the bodies of the cars become light containers made of stained glass
stained glass window has traditionally illuminated the ceremonial halls of the holy places. On the east side of Los Angeles, I’m Tuna sees this medium in a new light. He works between the language of old windows and his outdated bodies carsbringing stained glass to places where it normally has no business appearing.
Within Glass Visions Studio, the family stained glass business founded by his father Mark Tuna in 1979, the artist has created a practice that balances architectural art and car wreck. Porsche shells, salvaged church glass, desert agate and detached car doors become parts of the same world.
images courtesy of the artist
tone experiments through traditional craftsmanship
Ben Tuna took over his family’s studio in 2021, after years of learning the trade about restoration work, residential stained glass supplies and the physical demands of glassmaking. His recent works under the Glass Cowboy The name pushes this heritage into areas that are more experimental.
A rusted Porsche 911 Carrera becomes Resurrection, a hollow car body fitted with cathedral-like stained glass. Burnt vintage Porsches recovered from the Los Angeles fires are becoming beautiful memorials. A more recent work, Unearthed (2026), replaces the stained glass with finely cut agate harvested from the deserts of the Southwest, giving the body a mineral glow rather than an ecclesiastical one.
Ben Tuna fits wrecked Porsche bodies with stained glass, salvaged church windows and desert agate
the resurrection begins with a rusted Porsche shell
Resurrection (2025) focuses on a corroded Porsche 911 Carrera stripped of its wheels, windows and interior. The tone leaves the damage visible, treating the car’s empty openings as parts for hand-cut glass panels that sit inside custom metal frames. Across the windshield, side windows and rear window, figures and shards recall cathedral windows, their colors capturing a machine that was once built for speed.
The work derives its power from the tension between the condition of the car and its condition. A Porsche usually carries ideas of polish, value, movement and mechanical precision, yet this one sits still, eaten away by time. Tuna’s intervention gives the shell a different presence. The car retains its rust and failure, while the glass brings color, image and a sense of ceremony that never turns the object back into a usable vehicle.
1965 Porsche 356, lost in Los Angeles fires (2025)
burnt vehicles become sculptures after the fire
After the Los Angeles fires, Tuna began collecting burnt-out Porsche shells left behind in the wreckage. Beginning in March 2025, he acquired five burned-out vintage Porsches from the fires, with four coming from a collector’s garage in the Palisades. His first post-fire project was a 1965 Porsche 356, which became a 700-pound mobile sculpture built with salvaged stained glass from decommissioned churches.
The labor process carried the weight of the location from which it came. The ton and two assistants wore respirators while the car was stripped down to bare metal, dealing with toxic ash and chemicals before the glasswork began. He used pieces from about fifteen surviving stained glass windows, many of them hand-painted in Germany in the late 1800s, and assembled them based on size, color and feel rather than a fixed narrative.
at the artist’s studio in Los Angeles
Craft meets loss without becoming sentimental
In these fire projects, the car is a record of heat, collapse and private attachment. Ben Tuna once noted that he was moved to see cars washed away after the fires and thought that collectors lost items they had spent decades collecting. The scale of the burnt shells allows viewers to study what the fire has caused, while the glass takes the cars away from the scrapyard and into a slower material damage response.
So Tuna uses an old and physically demanding vessel to respond to a very present landscape of loss, rescue and rebuilding. Glass also has its own history, with many shards coming from decommissioned churches and forgotten windows. When he brings these pieces to a burnt-out Porsche, two design legacies meet in one object: the handcrafted window and the crafted body of the car.
agate, doors and the car as a fragment
Ben Tuna’s practice has also begun to move beyond stained glass as the only material language. In Unearthed (2026), he uses thin slices of agate collected from the deserts of the Southwest, fitting the mineral pieces to the car’s body like geological windows. The shift changes the tone of work. Where church glass brings figures, color fields, and old devotional images, agate brings streak of stone, desert color, and a deeper sense of time held within the material itself.
His door works extend the same thought on a smaller scale. Removable Porsche doors become wall pieces, with the car becoming a piece that can be hung as a window, panel or relief. Removed from the complete vehicle, the door retains its curve, handle and memory of movement, while the glass or stone transforms it into a search surface. It’s a smart move for the practice, because it allows the car’s tongue to travel beyond the full frame and into the interior without losing the charge of the original object.
“The best door I’ve seen in the wild.” | image courtesy of Ben Tuna
