Makers

Permanent Marker

Washington glass artist Dan Friday finds enduring forms for his ancestral Coast Salish history.

By Lauren Gallow
November 6, 2025

Winter 2026

Features + Profiles

Free To Read

Photo by Reva Keller

Dan Friday at his home studio in Sedro-Woolley, Washington.

For many of Washington’s Indigenous Coast Salish peoples, fish—and salmon in particular—are sacred. Chinook, sockeye, chum, coho, and pink: the five species of salmon native to the Northwest’s waterways are more than just a resource. Since time immemorial, the salmon has been a core symbol of identity and culture for Native peoples like the Lummi, who call themselves the Lhaq’temish, or People of the Sea, reflecting their close ties to the Salish Sea for their livelihood. It is fitting, then, that a salmon was the impetus for Lummi glass artist Dan Friday (Kwul Kwul Tw) to pursue his calling and true identity as a solo artist.

“As soon as I hung the last fish at the Seattle Aquarium, I knew it was time,” says Friday, referring to Schaenexw (Salmon) Run, an installation of 33 glass salmon at the Aquarium’s new Ocean Pavilion on the Seattle waterfront, and his synchronous decision to quit his day job. For decades, Friday worked for legendary Seattle glass artists such as Dale Chihuly, Preston Singletary, and Paul Marioni. Although he cultivated his own studio practice alongside his work for other artists, that project is what pushed Friday to at last make it his full-time job.

Glass bear sculpture showing the silhouette of Mount Baker

Photo by Ian Lewis

Friday's Kulshan Bear shows the silhouette of Mount Baker. Descendants of his great-great-grandfather Frank Hillaire are known as the bear family.

Installation of 33 glass salmon on the wall of the Seattle Aquarium

Photo by Ian Lewis

The blown and hot-sculpted glass salmon of Schaenexw (Salmon) Run honor Coast Salish lifeways.

As the artist sits in his studio in Washington’s Skagit Valley, surrounded by glass objects, clay maquettes, and black-and-white photographs of his ancestral Lummi Nation family members, he reflects on his long road to becoming a glass artist, and the central role his family played. “My Aunt Fran was pivotal at that point in my life when I started making my own work,” he explains, referring to Fran James (Che Top Ie), a master Coast Salish weaver whose blankets are included in the Smithsonian’s collection. “I was feeling insecure about creating work and not having a degree from a fancy university, and she said to me, ‘I don’t have a degree, and I make my work every day. Why aren’t you making your work?’”

Glass is deeply intertwined with Friday’s personal life story. He first walked into a Seattle glass studio when he was just 20 years old. Although he was beginning a career as an auto mechanic—following in the footsteps of his father, who died when Friday was only three years old—Friday is open about the pull that glass had on him from the start, and how it saved him from a dark path. “There was a time in my life when I was in addiction and wasn’t really betting on myself,” he reflects. “I’m grateful for being 16 years sober—it’s not a coincidence that I’ve been blowing glass for 15 years.”

Photo courtesy of Dan Friday

Friday's Aunt Fran (Che Top Ie) was a master Coast Salish weaver.

“Glass is super fragile, but also super permanent.”

— Dan Friday

Today, Friday’s blown and hot-sculpted glass is reflective of both his personal story and his Lummi heritage. “These are story poles,” says Friday, gesturing to another family photograph, this time of his great-grandfather Joseph Hillaire (Kwul Kwul Tw, Friday’s namesake) standing next to one of his towering creations. Hillaire was a totem pole carver who used his work to share the ways of the Lummi and Coast Salish people, and Friday sees himself as the next link in this ancestral chain. “Art is a way to keep the stories of my family going, to keep their fires burning,” he says.

Much like his ancestors before him, Friday uses his art to bring his culture into tangible form. “There’s such a storyline to my work, so sculpting became important,” he explains, referring to the hot-sculpting technique he frequently uses to create his art. Using tweezers, shears, and a range of ad hoc tools, Friday pulls, presses, and cuts glass into a desired shape, often molding it into the form of animals and other iconography from his Lummi heritage. Two of the most common figures in Friday’s work are the owl (kwai-el-hu) and the bear (kwái-it-shin). The owl is associated with knowledge and intuition in Lummi traditions, and the bear holds a deeply personal association for Friday, as children of his great-great-grandfather Frank Hillaire (Hae Tel Uk) are known as the bear family. Fittingly, Friday will often stack many shapes on top of one another into compositions he calls totems.

Unlike the totem poles, weavings, and baskets of earlier generations of his family, Friday sees glass as lending a sense of permanence to his stories. “My great-grandfather’s final totem pole is in front of Whatcom County Courthouse in Bellingham,” says Friday as we walk through his studio. “But most of the totems have returned to the earth through decay. Glass is super fragile, but also super permanent.”

Friday’s technique evokes this sense of permanence. The hot-sculpted totems are transparent and refractive—“an optic, gemlike quality,” as Friday describes it—yet they are solid masses of glass, giving them a heavy, weighty feel. With his blown pieces, Friday often incorporates cane and sandblasting techniques, which similarly give the hollow works a sense of solidity. In a series of works inspired by the stone anchors used by Coast Salish tribes in Sxwo’le (reef net) salmon fishing, Friday sandblasts the finished ovoid pieces to conjure the aged look of rock.

