For more than two decades, Marc Petrovic was a studio artist, focused on his own work and teaching a two-week workshop every year or so. Recently he made a huge shift: He’s now chairing the glass department at his alma mater, the Cleveland Institute of Art. 

In the midst of the transition, he made Courage, a piece for his Find & Seek series, in which air bubbles in the shape of letters are trapped in glass spheres that, together, reveal hidden words. “The words represent things that we might find and things that we may seek,” Petrovic says. 

In this latest piece, the word “courage” appears – and if you look very closely, you’ll see five instances of the word “fear.” “I thought it was a nice proportional balance,” Petrovic says, given “this whole idea of stopping a 23-year career and moving a family of four and two dogs 600 miles [from Connecticut to Ohio] to start a teaching career.”

And, he says, the midlife transition has proven more momentous than he imagined. “I probably should have put a few more ‘fears’ in there,” he says, “because five to one wasn’t enough.”