominated sign shop, which is where tube benders have historically gained and shared skills.

So it’s exciting that a new generation of contemporary neon artists—many of them female-identified or gender-nonconforming—are learning and teaching outside the shop. Despite her day job, Kaes—also an artist and educator—is one of them. She’s currently collaborating with Tacoma, Washington–based glass artist Jacob Willcox on a venture called Bad Boy, a combination neon shop and bending school. The pair have also been teaching away from home, including stints at the Pittsburgh Glass Center and the renowned Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington. The point, says Kaes, is to make skills that were once the monopoly of the sign industry available to anyone who’s as excited about neon as she is.

Neon Glows, Fades, Lights Up Again

Neon has been around a long time. Building on more than a century of previous experiments with electrified gases in tubes, Georges Claude established the Claude Neon Lights company in Paris just after World War I, patenting the technology that inventors like Heinrich Geissler, Daniel McFarland Moore, and Nikola Tesla innovated. Claude franchisees began spreading the signage around the world. From New York to Shanghai, a glowing, pulsating neon cityscape became a prime marker of modernity.

But in the US, World War II blackouts on both coasts meant that neon was switched off. And when you switch neon back on after it’s been off for a while, illumination can fail or falter, making signs flicker and lose elements. This degradation of neon contributed to a new image of the medium—as a garish come-on to cheap bars and seedy hotels. Cities began turning away from neon, and when the highway beautification movement kicked off in the 1960s, thousands of roadway signs were consigned to junkyards. By the 1990s, neon was being rapidly replaced by LED and neon shops were closing.

As the rejection of Georges Claude’s legacy went into high gear in the ’60s, though, artists began discovering neon. Conceptualists like Joseph Kosuth and neo-Dada artists such as Keith Sonnier brought this “degraded” medium into the white-walled precincts of art, inspiring later artists such as the Young British Artists star Tracey Emin to follow suit.

Artist Dani Kaes working at a neon sign shop

Photo by Dani Kaes

Dani Kaes is a Seattle-based neon artist who works full time at a neon sign shop.

Here’s the thing, though—most of these artists were designers, not benders; they went to a sign shop to have their neon works executed. But then, as Kaes explains, the 1980s saw the emergence of another group of artists who embraced the rich tackiness of neon and practiced a punkish DIY ethic that made them want to work hands-on. “Artists in that punk lifestyle said, We can make this rejected thing into something,” she says. “People embraced the art form because it was scandalous. They wanted access to this medium, to learn to bend.”

They began doing what they could to get trained in a phenomenally difficult glass art—banging on the doors of often-recalcitrant sign shop owners, taking classes at the handful of art schools that offered some instruction, forming informal groups to support each other. (Having learned to bend, they still generally had to go to sign shops to have their work prepared for gas filling, filled, and illuminated, a situation that continues, with a few exceptions, today.)

What’s emerged is an artist-driven neon scene. “Today,” says Corrie Siegel, “neon has reached this really interesting flourishing point where a lot of practitioners are taking up the material and understanding that the way that things were done in the past in the neon industry is going away. The future of neon, and the neon renaissance we’re in, are driven by artists in a major way. I would argue that commercial sign makers have always been artists, but what is keeping neon alive today is artists pushing the boundaries of the material.”

Photo by Gaby Scott

Preparing glass tubes for a sculptural neon work involves heating, bending, and fusing. Film still from Art of Neon created for the Museum of Craft and Design.

She Bends: Mentorship and Soulcraft

A Bay Area artist with plenty of friends and colleagues among these DIY benders is Meryl Pataky. After attending a high-profile show of non-bending neon artists in London, she realized that up-and-coming makers in her hands-on cohort needed more training, more help, more shows. Female neon artists and those from marginalized communities were in particular need of support.

So with art consultant and art program and events producer Kelsey Issel, she founded She Bends in 2018. This alliance of non-male neon benders is based in San Francisco but includes artists worldwide. The idea is to train those who are beginning the bending journey, and to promote artists who are already launched.

The pair by no means discount artists who don’t bend. “We’re standing on the shoulders of artists who have made really amazing work with neon they didn’t fabricate,” Issel says. “But with a commercial shop, there’s a separation between the artist’s concept and how it’s being crafted. There is a shift when the artists actually have their hands in the material.”

Adds Pataky: “The hand of the maker is definitely present then. There’s a little bit of wonk. Some of the letter heights aren’t the same. And that’s what we want to see—the journey, the artistic evolution of a person who’s learning this material for the purposes of making art.”

The two highest-profile shows the pair have curated so far have been She Bends: Redefining Neon Legacy at Tacoma’s Museum of Glass, in which they underlined the master-apprentice tradition in neon by pairing the work of five artists with that of the four benders who trained them; and She Bends: Neon as Soulcraft at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, in which they went even deeper into mentorship by establishing residencies in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. There, established artists were paired with emerging makers—Dani Kaes and her mentee Melissa Jean Golberg, for example—on new collaborations.

