Conceptualized and spearheaded by environmental artist Joseph Rossano, School is an international multi-media, traveling art performance and exhibition that casts light on the diminished state of global salmon and steelhead populations and the threatened habitat on which they depend. Sculpted from molten glass by concerned glassmakers from around the world—as well as first-hand video accounts from scientists, artists, and Indigenous peoples—the installation features a life-size school of mirrored salmon-like forms.

School is inspired by the Skagit River, the fourth largest outflow to the Pacific Ocean in the continental United States, and its dwindling run of salmon and steelhead. Once numbering in the millions, the Skagit’s salmon stocks now number barely in the tens of thousands. Likewise, the river's steelhead population, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, now numbers only in the hundreds. Because steelhead returned to the Skagit in the late winter when cupboards were historically bare, they once served as an essential food supply to Indigenous peoples. The stories of the region’s people and their use of its land over thousands of years offer captivating and actionable insights that Rossano hopes will bring disparate groups together to benefit these fish and those dependent on them.

Hosted by STARworks NC and galvanized by glassmakers from around the globe, a dynamic series of live-streamed fish-making events unfolded as part of the Glass Art Society’s 2021 virtual conference, May 18 - 21. Participating studios and universities include: Studio BLÅST (Tromso, Norway), Devereux & Husky (Wiltshire, UK), Benefield & Spencer Glass (Ballintoy, Northern Ireland), the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, WA), STARworks (Star, NC), Urban Glass (Brooklyn, NY), Australian National University (Canberra, AU) and Osaka University of Art (Osaka, Japan).

Joining this ambitious collaboration are: The Missing Salmon Alliance, The Wild Salmon Center, the Atlantic Salmon Trust, Salmon Nation, and the Smithsonian Institution. Together, these organizations are working with Joseph Rossano to propose School as the backdrop for the United Nations Conference on Global Climate Change, COP26, which will occur November 1-12, 2021, in Glasgow, Scotland.

As School travels to different regions of the globe — regions with their own rivers and issues unique to each stock of fish that depend upon them — the narrative will change to cast light on that river and its fish populations. When in Scotland the story might focus on the River Clyde; in New York, the Connecticut; in Montreal, the Grand Cascapédia; yet, at the exhibit’s end, like the salmon and steelhead it mimics, School will return to the place of its spawning in the Pacific Northwest in 2022. Before it returns to its natal river, the Museum of Glass, however, a population of makers will strive to exceed a symbolic 2,504 fish, the estimated lowest steelhead return to the Skagit River to date. With that return, School will tell the story of vanishing and endangered fish, their world, and the world of makers that inspired awareness through art, demonstrating how a group of concerned individuals can work together to foment recovery.

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