In a quiet Glendale warehouse, 30-year-old stained-glass artist Ben Tuna has been turning burned-out vintage cars into luminous works of art. His latest project: a 1965 Porsche 356 that survived the Palisades fire, now fitted with reclaimed church glass depicting saints, hibiscus blooms, and golden fleur-de-lis. His work was profiled by Claims Journal and Bloomberg.
“When the fire happened, I started seeing all these great cars on Instagram, and I knew they’d just be thrown away,” Tuna says. “I was like, ‘I have to intercept some of these. I can do something so cool with them.’”
The profile writes that Tuna’s first glass-clad Porsche, a derelict 1965 911 from Ohio, will debut Aug. 13 at the Motorluxe gala during Monterey Car Week. The Porsche 356 will follow, part of his “Resurrection” series—art pieces, not restorations. “It’s my color selection, my use of color and material, that separates my work from everyone else’s,” he says.
A second-generation glassworker, Tuna inherited his skills from his father, Mark, who founded Glass Visions Studio in 1979. “My dad was an incredible artist. I got all my color knowledge from him,” he says. But the trade wasn’t his plan—until 2020, when his father suffered a stroke one month into a massive Playboy Mansion project. “Someone’s gotta do this,” Tuna recalls. He quit his job, took over the work, and ultimately installed about 250 windows in the Holmby Hills estate. “They gave me the platform to trust my instinct,” he says.
Today, Tuna leads a small team producing hundreds of stained-glass installations a year, though the cars are his passion. “I never loved this work, and that’s why I’m doing stuff now that’s not traditional,” he says. “There are like 50 years of work in these cars, and I’ve only been alive for 30. That is what excites me.”
The process is dangerous—cuts, lead exposure, toxic chemicals—and expensive, with salvaged church windows costing up to $250,000. But the results, Tuna says, are worth it. “The more patina—and patron saints—the better.”
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