Glass master breathes new life into old work

Real Estate Weekly, Oct 18, 2006 by Danielle Wolffe

Albert Husted, owner of Albert's Stained Glass, knows he is privileged to base his business in New York, where the art he loves is both abundant in the architecture of the city and in desperate need of repair.

"With glass you either love it or you don't. For me, personally, I look at glass and I find it incredible that a material like that exists, and I just want to be surrounded by it all the time," Husted said.

Husted found a way to surround himself with the glass all the time. His Brooklyn studio is stocked with sheets of glass ranging from the opalescent glass popularized by Lefarge in the late 1880s to rarer cuts procured to match materials discovered during such high profile restoration projects as Carnegie Hall and Grand Central Station. He has done work for fiction writer, Anna Quindelin, and for churches as faraway as Nigeria. His business is based in the brownstones of Brooklyn, where a roster of steady clients come to appreciate the beauty reflected in their windows.

"We hear it all the time. People come into our shop three years after they have bought their new house, after they have gotten over the sticker shock, and tell us the glass helped sway them to buy the house and how they can finally afford to restore it," Hursted said.

Working around glass is a dream that was planted in him when he was a nine-year-old boy wandering the streets of Indiana, staring into church windows and storefronts sporting Tiffany windows around town. He experimented with blown hot glass--and kiln-fired warm glass work--throughout his adult life. It wasn't until 1989, when his business partner in a public relations firm, Allan Hale, got sick before fulfilling his dream to practice art full time, Husted traded his business and set up Albert's Stained Glass.

"I saw Allan never had an opportunity to do what he wanted to do, and that gave me the inspiration to do what I really felt connected to," Husted said.

New York architecture provides great opportunity for restoration of stained glass, with old lead matrix that warps and bows after less than a century, and linseed oil based putty that dries out over time. The abundance of land marked buildings also creates a great need for this work

The character of the city of New York brings unique hardships to the fragile material. When construction work on 47th Street shifted the granite structure of St. Luke's Church, Albert's Stained Glass was called to take out the windows and restore them before they were smashed.

After a burglar broke into St. Pauls Church in Lower Manhattan, nearly 1000 shards from the bottom of the window were brought to the studio in a small cardboard box. Artist, Jose Silva, lead a crew replacing shards in the leading to replicate the pattern and finding matching glass to recreate that portion of the design.

The design was then reconstructed based on a blurry photograph and a snippet of video and balanced with the design on the undamaged portions of the window.

"If you go to the church and you didn't know, you couldn't tell the window was ever damaged," Husted said. "That was quite an accomplishment. We were very pleased with the finished piece."

The technical skills artists Armando Tlaseca, Jose Silva and Fidel Silva display doing restoration projects amaze Husted. Leading is a unique element to each piece, and can reveal the signature of the studio where the piece was originally made--whether it be a Tiffany, or a Lefarge. To restore a piece, the leading must be taken apart, then reassembled in the exact same way before the glass can be set, otherwise the piece will not work. Some glass workers sketch the patterns of leading before they take it apart. Artists at Albert's Stained Glass work exclusively by memory.

"It's really uncanny," Husted said. "They look at it and somehow they memorize how the lead goes. It just makes sense to them. They take it apart and when they start to re-lead they know exactly how the lead has to go."

A slew of international apprentices and freelancers coming through the firm's doors often brings modern work to the forefront of the studio.

Husted recently worked with local artist, William Villalongo, to create a one-of-a-kind modern piece commissioned for an exhibit in Texas.

The design of an African-American cowboy riding a horse through a desert with an alien on his head and a spaceship floating through the fluid blue sky, was painted onto glass and then fired in a kiln at 1300 degrees.

"That was a very modern and strange but wonderful design, we really had a lot of fun doing it," Husted said.

Another modern piece was created as a memorial for 9/11 victims for the Midwood Jewish Center in Brooklyn honoring Lisa Weinstein, a member of the center. Husted designed the piece, an abstract overlapping pattern of geometric shapes suggesting buildings, tears and wings in primary colors dominated by blues that bears similarities to some of Chagall's work.

One of the most nerve-wracking jobs the company undertook was both historically and aesthetically challenging.