Fired Up in Newton

Fire in the Blood

For Jonathan, glassblowing isn’t a career he chose. It’s one he was born into. His father ran a studio in Michigan where a seven-year-old Jonathan swept floors, soaked up knowledge, and slowly found his way to the furnace. By the time he was fully involved, glass wasn’t just something he did, it was who he was.

“I absolutely knew glassblowing was my future,” Jonathan says. “Even when I was working a 9 to 5, I was still spending time in the garage blowing glass. You can’t kill the fire alive. It’s impossible.”

Mary, meanwhile, came to glass from a different direction. As a nineteen-year-old art student focused on ceramics and darkroom photography, she drove two and a half hours every weekend from Iowa Falls to Spencer, Iowa, to take classes at the Reynolds School for Visual Arts, where Jonathan’s father taught and Jonathan instructed. What started as a passion for the craft became something more.

“After about a year or two of classes,” Mary laughs, “we decided we worked better as a partnership in life as well as in glassware.”

Built from Loss, Driven by Legacy

Jonathan’s father passed away on leap year 2020 – special, he says, as his dad always was. His death was a turning point. Rather than stepping back from glass, it lit a fire under the Curiels to finally open the studio they’d long dreamed of. Jonathan’s father had been brought to Newton years earlier with the vision of opening a hot shop that was never fully realized in his lifetime. Fuego, in many ways, is the fulfillment of that dream.

“I took on this glass studio knowing I needed something for my father,” Jonathan says. “His passing created a certain air of urgency. I realized the time was now, before I lost that energy he had.”

Indeed, opening Fuego was no small leap. Mary and Jonathan sold investment properties to fund it, spent a year building and planning, and fabricated every piece of equipment themselves; from the hand-built furnace designed by Jonathan’s father and a Toledo engineer in the late 90s, to the custom tools and annealing ovens that line the studio today. It was, as Mary puts it, a full commitment.

“Once that furnace is on, it’s on,” she says. “You can’t really just kind of half do it.”

Where Creative Sparks Fly

Walk through the studio and you’ll understand why people drive hours to get here. The furnace holds molten glass at over 2,000 degrees. Custom-built tools, a steel-topped shaping table, annealing ovens, and a lamp working station fill the space.

Walk through the studio and you’ll understand why people drive hours to get here. The furnace holds molten glass at over 2,000 degrees. Custom-built tools, a steel-topped shaping table, annealing ovens, and a lamp working station fill the space. Music plays. Jonathan moves like every motion is muscle memory. There’s something about the heat, the hum, and the people behind it all that makes it impossible not to want to be part of it.

And people are. Classes sell out every month. Students come from two and three hours away. Families arrive together and leave with hand-blown pieces and stories they’ll tell for years. One student brought her 80 year-old mother. Another has come back every single month since the studio opened.

More Than a Studio

Beyond the classes, the Curiels are quietly becoming one of Newton’s most creative community connectors. Their glass Easter egg hunt – in which individually crafted eggs were hidden throughout town, each one personalized for a sponsoring local business – drew people from out of state and landed on the news. Mary went door to door to recruit 60 local businesses. The goal was simple: get people out, get them exploring, and introduce them to parts of Newton they’d never seen.

“I’ve lived here forever and I didn’t know that place was here,” more than one attendee told them afterward. That’s exactly the point.

Fuego has also partnered with Gezellig Brewing just down the street, offering a beer mug class where students took their hand-blown creation straight to the taproom for a free pour of their choice. More collaborations are in the works, and the Curiels say yes as often as they can.

“We like to say yes to all these new experiences,” Mary says, “and just see what comes from them.”

A Home in Newton, Forged in Fire

The Curiels didn’t stumble into Newton. They were drawn here, first through an artist relocation program after a fire at their Spencer studio, then by something harder to name but easy to feel.

“There’s a certain air about Newton,” Jonathan says. “It’s just a positive, happy community. People are willing to really put into it. We wanted to see a community that would back each other up, somewhere that support was not hard to find.”

Moreover, they wanted their two young boys – currently four and almost two, the older already learning the trade – to grow up the same way Jonathan did: with a shop at the center of family life, and the understanding that chasing a dream is always worth it.

“Even if this flops,” Mary says, “we can at least say we did it, and let them know it’s worth trying to follow your dreams.”

Newton is growing. The art scene is alive. And at Fuego Hot Glass, the furnace stays on, and the door is always open.