When Brandi Hines-Lee encountered a problem making a stained-glass window, her mother was someone she could turn to. After her mother died, a problem she could not solve carried another reminder of the loss: the person who could help was gone.

Hines-Lee describes that experience in a Main Street Business Insights episode released October 7. It helps explain the teaching at Agitsi Stained Glass, her studio in Tulsa’s Red Fork district along Route 66. She wants people learning the craft to have someone they can ask.

The knowledge began within her family. Hines-Lee grew up watching her grandmother and mother work in stained glass, learning especially from her mother. The two hoped to open a shop together. After her mother’s death, Hines-Lee decided to carry that plan forward in her memory.

She named the studio Agitsi, meaning “my mother” in Cherokee. The name holds the connection to the woman she learned from. Teaching gives that connection a continuing place in other people’s work.

At the studio, that exchange takes a practical form. Its current website describes workshops in which beginners learn to cut glass, apply copper foil, solder and finish a piece. Those are skills someone can continue practicing after a class ends, with new questions as the work becomes more demanding.

Hines-Lee says her willingness to answer does not depend on someone buying a class. She remembers struggling without her mother’s guidance and describes offering the encouragement and advice she had missed. In her account, students who go on to make and sell their own work are people she wants to support.

Her teaching also has a documented place beyond the shop. Philbrook’s 2023 Stay Gold course listing offered an eight-session stained-glass series with Hines-Lee for adults 55 and older. The beginner course covered design, pattern-making, glass cutting, assembly and finishing, with a group exhibit planned at the end. It placed the family craft within a museum program for people beginning a new artistic practice later in life.

Community has helped Hines-Lee find a place to continue her own work, too. In the podcast, she recounts meeting another artist while both were volunteering as mentors. When she had outgrown her previous space, that connection led to an invitation to join the artists in Red Fork. The support she describes receiving from fellow artists sits alongside the support she offers learners.

For Hines-Lee, a Cherokee artist, teaching and community are connected to her identity. She explains that she approaches learners with the care she brings to teaching her own children. That is her account of how she chooses to share the craft she inherited.

The thread runs from a grandmother and mother working in glass to a daughter making room for other people to learn. At Agitsi, the family’s knowledge continues through the questions Hines-Lee is willing to answer—and through the work another person can begin with that help.