Abilene, Through the Looking Glass

To best trace the thread of Carlyn Ray’s ascent through the Texas glassblowing scene, you must first consider the lowly silkworm. 

At the ripe young age of 10, Ray raised the caterpillars in cardboard boxes in her Dallas home, fattening them up on mulberry leaves until they spun cocoons and began to pupate. It was at this point that the boxes were carted to her neighbor’s home, where the cocoons were boiled and unraveled before the fine silk was sent through a loom and weaved into unique works of art. “I would see the whole process, feeding the worms and watching them become this cocoon, then seeing how that thread becomes a tapestry, an everlasting piece of art.”

Also during her formative years, Ray attended a glassblowing demonstration in a barn outside of town, where tattooed, motorcycle-riding men showed the crowd how to heat soda-lime glass to lava-like temperatures, plucking the molten material from a furnace and transforming it into new forms. As the sizzling glass cooled before her eyes, Ray said, the die was cast for her future ambitions. She would become a professional glassblower, she recalls telling her parents then (they were supportive, the career prospects for starving artists being at least slightly less dim than those for caterpillar farmers), and over the intervening decades the now-44-year-old artisan established her own idiosyncratic take on what’s known as “weaving” glass.   

In May, Ray’s lifelong preoccupation culminated in what could fairly be considered the most striking public artwork to ever grace Abilene, a West Texas city of 133,000 that’s lately experiencing something of an identity crisis. 

Abilene is a railroad town, like many other communities in the state’s sprawling western reaches, replete with rodeos and three private Christian universities and an air force base. Today, OpenAI’s “Stargate,” which has been billed as the world’s largest artificial intelligence training hub, is online and bringing a crush of newcomers to town, for better or worse. Abilene is also home to a growing collection of public art installations, including a rooftop brontosaurus that cranes its neck toward a Volkswagen bug, a 27-ton windchime in the shape of a tornado, and a full moon with a mildly menacing smile that’s set on a 20-foot pole, to name a few. 

Outshining the rest, Ray’s newest and grandest public work to date, called Gathered Radiance, is a jawdropping feat of engineering and artistry that rises well above the level of roadside oddity. Six years in the making, the three-story art installation comprises 400 individual blown-glass ribbons, clamshells and clouds suspended from a ceiling by sturdy cables. The piece was unveiled in May during the grand opening of Abilene’s newest public library, a modern, airy space that replaced the tumble-down main branch just across the railroad tracks that bisect the city. The new facility is housed on an eight-acre campus called Abilene Heritage Square, which wisely positions Gathered Radiance as its centerpiece. 

Ray’s pièce de résistance, along with the library that contains it, is more than just a public spectacle—it’s an endorsement of Abilene’s longstanding identity as a literary safe space in a state where conservative crusaders seek to censor and control the books their fellow Texans can access. According to statistics published by Abilene city officials after the unveiling event last month, the new library counted approximately 25,000 visitors during its first week of business. For comparison, that’s 30 percent of the total visitation recorded at its dilapidated predecessor for an entire fiscal year. The library was funded by a unanimous city council vote to the tune of $21.5 million for a 40-year lease, and Heritage Square got an architectural facelift courtesy of private donations from benefactors in 23 different states.   

“You can’t force this sort of energy and involvement in your community. This is organic,” said Julee Hammer, Abilene’s director of library services. “Very generous people want the community to be as wonderful as possible; they want to give it to the next generation. It’s an Abilene phenomenon.” 

This philanthropic and forward-thinking facet of the city’s identity may come as a surprise to folks elsewhere in the state, especially urbanites who write the place off as a backwater of cowboy cosplayers and religious zealots. (Though this bad rap is somewhat understandable: Taylor County, which includes most of the city, went 74 percent for Donald Trump in the 2024 general election, and 72 percent four years before that.) 

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But the city simultaneously has a reputation as a bastion of books and literacy advocacy. State lawmakers have dubbed Abilene “The Storybook Capital of Texas,” and the Children’s Art and Literacy Festival held here each summer is the largest event of its kind in the country. The city has mostly been spared the militant moral activism that has plagued other Texas towns, such as Midland, Leander, and Granbury, where fights over public reading materials have been conspicuous and nasty. 

“In a lot of cities, there are anti-establishment flashes, but the establishment here consists of very conservative Republicans and very liberal Democrats working together,” said Glenn Dromgoole, a former editor of the Abilene Reporter-News and owner of Texas Star Trading, a local bookstore and gift shop. “We haven’t had the problem where the extreme right took over the city council, the school board, that kind of thing.”

Even still, the threat of change is riding on the city’s (ceaseless) wind. Among the horde of visitors who swarmed the new library on opening day was Tammy Fogle, a local gadfly who has for years sought to push Abilene further to the right. In 2022, she campaigned to classify Abilene and other regional towns as “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” Two years later, she raised hell over a statue for the city’s Storybook Garden that depicted characters from the KittyCorn book series. (One book in the series features a kitten who wants to be a unicorn; Fogle claimed the story was “grooming” children to adopt pro-transgender values.)

Fogle’s most recent right-wing blitz has been against school library books she deems immoral or inappropriate for children. She is the leader of the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a group that bills itself as “fighting for the survival of America” by promoting “parental rights” across the country. Though Fogle has no children attending schools in the Abilene Independent School District, she nonetheless has raised at least 27 challenges regarding books collected in the district’s library system. When an advisory council reviewed Fogle’s challenges and voted to keep most of the books on the shelves, she attempted an end-run around local officials, filing a petition with the Texas Education Agency to reverse the decision.

Fogle may be granted increased purview over the city’s library materials before the end of this month. She’s a candidate for an open city council seat, having survived the May general election with 27 percent of the vote. In the June 13 runoff contest, Fogle faces off against Ben Bailey, a business owner and a veteran of the U.S. Navy, who won 32 percent of the vote. Fogle declined to be interviewed for this story.

Now, as Abilene finds itself at an inflection point, Ray’s blown-glass spectacle gives residents a prime opportunity for self-reflection—literally. “I feel the energy really culminating in Abilene,” Ray says, “this blossoming effect, like it’s just starting to open up.” Her Gathered Radiance, along with works displayed at Ray’s solo exhibition inside the Grace Museum a few blocks from the library, casts a glimmer across the city’s centerline, a beacon of imagination and creative exploration in a divisive world. “Colors and light, there’s something about that that naturally ties books and art and learning together. It opens minds to possibilities.”

The artist has a book recommendation, as it so happens: Elena’s Serenade, an illustrated children’s book about—what else—a girl who wants to be a glassblower. In the story, set in Mexico, Elena is discouraged from pursuing her artistic dreams. “Who ever heard of a girl glassblower?” her father says dismissively. In a flash of defiance, Elena sets out for Monterrey to learn the trade. Spoiler alert: Upon reflection, Elena’s doubters reverse course; it turns out that the girl is a splendid glassblower after all. What she really needed was a show of confidence from her supporting cast. In other words, whether you’re in Mexico or West Texas, it takes a village to advance the arts. 

Interested members of Abilene’s reading public can find the 40-page picture book among the manifold titles in the city’s permanent collection—for now, at least. To anyone who’d rather see the book scoured from the shelves, might I suggest a long look in the mirror?

The post Abilene, Through the Looking Glass appeared first on The Texas Observer.