Montreal-based glass artist Jack Nissen has a unique approach to urban intervention. He is 'vandalizing' the city by mending cracks in public infrastructure, such as bus stops, sidewalks and drains with custom-made glass pieces. Nissen's work serves as a commentary on the fragility and resilience of urban life, drawing parallels between the delicate nature of glass and the often-precarious quality of life experienced by city dwellers. By transforming damages on public infrastructure into art, Nissen's installations encourage viewers to reconsider their relationship with the urban environment, fostering a sense of community ownership and calling for its care while also highlighting the often-overlooked beauty of an urban landscape. This is why Jack Nissen's glass art reflects the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Sustainable Cities and Communities.
Nissen begins his process by first making an exact cast of the damaged areas with either wooden dowels or cardboard. He then crafts molten glass according to the cast, using delicate single glass rods to first build the overall structure before filling it in with his signature geometric design. In some cases, such as the yellow sidewalk in Montreal, he found the crack’s shape to be interesting enough that he kept replicating it, making it smaller in size with each iteration, creating the effect that the crack had grown and fixed itself in glass.
Nissen recognizes how his practice is conjuring beauty in spaces and places that otherwise would have been deemed broken or damaged. This aligns with the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which calls for a state of mind that can find beauty in imperfect everyday items. In a way, what Nissen does can also be considered a contemporary form of kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with powdered gold, silver or platinum to highlight the damage and embrace the item’s history. Hence, Nissen’s work can be read as a way to embrace the imperfections of a city. This, at the same time, calls for everyone to care for their public infrastructure due to its communal nature.
Side Walk Glass Art “Vandalism” by Jack Nissen. Image courtesy of Instagram/@jacknissenglass.
Jack Nissen’s glass interventions do more than just fill cracks—they fill a symbolic void in how people perceive their shared urban spaces. By melding the delicate artistry of glass with the brutal honesty of broken concrete, he performs a kind of civic alchemy: transforming neglect into care, damage into beauty, and impersonal infrastructure into a canvas for communal reflection. His work stands as a quiet but powerful ode to urban resilience, reminding people that a city’s strength lies not in flawless surfaces, but in its capacity to repair, adapt, and reveal grace in the broken places. Nissen offers more than a fix—he offers a philosophy: that to mend a city, we must first learn to see its scars not as flaws, but as stories waiting to be healed with light.
Brick Wall Glass Art “Vandalism” by Jack Nissen. Image courtesy of Instagram/@jacknissenglass.
Find out more about the glass art by Jack Nissen and his other initiatives by checking his Instagram @jacknissenglass.