Both shows illustrate how the new female benders are expanding neon—certainly beyond its original commercial functions, but also beyond the scope of the best-known non-bending artists: the conceptualist restraint of Kosuth, say, or the cheerful narcissism of Emin. For example, Palestinian-Canadian artist Jude Abu Zaineh’s tend to grow (watermelons) in Redefining Neon Legacy is a wall of little glowing watermelons that comes off as a cheeky cartoon at first. But when you learn that the green, white, and red of the fruit, plus the black of its seeds, are the colors of the Palestinian flag, it becomes clear that a heartfelt identity is being claimed.

Abu Zaineh appeared in the show along with her mentor, none other than Pataky. After fruitless efforts to learn at sign shops in Canada, she made a major move: to San Francisco and She Bends. There she learned how personally challenging bending can be. “The glass would keep breaking and I wouldn’t get the bends right,” she says. “It’s a reflection of your state of being in that moment when you’re going to bend the glass. The glass reads you. If you step into the flame in a tense state of mind, the glass will frustrate you.”

There’s more than a hint of this sense of connection between bending and inner experience in the title of She Bends’ San Francisco show. Pataky and Issel chose the phrase “Neon as Soulcraft” as an homage to a book that’s important to their practice, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford. “We look to Crawford’s book,” says Issel, “because it’s a great summary of craft philosophy, what it means to work with the hands, to create objects from scratch. That material responsibility connects you to the world and equals social responsibility. We will always live in the physical world, and that physical world will always need to be maintained.”

Photo courtesy of Dallis Willard and the Museum of Craft and Design

Meryl Pataky demonstrates tube bending.

Photo courtesy of Dallis Willard and the Museum of Craft and Design

Quilt, 2024, by Meryl Pataky and Kelsey Issel, founders of She Bends. Shown here at Neon as Soulcraft.
Photo courtesy of Ekaterina Izmestieva

Dani Kaes and mentee Melissa Jean Goldberg created The process of building a safe space, 2024, as part of Neon as Soulcraft.
Photo courtesy of the artist

Palestinian-Canadian artist Jude Abu Zaineh’s tend to grow (watermelons), 2022, was part of Redefining Neon Legacy at the Glass Art Museum.

Another participant in the Museum of Glass exhibition was Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez, a Philadelphia multimedia artist of Iranian and Puerto Rican heritage who appeared with her neon mentor, Brooklyn-based Stephanie Sara Lifshutz. Ahmadizadeh Melendez’s mixed-media pieces are generally inspired by her poetry, in which, as she told an interviewer, “the speaker longs to stand up for herself as a means to transcend heartbreak, Philadelphian ruthlessness, and the limitations of corporeality itself.” For the exhibition, she joined two candleholders with a perfectly bent inverted U of glowing neon, as if two candles had become their flames and were uniting in an arc of love.

When the time came for the residencies that resulted in Neon as Soulcraft, Ahmadizadeh Melendez, who teaches at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, was the mentor, working with Philly artist Christen Baker, a recent Tyler graduate. Together they put together a “mind map” called You Are Here—a cluster of words in neon, connected by dotted lines on the gallery wall. These verbal “announcements” pay homage to neon’s origins in signage but go deeper. Ahmadizadeh Melendez chose and bent the words Always, Fear, and Maybe. Baker’s words were Then, Now, and, in bright yellow, Attention.

“Then and Now, I think, are ideas that we feel concerned about today: how things were, how they can change, and anxieties about that,” Baker says. “And Attention is a word I think a lot about, especially as it relates to neon, because that’s what its function is: to get your attention.”

Photo courtesy of Dallis Willard and the Museum of Craft and Design

Philadelphia artist Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez bends a glass tube for a neon artwork. She teaches at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Neon Unbound

She Bends is one part of a wide-ranging contemporary neon ecosystem with plenty of players. Vashon, Washington–based She Bends associate Alleson Buchanan makes feisty neon art—her colorful Big Lilith Energy sign, for example, celebrates Adam’s legendary first wife, who refused to knuckle under to him and was turned into a “demon” by patriarchal tradition. Buchanan cofounded the Neon Makers Guild, a membership organization that includes a wide range of artists. The Museum of Neon Art maintains a permanent collection of work from the 1970s onward that has pieces by the likes of Stephen Antonakos, Michael Hayden, and Larry Albright, and showcases work being made today by Leticia Maldonado, Kacie Lees, Dani Bonnet, and Oliver Nowlin, among others.

MONA also preserves and displays taken-down neon signs from the golden age of the medium, including one from the legendary Brown Derby restaurant at Hollywood and Vine. It’s their contribution to a nationwide vintage neon preservation movement, supported by many artists, of which the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, with its Neon Boneyard of more than 250 unrestored signs, is probably the most prominent example.

It all adds up to a craft-based art scene that’s respectful of the past while it innovates, indebted to the guild-like sign industry while it transcends it, and powered by the moxie of benders like Dani Kaes, who exclaims: “I love art neon. I love tacky neon. I love bowling alley neon. I love food court neon. I love neon everywhere!”

Go See Neon

Museum of Neon Art, Glendale, California | neonmona.org
Neon Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada | neonmuseum.org
Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington | museumofglass.org
Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York | cmog.org

And search for neon at other museums near you.

Jon Spayde is a contributing editor to American Craft.

The exterior of the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, California

Photo by Gary van der Steur

The Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, California, maintains a collection of neon art from the 1970s to today.

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