Biography

Some say that Josh Simpson’s fascination with glass started when he dropped out of Hamilton College as a senior with just one required course left to finish his degree, because he suddenly discovered what he wanted to do with his life. In truth, his fascination started long before college, as a child entranced by two shimmering glass vases – one made by Tiffany, the other a Steuben – at his grandparents’ house. And Simpson’s long successful career didn’t start with a clear epiphany.

Instead, perhaps like many of our lives, it began by happenstance, with just a few small steps taken one at a time, steps that kept leading him further and further into glass.

From building his first glass furnace at Goddard College… to hand-sewing a tipi to live in while he taught himself the basics of glassblowing… to driving his pickup truck loaded with boxes of finished work all across New England, searching for galleries to sell his glass… to buying a huge old dairy barn and transforming it into a professional studio where he would eventually employ dozens of talented people over the course of 50 years… Josh’s story is so rich and complex that it could be told in a hundred ways and yet not one of the narratives would be quite perfectly true.

However, there’s one undeniable fact: in 1971, Josh Simpson found a calling that he couldn’t resist, and in the years that followed, the allure of this magical material never left him. The following list of milestones paints a partial picture of his life.

And by the way, he did return to Hamilton to finish college.