Image courtesy of Andrew Page.
Andrew Page
Andrew Page (b. 1965) has been editor of UrbanGlass’s quarterly journal, Glass, since 2004. A writer and book editor, Page has co-curated exhibitions on glass; frequently serves as a panelist and lecturer; and has written for a wide range of publications, including Details, New York, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is the founder of the Robert M. Minkoff Foundation Academic Symposium at UrbanGlass, a biennial event that has brought together the international community of glass art educators four times since 2013. From 2011 to 2019, Page was Director of the Robert M. Minkoff Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to advance glass art. He holds a BA in English from Vassar College (1987).
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Andrew Page talks about Richard Yelle starting NYEGW’s New Work.
2:20 TranscriptAndrew Page talks about Richard Yelle starting NYEGW’s New Work. Oral history interview with Andrew Page, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:20.
Andrew Page: In this current day and age, when all types of media are featured performance and found objects and video and any material you really want to work with is acceptable in pretty much any context, It’s hard to remember that at one point, it really wasn’t as open minded. And in terms of material, glass was always seen as sort of a decorative or often seen as a decorative or industrial material and making a bid for sculpture was a long and arduous process where people would start taking it seriously. And the founder of the New York Experimental Glass Workshop [New York, New York], Richard Yelle, always had a vision beyond providing a furnace for people to work at. Because he worked as the executive director of Clayworks [New York, New York], because he was in the New York ferment, he was always aware of what it takes to make an organization an arts organization and not simply a studio and he always had that as part of his ambition. So two years after he opened the New York Experimental Glass Workshop in 1977, he decided he needed to start a place where the discourse about glass as a medium for art could take place because it just simply wasn’t happening. All this great work was being produced and there wasn’t much conversation about it and its relevance. So we decided in the spirit of the times when you start your own nonprofit art association in New York, you also start your own publication. And in fact at the time, there were a lot of underground art publications on newsprint that were being published in SoHo and in the areas around New York like the East Village where there was concentrations of art. So he went and began his own publication called New Work. In fact, he didn’t mention new work in glass. Significantly the first issue is simply called New Work and it was an ambition to allocate glass in the fine art world and not only write about glass but its position in relation to other media. This periodical took a few years to get running really on a regular basis. There would be, like, issues 1, 2 and 3 as coming together in an individual publication, but it can—it was published continuously since 1979 to today and it was an important voice; it brought, you know, major thinkers, it brought artists into a dialogue about what was happening in this field that was new. But also what was happening in the New York realm as well.
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Andrew Page, Editor of Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly talks about Richard Yelle starting New York Experimental Glass Workshop rather than joining Dale Chihuly at Pilchuck.
00:55 TranscriptAndrew Page, Editor of Glass: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly talks about Richard Yelle starting New York Experimental Glass Workshop rather than joining Dale Chihuly at Pilchuck. Oral history interview with Andrew Page, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:54.
Andrew Page: I don’t know if they’ve been much talk about, you know, Dale Chihuly who started Pilchuck [Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington] and he’s been referenced by some of your other speakers, but Richard [Yelle] was actually invited to come out to the West Coast, to the Northwest, to be part of Pilchuck. He was a student of Dale’s at RISD where he earned his MFA. And Richard very consciously begged off, he didn’t want to go ‘to blow glass in the woods,’ as he put it, because for him the art world was centered in New York City. He wanted to be a part of that art world, he wanted to apply his glass experience to the art scene in New York City and that’s where he built—not a parallel—it was a very different organization than Pilchuck was, and I think both of them had great impact and you know, you talked earlier about information exchange that was about definitely happening at Pilchuck, and it was also happening at Urban [UrbanGlass, New York, New York]. But as Cybele [Maylone] was mentioning the dialogue was very much between contemporary artists as well, and had a particular New York flavor to that conversation.
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Glass Editor Andrew Page talks about the proximity of NYEGW to SoHo and the Heller Gallery.
0:36 TranscriptAndrew Page talks about the proximity of NYEGW to SoHo and the Heller Gallery. Oral history interview with Andrew Page, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:36.
Andrew Page: In addition to international artists who would come through the New York Experimental, there was a lot of cross-fertilization and cross-pollination. For a time the New York Experimental Glass Workshop was located in SoHo. Well, actually the eastern part of Little Italy but very close to SoHo. And it was really an important venue because people could just walk from the galleries. In fact Heller Gallery was located at the time in SoHo, and they would take a collector across to see glass being made. You know, artists would ride up the ramp in their—on their motorcycles to see what was going on and take part in this amazing community that flourished there.
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Glass Editor Andrew Page talks about Pilchuck and the differences between West Coast and East Coast glass.
02:32 TranscriptAndrew Page talks about Pilchuck and the differences between West Coast and East Coast glass. Oral history interview with Andrew Page, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:32.
