BOOK CLUB

Carrying the Torch of a Taboo Art Form

Ben Belgrad is Lighting Up the Vail Art Scene

By Laura Mills

What if I told you that the next storm of underground art was forming just a few miles away down I-70? Bat Country Studios is home to a collective of unique creatives who are working with mediums most of us are traditionally unfamiliar with, like borosilicate scientific flame working. You’ve probably heard of the more well-known version of borosilicate: Pyrex – a type of glass that can be heated to extreme temperatures without breaking. It’s the same type of glass that is used to make bongs, rigs, pipes and, more recently, Drinking Vessels.

Collecting art and selling one-off items at auctions is something we often tie to a level of wealth and hierarchy. When we think of bongs and glass used to smoke marijuana, they usually don’t fall into the same category — until recently. In 2010, Ben Belgrad, owner of Bat Country Studios, won a beautifully made bong in a 4/20 raffle while he was a sophomore at Indiana University. Infatuated with the extreme level of talent that was put into the piece and the opportunity to learn from the creator, Belgrad tapped into a level of creativity, connecting him to the underground art world, made mostly of glass.

Pipe makers historically had to fight through a myriad of legal limitations to get their art in front of buyers. From selling their art pieces, some of which take weeks and months to make, out of the back of their Subaru at the lot of a Grateful Dead show to now having pieces go to auction for $250,000, there was, and is, no easy jump. When talking to Belgrad about the progression of borosilicate glass blowing going from paraphernalia to art, he was not short on anecdotes applicable to the growth.

“20 years ago, my contemporaries were afraid to be in the car with the marijuana pipes they made on the way to the shops to sell them,” shares Belgrad. “If they got pulled over, they could go to jail. Now, you have this situation where these pieces are in museums and being auctioned at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and these pieces are achieving a level of art appreciation that just was not there under the criminalization and illegality of marijuana.”

With marijuana becoming recreationally legal in varying states across the United States, the secretive element of pipe making was able to break its way into mainstream art.

Borosilicate glassblowing is tedious, hot and requires lots of patience. Through the use of a high-powered pro-