Lifelong Jackson resident Andrew Young spent his childhood making things with his own hands, whether it was painting in his house, working with his friends to build treehouses in backyards or creating makeshift dams in the woods behind his house when it rained to make pools of water.
His first large-scale art project came in his 10th-grade English class, when he created a handmade book cover for one of Shakespeare’s plays. He crafted the cover out of thin wood and filled it with sheets of paper he stained brown with tea and slightly singed at the edges to make them look older than they were.
“I poured a lot of time and effort into making it all look like something that might have come out of that time,” Young told the Mississippi Free Press. “If I’m being honest, I think that project ended up being a big part of how I managed to pass that class.”
All of Young’s artistic experiences came to a head while he was attending college at Louisiana State University, when a professor named Paul Dufour started up a new art department dedicated to making stained glass and Young decided to attend his classes.
Dufour directed Young and his other students to start making a design for a stained glass window by putting down a design on paper, which is called a “cartoon.” Young, looking at the available materials before him, became intrigued with the idea of a form that would contrast light against an opaque border.
Using a small steel cutting wheel to make scoring lines across a thick sheet of glass, Young began experimenting with the hues and shapes of the pieces he had on hand and put together a window featuring a design of a diagonal rising sun set against an oval of black glass.
“My experience at LSU wasn’t like apprenticing at some old studio,” Young said. “In a way I’d say the material itself was as much of a teacher for me as my professor, learning all about what it did and didn’t want to do. When that first piece came together, it taught me the limitless potential in what I was looking at.”
That first window, which Young later dubbed “Window Prime,” today sits inside the storefront of Pearl River Glass Studio, Young’s own glass-making studio in Jackson.
‘Neutral, Local and Approachable’
Young founded Pearl River Glass Studio in October 1975 alongside Reggie DeFreese, his roommate at LSU who shared a similar passion for stained glass crafting. Young says he chose Pearl River Glass Studio as the business’ name because he saw it as neutral, local and approachable.
“From the beginning, this was never going to be just about me, so I wasn’t going to name the studio after myself,” Young said. “Stained glass requires a lot of people to come together to make its component parts, from firing glass in the kiln to cutting and assembly to installation. I wanted my studio to focus on bringing people together to advance the arts.”
The studio initially opened inside a one-car garage in downtown Jackson and moved into a proper studio in the Midtown Arts District in 1976.
While churches in the Jackson metro have long served as major customers for Young’s stained-glass creations, he has also made stained-glass windows for major Jackson landmarks such as the Mississippi State Capitol Building, the Governor’s Office and the Art Garden at the Mississippi Museum of Art. The studio also makes and restores glass for residential and commercial use for houses and local businesses.
‘A Place for Artists to Come Together’
Young is currently working on an expansion to Pearl River Glass Studio’s storefront to install new kilns for crafting clay and ceramics alongside glass. The studio also features a market area called The Luminary, where customers can purchase smaller stained-glass crafts such as platters and Christmas ornaments that Young considers more accessible than his more “niche” stained-glass window installations.
In 2023, Young established a nonprofit arts conservatory at Pearl River Glass Studio that teaches classes on different types of glass working, such as leaded stained glass and kiln-fired fused glass, as well as courses on ceramics, mosaics, figure drawing and other artistic mediums. His goal is to share the creative experience with as many artists in Jackson as possible while allowing his studio to serve as a place for up and coming artists to display their work.
“Glass is our medium here and a very fun one to work with, but I want to be able to fold in a much larger community and give anyone access to the creative experience,” Young said. “As a practicing artist, I know every part of that process is rewarding, from designing to selecting your materials to the actual moment of creation.”
“Art is a necessary part of who we are as human beings,” he added. “I started this studio as a place for artists to come together and grow while honing part of us, which is something I want to keep making happen every day.”
For more information on Pearl River Glass Studio, call 601-353-2497 or visit pearlriverglass.com.