John Littleton and Kate Vogel

John Littleton and Kate Vogel are American studio glass artists who have worked collaboratively since 1979, in the studio of Littleton’s father, Harvey Littleton. After meeting at the University of Wisconsin Madison where they received their Bachelor’s degrees. In 1980 they moved to Bakersville, NC where they maintain their home and studio.

The pair is considered to be among the third generation of American Studio Glass Movement artists who trace their roots to the work of Littleton’s father in the early-1960s. John Littleton experienced first-hand the personalities and events of the early glass movement. Glass, however, was not Littleton's first medium of choice when it came time for him to select a career. It was only after majoring in photography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison that he began to create in glass. He soon formed a collaborative partnership with another art student, Kate Vogel, who had exchanged her study of two-dimensional art for glass. In 1977 she was enrolled in a summer course at Santa Reperata Graphic Arts Center in Florence, Italy. While in Italy she took a trip to the Venetian island of Murano where she visited some of the glass factories.

The artists' earliest collaborations in glass were the bag forms for which they are well known today. Since 2000 their work has included a series of arms and hands cast in amber-colored glass. Over the years, the hands have held various objects, including river stones, large faceted glass "jewels", and colorful cast glass leaves. Littleton and Vogel have also become known for their series of functional glass and wrought iron side tables. The tops of the tables, flat discs cast with the impressions of vines and leaves, were inspired by the artists' trip to Costa Rica; on a tour of the rain forest, high above the ground on a suspended walkway, Littleton and Vogel looked down on a "tangled web of plants [that] became radial patterns and spirals as the ferns and trees reached for the light."

Littleton and Vogel's first successful sculptures took the form of "Bags"; blown glass bubbles that were shaped to look like soft fabric bundles "tied" at the neck with a loop of glass and terminating in a flared ruff. The bags were quickly followed by two series of forms that had elements in common with them. "Handkerchiefs" took the form of soft inverted cones with flared, undulating lips; "Favors" featured an ovoid or lobed form with two flared rills of glass on either side, resembling a lump of candy twisted in colorful paper. At the beginning of this collaborative career, Littleton and Vogel exploited the ability of glass to retain the appearance of its hot fluidity even after cooling into a solid. In a catalog statement for the first exhibition of their collaborative work the artists wrote, "With the bag, handkerchief and favor forms we try to freeze some of the molten quality of the glass." It was the bags, however, that presented the most possibilities for variation and evolution. The artists' sense of play became more evident as the bags referred less to their inanimate prototypes than to biomorphic forms.

Littleton and Vogel taught at Penland School of Crafts, Penland, North Carolina in 1987 and 1993. They co-taught a workshop at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington in 2007. The artists have lectured at a number of venues including the Mint Museum of Art, St. Louis Art Museum and Appalachian State University.

Their work is in public and private collections in North America, Europe, and Asia. They have been spotlighted in magazines, newspapers, television, and are featured artists in the film "The Blue Ridge Parkway - America's Favorite Journey" showing at the Blue Ridge Parkway Destination Center. The artists' work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions. Through the Maurine Littleton Gallery, their glass sculptures were seen annually at the Sculptural Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) expositions in New York City from 1998 through 2007; in Chicago from 1988 through 2007 and in Miami from 1994 through 1999. Other notable exhibitions in which Littleton and Vogel's work has appeared include "The White House Collection of American Craft" organized by the Smithsonian Institution. The exhibition opened at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art in 1994 and toured throughout the United States until 2004. Internationally Littleton and Vogel's work has been seen in "The Visible Man" (2003) and "North Carolina Glass" (1995) exhibitions at the Glasmuseum Ebeltoft in Denmark and through the U.S. Department of State's Art in Embassies program in Hong Kong, Gabon and Belgium beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s. Their work was also included in "North Carolina Glass '90" at Western Carolina University (1990). That exhibition went on tour to Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Littleton’s and Vogels’ work is also featured in collections of the High Museum of Art; Mint Museum of Art; St. Louis Art Museum; New Orleans Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Racine Art Museum; The William J. Clinton Presidential Library; Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, Denmark; Glasmuseum Frauenau, Bavaria, Germany and the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland.