Bogenrief Studios creates art in glass

Jul 15, 2023

Mark Bogenrief holds up a glass composition made by his son, Jesse Bogenrief, owner of JJ Gaffers, a studio that creates handblown glass art. The pattern was created by melting different colors of glass and pressing the melted glass through holes to create shapes.

SUTHERLAND—Bogenrief Studios is tucked away in a former school building in Sutherland, where the structure’s unremarkable brick exterior conceals the unlikely enterprise unfolding within.

The building’s dark hallways are lined with glowing Tiffany-style lamps and colorful glass mosaics. Here and there, “lady windows” featuring life-size female figures cast their kaleidoscopic light onto metal lockers, and along the hallway, each door opens to a large classroom, which serves as production space or storage.

“There’s not a square inch that isn’t filled,” Mark Bogenrief said.

Bogenrief’s reputation extends well beyond Iowa. He is an artist, and his chosen medium is stained and beveled glass. His work is featured in homes, commercial spaces and churches across the nation and around the world.

“My last set of four lady windows went to Russia, and a couple lamps ended up going to Paris,” the 73-year-old said. “They have been kind of scattered all over. I used to supply auction houses — two in Chicago, two in Atlanta and one in San Francisco.”

Mark Bogenrief reaches for a pattern in the former locker room that is devoted to beveling at Bogenrief Studios in Sutherland. The business has occupied a former school building since 2004.

Auction houses took a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that part of his business has basically disappeared, he said. The market for stained glass persists, however, and Bogenrief continues to draw clients from major cities across the United States.

Wherever in the world one of his pieces ends up, it starts in Sutherland, a community with only a handful of businesses and a population of around 600.

Bogenrief has been creating ori­ginal works in stained glass for 45 years, ever since he and his late wife Jeanne started the business in their home in Seney in the late 1970s. Over the decades, Bogenrief Studios has acquired a number of regular clients, including buyers who commission pieces for private residences and businesses in many major U.S. cities. In Chicago, Bogenrief’s original designs appear side by side with antiques in Walker Bros. Pancake House restaurants, a Chicago-based franchise known for its stained-glass windows and lamps.

“He’s got 4,000 antique windows, and he’s got about 60 of our new windows — he’s been a very, very big client,” Bogenrief said.

Also among his clientele are Jackie Siegel and David Siegel, owners of Westgate Resorts in Florida. In 2004, the couple started constructing a 90,000-square-foot home near Orlando, one of the largest single-family homes ever built in the United States. Bogenrief Studios was commissioned to create the vast stained-glass dome that was installed in one of the mansion’s vaulted ceilings.

“That was amazing — 27 feet across and seven feet deep,” Bogenrief said.

The massive structure is a prominent feature of the huge home, and it makes an appearance in the 2012 American documentary “The Queen of Versailles,” which chronicles the building of the Siegel mansion and the challenges posed by the economic downturn of 2008, which stalled the project for years. The documentary debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was well received by critics.

A Tiffany-style lamp featuring poppies stands in the hallway of Bogenrief Studios, which occupies a former school building in Sutherland.

“They’re redoing the basement, and we have a 22-foot tornado dome to do,” Bogenrief said.

A tornado dome is wide and circular at the top and curves into a tunnel as it descends.

“It comes down from the ceiling down to a small center, and then they have a bar built around it — plus, we’ve done quite a few other things for them,” he said.

For large commissions, Bogenrief flies out to visit clients on location, where he can take measurements, talk through expectations and envision a future work in its actual context. When he returns, his team gets to work.

In years past Bogenrief has had up to 40 employees, but in the crucible of the COVID-19 pandemic, he downsized. Today, he employs five people full time, and business continues to pick up. The studio often has around 10 projects going each week, and new commissions keep coming.

Along with the tornado dome for the Siegels, the studio team is busy creating two giant windows for a home in the Hamptons on Long Island, NY — two vertical panels for a grand stairwell that feature full-length mermaids before elaborate nautical backdrops.

Bogenrief also is working on a concept design for a new Wyoming casino. The proposed window features a Native American chief in authentic tribal dress and employs semitransparent arrowheads hand chipped from the thick glass of discarded vintage television screens.

“These were TV screens, and this one individual I knew could really chip glass,” Bogenrief said, standing over the pencil-drawn pattern that displays each arrowhead marked with its own number. “So, the number 17 goes over there — because they’re all different.”

Along with larger projects, Bogenrief also puts his mind and hands to smaller and more sentimental commissions. For example, after a rural Iowa church was destroyed by straight-line winds in 2006, he inherited what remained of its broken stained-glass windows. Today, he is regularly sought out by parishioners of Mary Hill Visitation Catholic Church, which was located in an unincorporated town near Cherokee.

