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Keeping the Light Alive: A Stained Glass Artist Bridging Tradition and the Modern Marketplace

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From a Pittsburgh restoration studio to Renaissance festival booths, M. Sotherden has built a life and livelihood through stained glass.

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Sotherden did not arrive at stained glass by accident. The medium announced itself early, on a visit to the National Cathedral during a school trip, when the beauty and history of a stained glass window holding a piece of moon rock stopped them cold. That moment crystallized over the years into a career defined by both precision and persistence.

“I remember thinking (because my framework was small town churches with pedestrian windows), ‘wow, you mean stained glass can have planets and moon rocks in it? What else can it contain?’ ”

After formal training in fine arts in both New Hampshire and England, Sotherden moved into professional studio work in Pittsburgh. There, they worked on everything from church windows to high-profile restoration projects, including pieces from the Tiffany era and other historically significant makers.

The work was exacting: glass cut and fitted by hand, painted, fired, assembled—each piece both an artwork and a structural object. Restoration demanded even more, requiring matching materials, techniques, and determining the original artist’s intent across decades or centuries.

“Restoration is this exacting field that requires your artistic ego to take a back seat and instead, reproduce exactly what was there, and while I love everything it taught me, I’ve come to realize that I’m much happier making things where I can focus instead on my love of animals, colors and technical experimentation.”

In 2004, after being downsized during an economic downturn, Sotherden made a decision that many craftspeople eventually face: build something independently or leave the field entirely. They chose to build.

Today, Sotherden operates a one-person studio based in Dayton, Ohio, producing work that ranges from small-scale jewelry and gifts to custom windows. But unlike many studio artists, the primary marketplace is not a gallery or online store.

It is the Renaissance festival circuit.

At events across the region, including Tennessee, Pittsburgh, and Ohio, Sotherden works as a full-time vendor. The booth functions as both storefront and studio presence, offering a rotating inventory of one-of-a-kind pieces.

“Selling my art in person - while exhausting for me as an introvert - also gives me really good information about why someone may (or may not) connect with my work. Selling online is lovely from the standpoint that I can be a homebody and introverted while doing it, but it always feels a bit empty, because it’s so impersonal.”

This model is partly practical. Stained glass is notoriously difficult to photograph, and each piece is unique. But it is also philosophical. Direct interaction allows for something increasingly rare: a conversation about craft.

Visitors may arrive drawn by color and light. They leave with a new understanding of how glass is cut, how it is assembled, why one piece costs more than another, and what it means to maintain a tradition that has few practitioners left.

Speaking to someone interacting with my art, especially when most folks don’t necessarily understand how a thing is made can be challenging to make fit neatly into a 15 second soundbite. Doesn’t mean I don’t try anyway. For example, did you know that hot colors tend to cost more than cool colors?”

Outside the festivals, Sotherden maintains a weekly Patreon, offering subscribers a look inside the studio: works in progress, technical breakdowns, and the unfiltered reality of sustaining a life in art. The posts are informal, sometimes chaotic, often candid. They are also a continuation of the same impulse that drives the festival conversations: making the invisible visible.

Because stained glass, for all its history, remains a mystery to most people.

And for Sotherden, that mystery is not something to guard.

It is something to illuminate.

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