Totem sculpture made from hot sculpted glass

Photo by Ian Lewis

Forager Totem, 2024, hand-sculpted hot glass, 32 x 6 x 5 in.

Photo courtesy of Dan Friday

Friday's Grandpa Joe (Kwul Kwul Tw), a totem pole carver.
Photo courtesy of Dan Friday

Friday's great-great-grandfather Frank Hillaire (Hae Tel Uk) in a fishing boat.
Photo courtesy of Dan Friday

Reef net teaching, 1890.

Much as the salmon holds both personal and ancestral meaning to Friday, fishing has a similar resonance. Friday grew up fishing, and his father fought in the Fish Wars, a series of Indigenous-led protests in the Puget Sound in the 1960s and ’70s that eventually led to the recognition of tribal fishing rights. “Stories like [those about] the reef nets are stories of this area, and it’s important to continue telling them and not let them die,” he says.

Lately, the artist is finding an even greater sense of permanence in his work as it expands to mediums beyond glass. Friday has increasingly pursued public art commissions, creating work on a monumental scale for sites with thousands of annual visitors: He recently completed a nine-foot-tall bronze anchor that’s installed in front of the Gates Foundation campus in downtown Seattle, and is currently working on another large outdoor public work for one of the largest cultural destinations in the city.

At the new Seattle Aquarium Ocean Pavilion, his public art installation expands outwards from the glass salmon of Schaenexw (Salmon) Run inside the building; to a radiating abstract pattern called Spindle Whorl Portal, integrated in the roof soffit above the entrance; to an exterior installation in the ground outside the entrance called Grandmother Rock, with bronze crabs inlaid in a circular concrete pattern. All the elements reference ancestral Lummi tales, and visitors can scan a QR code to listen to a recording of Friday’s great-grandfather telling the story of Grandmother Rock, a traditional tale about a rock that sings to calm a storm. It’s a testament to Friday’s commitment to concretizing but also honoring the forms of his personal history. “I come from an oral tradition,” says Friday, alluding to the fact that the stories of his people have been passed down only via spoken word, since there is no written Coast Salish language.

Friday’s work for the Aquarium was selected as a means of acknowledging and continuing the Indigenous stories embedded in the pavilion’s waterfront site, which is the historical home of the Duwamish people. “Dan brought a connection to the land and a sensitivity to the conservation of natural systems that integrated seamlessly with the mission of the Aquarium,” says Osama Quotah, partner at architecture firm LMN, which designed the building and worked with Friday to execute his artworks. “It was important to us that he add stories to the building, both in glass and other mediums that he might not typically use.”

Photo by Ian Lewis

Raven Totem incorporates caning in depicting the trickster bird of Indigenous Northwest cultures, 16 x 5 x 4 in.

Photo by Reva Keller

Friday uses a cherrywood block to shape the glass for a Lummi Lightning Bear in the hot shop at Schack Art Center in Everett, Washington.
Photo by Reva Keller

Glass canes cut to size and ready to be used in a bear sculpture.
Photo by Reva Keller

Friday heats the bear in the reheating chamber.

Ultimately, the power of Friday’s work lies not in its mediums or even its cultural references, but in the shapes it takes. Abstracting traditional Coast Salish iconography into universally recognizable forms, Friday reminds us that storytelling is what unites us as humans and allows us to dream new futures. Though sourced from his own heritage, Friday’s is a language each of us can relate to, no matter our backgrounds; his work is a luminous jumping-off point to conjure stories of our own.

“Dan’s work creates a sense of entry by being accessible. People can look at it and recognize the bear, or the owl, or the salmon, even if they don’t have personal associations with these things,” explains Tami Landis, curator of postwar and contemporary glass at the Corning Museum of Glass, the world’s foremost glass collecting and research institution. “At the same time, his work is successful because it tells a story—a really profound, personal story.”

Lauren Gallow writes about design, art, and architecture from her home base in Seattle, with bylines in The New York Times, Dwell, and The Art Newspaper. She profiled Washington woodworker Kevin Reiswig in the Summer 2025 issue of American Craft.

Friday in his studio holding a finished bear sculpture.

Photo by Reva Keller

Friday holds a Kulshan Bear, surrounded by totems, sxwo'le anchors, and photos of his ancestors.

Photo by Reva Keller

In the Schack Art Center's hot shop, Friday shapes a bear sculpture from molten glass.
Photo by Reva Keller

Friday shapes the nose of a cooled glass bear.
Photo by Ian Lewis

Finished Lummi Lightning Bear, hand-sculpted hot glass, 13 x 8 x 2 in.

See more of Dan Friday's work online.

Website Instagram

Before you go!

We believe that making creates a meaningful world, and we hope you do, too. Deeply researched and impactful journalism on the craft community is in short supply. At the same time, being featured in a national publication can have a major effect on a maker’s or artist’s livelihood, particularly those who are just starting in their career. You can help support our mission and the work of makers around the country by becoming a member or by making a gift today.

Thank you!
American Craft Editors

Join Donate