Steven Johnson and James Gregg do “the final” picking n one piece of a 12-piece light fixture that will eventually hang in a 90,000-square-foot home in Florida. The home was featured in the 2012 documentary “The Queen of Versailles.”

“I have members of that church come up and they want me to make a little memorial for them, if they were married in there — and all that kind of good stuff,” he said.

Bogenrief’s business is about 60 percent original commissions and spec pieces, which the studio creates for display and purchase, and 40 percent restoration.

“These are actually Frank Lloyd Wright windows out of Chicago,” he said.

Bogenrief has been patiently replacing the broken glass in the windows.

“Once we get everything cut apart, we’ll grind the edges of the zinc came, and we’ll solder it all back together — and then we’ll grout it,” he said.

Along with restorations for clients, Bogenrief has been restoring two original Tiffany windows he found in a Chicago garage more than a decade ago.

“Here are two Tiffany windows that I’ve been looking for glass for almost 15 years,” he said. “What’s going to end up happening is I’ll have to take each different color and get it crushed and chemically analyzed. So, we will make the glass ourselves.”

Mark Bogenrief places a piece of white glass on a paper pattern in the cutting room at Bogenrief Studios in Sutherland. Before the soldering stage, pieces of cut glass are placed on a paper pattern that is 10 percent larger than the actual piece, to allow room for edges that need to be sanded or ground smooth.

Tiffany glass refers to the glass developed and produced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Tiffany Studios in New York City. It was employed in the making of Tiffany lamps and windows, which were widely mimicked and reproduced in the last century.

“What Tiffany glass is out there, they sell it by the square inch — it’s expensive,” Bogenrief said.

Before opening a stained-glass studio, Bogenrief never considered himself an artist. His first career was on the production floor in a meat-packing plant in Dakota Dunes, SD.

“It was 1978 — the wife and I were working in IBP,” he said. “I worked on the kill floor; she worked in middle meats — and then they went on strike.”

The Bogenriefs were living in a small Victorian home in Sioux City at the time, and Mark started learning stained-glass repair in his father’s antique shop in Hinton. Ultimately, Mark thought he might make an arched window for their home’s stairwell during the strike.

“Urban Renewal was going on at that time, so there were a lot of homes being knocked down,” Bogenrief said. “They were busting the glass out and getting 50 cents a pound for the lead. They didn’t care about the glass. So, dad would go buy the glass — and a lot of them were broken. So, he started sending off for glass and started fixing them.”

Bogenrief and his twin brother joined their father in the work of restoration, and Bogenrief began creating his own original designs, although he never got around to making the window he planned.

“I never went back to the packing plant — I found my passion in life,” Bogenrief said. “My motto was always faster, bigger, better, more — the third window we ever built was two-and-a-half feet by five feet with 2,000 pieces.”

Mark Bogenrief places a piece of glass on a restoration in progress at Bogenrief Studios in Sutherland. The two windows being restored were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and are from Chicago.

Since then, Bogenrief has risen well before first light each morning to begin work. Many days, Bogenrief works alongside one of his two sons, who is employed by the studio. His other son struck out on his own in 2017, opening JJ Gaffers in Des Moines, a studio that produces works of handblown glass and offers classes.

The Bogenriefs moved into the former school building in Sutherland in 2004 after operating out of a number of spaces in Merrill and Cherokee. The city of Sutherland bought the school building for $1 in 2004, and the same fall, the South O’Brien students in grades 6-8 who attended classes there were moved to Paullina. For the Bogenriefs, the building was perfect. The school had the advantage of being all on one level, and it provided vastly more space.

“It’s 33,000 square feet,” Bogenrief said.

The building’s classrooms feature large windows and vaulted ceilings, and along with an abundance of indoor plants, there is one wandering black cat with the run of the place.

“We’re actually basically a dumping ground for plants — people bring them here,” Bogenrief said. “My wife, who passed away seven years ago — she was the one that mainly took care of them. So, they’ve suffered since then.”

Jeanne was diagnosed with cancer, and she died in May 2016.

The glass storage room at Bogenrief Studios in Sutherland houses thousands of sheets of stained glass, organized by texture, color and the manufacturer that produced the glass

Along with scoring tools and diamond band saws, the classrooms lining the hall feature tables covered in patterns, half-finished mosaics and fragmentary works of glass in the process of restoration. Across the hall from the room where pieces are designed and patterns are created, there is a storeroom filled with thousands of pressed and polished glass jewels, organized by size and color.

“In here, I’ve got 150,000 jewels,” Bogenrief said.

Some of the jewels are made from pressed glass, and they are incorporated into some stained-glass compositions.

“And then I have Swarovskis, which are hand-polished like a diamond — those get very expensive,” Bogenrief said. “Some clients want only the best.”

Adjacent to the storeroom for jewels is the storage room for the stained glass, which is stored in large opalescent sheets, arranged vertically on shelves. Most of the glass employed by Bogenrief in designs is opalescent, meaning it is often swirled with more than one color and lets light through it despite its opacity.

