[1] They are considered to be among the third generation of American Studio Glass Movement artists who trace their roots to the work of Harvey Littleton in the 1960s.

[2]: 47–51  Harvey Littleton soon gained significant exposure for his artwork in glass and became a self-described "evangelist" for the medium,[3] lecturing about its potential for the studio artist throughout the Midwest and Northeastern United States.

[1] When it came time to select a course of study in college, John Littleton, in a bid to establish his identity apart from that of his father,[1] majored in photography with Cavalierre Ketchum (b.

[6] As a college student at the University of Wisconsin, Kate Vogel initially studied two-dimensional art, specifically drawing and painting.

Their first collaboration in glass took place in 1979 at the Spruce Pine, North Carolina studio of Harvey Littleton, who had relocated there three years earlier, after his retirement from the University of Wisconsin.

[1] John Littleton and Kate Vogel moved to North Carolina in the summer of 1979, eventually settling in Bakersville, where they built their studio and hot shop.

In North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains they found themselves in the midst of a growing community of glass artists, including Rick and Valerie Beck, Gary Beecham, Katherine and William Bernstein, Shane Fero, Rob Levin, Mark Peiser, Richard Ritter, Jeffrey M. Todd, Yaffa Sikorsky-Todd and Jan Williams.

At the beginning of their collaborative career Littleton and Vogel exploited the ability of glass to retain the appearance of its hot fluidity even after cooling into a solid.

[7]: 13  In a catalog statement for the first exhibition of their collaborative work the artists wrote, "With the bag, handkerchief and favor forms we try to freeze some of the molten quality of the glass.

About this time they also began to sand blast and acid etch the exterior surfaces of the bags to produce a deceptively soft texture with a satiny sheen.

Cutting open the hot bubble the collaborators produced blooms with long ray-like petals surrounding a delicate glass stamen.

The human forms soon broke free of the cube, appearing in the round with the fine details of skin texture, wrinkles and hair preserved from the original plaster casting.

In the brochure for the a twenty-year retrospective of the artists' work, Joan Byrd wrote of the dichotomy between the continuing series of Bags and the cast sculptures.

The tops of the tables, flat discs cast with the impressions of vines and leaves, were inspired by the artists' trip to Costa Rica.

On a tour of the rain forest, high above the ground on a suspended walkway, Littleton and Vogel looked down on a "tangled web of plants [that] became radial patterns and spirals as the ferns and trees reached for the light.

Other notable exhibitions in which Littleton and Vogel's work has appeared include "The White House Collection of American Craft" organized by the Smithsonian Institution.

Internationally Littleton and Vogel's work has been seen in "The Visible Man" (2003) and "North Carolina Glass" (1995) exhibitions at the Glasmuseum Ebeltoft in Denmark and through the U.S. Department of State's Art in Embassies program in Hong Kong, Gabon and Belgium beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s.