The studio gets most of its glass from Ed Hoy’s International Art Glass & Supplies based in Chicago. It is one of the largest suppliers of stained glass in the country, and it carries the products of a variety of manufacturers.

“All manufacturers have different temperaments of glass,” Bogenrief said.

He has learned that different varieties of glass, produced by different companies, require a different approach — more or less pressure to break along the score line or a deeper or shallower score.

Mark Bogenrief gestures toward two full-length “lady windows,” a genre of stained glass that features a single woman in a vertical panel, often with an elaborate botanical backdrop. The pieces are displayed at Bogenrief Studios in Sutherland, which is world renowned.

To create small pieces and elaborate curves, he said, glass typically is scored by hand.

“Except for the thicker glass — we have little diamond band saws,” Bogenrief said.

Once a sheet of glass has been marked using pieces of the pattern for a new work, it goes to the cutting room.

“We get to make our own puzzles,” Bogenrief said.

It often takes hundreds of hours to complete a work of stained glass at Bogenrief Studios. Some projects take years.

Whatever the project’s size, the steps of the process can be followed sequentially from one room to the next, a process that begins on paper and ends in glass.

In the room where new pieces begin their lives, large paper patterns lie unfurled on tables, their elaborate penciled designs ready to be cut with pattern shears, which remove a small strip from each patterned shape to allow space for “the heart of the lead,” which binds each piece together.

Troy Werkmeister removes debris and extra solder from one piece of a 12-piece light fixture that will eventually hang in a 90,000-square-foot home in Florida. The home was featured in the 2012 documentary “The Queen of Versailles.”

Once the pieces are scored and broken into patterned shapes, they are “deburred.” The sharp and irregular edges, called “burrs,” that are created during scoring must be smoothed by sanding or grinding before the piece can ultimately take shape. Next, copper foil is applied to the edge of each piece before they can be soldered together. Bogenrief favors a solder that is 60 percent lead and 40 percent tin.

“It flows nice — you get a nice line,” Bogenrief said. “There’s a lot of time just in this stage.”

Farther down the hall on a recent Wednesday, several employees were seated at tables, carefully removing extra solder and debris from the huge, curving pieces of a light fixture. Each of the 12 pieces is the length of a full-grown person.

“They’re doing the final picking,” Bogenrief said. “This is for the 90,000-square-foot home in Florida.”

As different pieces take shape in the spaces along the main hallway, one production space remains separate. Through the former school’s gymnasium, which is home to spec pieces and fiberglass molds for lamps, there is a former locker room that most recently served as the school’s art room. That’s where Bogenrief keeps the beveling equipment.

“Beveling is very hard — this is the stage 99 percent of people can’t do,” Bogenrief said.

Mark Bogenrief holds a piece of glass to a grinder, polishing its beveled edge, at Bogenrief Studios in Sutherland. Bogenrief creates works of stained and beveled glass, sometimes in combination.

He uses a variety of grinders he rigged up himself, applying chemicals or a pumice slurry during the process to achieve a clear beveled edge, which refracts light to create rainbow patterns.

“Sometimes there’s up to 100 pounds of pull, and it will rip the piece out of your hand,” Bogenrief said. “It’s almost equivalent to working at the factory — it’s physically demanding. I’ll probably have done over 200,000 pieces over the course of the year.”

Bogenrief said interest in stained glass has generally declined in recent decades, but that’s nothing new. Over the centuries, the popularity of stained glass has waxed and waned, reaching its historic peak during the Middle Ages, when stained glass filled churches with subdued light and offered a visual means of religious instruction for the masses of churchgoers who were illiterate.

Bogenrief still creates and restores works for sacred spaces, but the majority of his business are pieces commissioned by individuals. The studio’s lady windows are popular and have become one of its trademarks.

A female figure holding an open book of tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is rendered in stained glass. Bogenrief Studios in Sutherland is widely known for its distinctive “lady windows,” which feature faces painted with crushed glass and fired 17 times.

“That’s what we’re known for, our lady windows,” he said.

In designing them, Bogenrief draws his inspiration from a 19th-century Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, who became famous for his lithograph prints featuring female figures rendered in an Art Nouveau style. Mucha’s first posters featured the French actress Sarah Bernhardt in graceful poses with elaborate botanical backdrops.

Bogenrief Studios is located at 220 W Sutherland St. in Sutherland. The business has occupied a former school building since 2004.

“They used to have what they call the yard-long prints, and Mucha would draw them up — Art Nouveau ladies — and I always thought they’d look great in glass,” Bogenrief said.

He continues to work with new and longtime clients, and as he earns their trust, he gets greater freedom to follow his imagination wherever it leads him.

“Once I get started with a client, they’ll usually let me go,” Bogenrief said.

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