Andrew Page: I mean, I think to speak broadly—and you know, not wanting to paint with too broad of a brush on this, but on the West Coast if there is a difference between the West Coast glass scene as it’s centered in the Northwest, and the New York or East Coast glass scene, one of the big differences I think is, well, Pilchuck [Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington] brought all types of international figures to bring European ideas, European technologies, European techniques to share with the American scene, which was incredibly important. The West Coast really grabbed on to some of the traditional techniques from Venice. Lino Tagliapietra, one of the first artists to really openly share the historic techniques from Venice, came to Pilchuck for the first time in 1979, and he found such an eager audience to learn the traditional methods which were quite different than the more experimental, asymmetrical outcomes of a lot of sort of early glass artists who prized that crudeness. There was a thirst for the refined, you know, symmetrical, ordered patterns of cane work and they found a real dedicated group of artists who spent the time, who were young enough to develop the hand techniques to achieve incredibly fine results of blown glass. And some say that, you know, it’s almost a decorative approach, it’s traditional, it’s decorative. They’ve taken it to new heights of scale, unconventional colors and interesting shapes, but it’s within a certain framework that one might consider more decorative in focus. And I think you might generalize and say on the East Coast with all that influence certainly at New York Experimental of fine art galleries and artists coming in and dabbling in glass and Louise Bourgeois, Lynda Benglis, Matthew Barney, others who spent time and crossed paths with New York Experimental, there was I think more of a dialogue with contemporary art and you see that in some of the work that was produced at, for example, UrbanGlass versus maybe at Pilchuck. Although it’s really hard to generalize, I mean, I don’t want in any way to diminish the impact of Pilchuck as a crossroads for information, for technique and also for ideas about art. I mean, they’ve had a great visiting artist program. They brought some of the top names in visual arts to Pilchuck: Maya Lin, Eric Fischl, these people have all done important exchanges at Pilchuck. Jim Dine, many others. So they were able to bring through their artistic directors great figures of contemporary art who had great influence on the glass scene on the West Coast, but what lasted and what really coalesced on the West Coast one could generalize and say had a bit of a more decorative focus.
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Andrew Page talks about the economic challenges New York Experimental Glass Workshop/UrbanGlass has faced during its history.
01:31 TranscriptAndrew Page talks about the economic challenges New York Experimental Glass Workshop/UrbanGlass has faced during its history. Oral history interview with Andrew Page, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:31.
Andrew Page: Economics have always been something that factored into glass. It does use a tremendous amount of energy. It is something that is expensive to maintain, and the history of the New York Experimental Glass Workshop in particular was a struggle against the economic challenges of blowing glass. And for our 40th anniversary of UrbanGlass we looked back at the ten, you know, the ten year periods in the history of New York Experimental which became UrbanGlass. And a lot of the themes were—was the struggle to survive. New York City both had rising rents, which forced relocation two times. It forced a lot of financial pressure on the organization and on the people who are running it. So I think there was a scrappiness and a need to innovate, a need to think creatively not only about making art but about surviving that also characterized some of the decades of UrbanGlass since 1979. And maybe that would be one difference is just the kind of resourcefulness that’s required, the imagination to do fundraisers in association with Christie’s Auction House or to do residencies, or to offer classes in the way that they did. There were a lot of things about what we now consider sort of standard for open access studios that was pioneered by the New York Experimental Glass Workshop that have now become the mainstay, such as the fundraising auction or the outreach in terms of education and studio rentals. But it has been a struggle for the organization just because of the costs involved in making glass.
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Andrew Page talks about UrbanGlass’ tribute to Paul Hollister.
0:51 TranscriptAndrew Page talks about UrbanGlass’ tribute to Paul Hollister. Oral history interview with Andrew Page, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:50.
Andrew Page: Paul Hollister. We wrote a piece, a sort of an homage to Paul Hollister upon his passing, that included some clips from what he published in the New York Times. And we also spoke to Doug Heller, who’s one of the premier gallerists dealing with studio glass whose gallery actually predated the formation of the New York Experimental Glass Workshop [New York, New York] by a couple of years. And Doug was very aware of when Paul would write about one of his exhibitions because he would see an immediate change in the people coming to the gallery. There was so much of an impact having those articles published in the New York Times that gave it a sort of a cultural stamp of significance that Doug spoke very highly of how much of an impact that did have on the whole field. But suddenly it was considered worthy of coverage and overview in the New York Times.
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Andrew Page talks about the continued importance of Glass Quarterly. Oral history interview with Andrew Page, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:08.
Andrew Page: Glass Quarterly continues to be published and it’s always had as its focus to be placing glass in a contemporary art context. And we take that legacy really seriously, and we continue to seek out writers who write not just about glass to contextualize what’s being done to take part in a dialogue that transcends the material, because there is a real culture around the material. There’s a culture of galleries that specialize in glass, collectors who only are interested in work in glass, and artists who only work in glass. That’s breaking down, but at one point and I think it was the dedication of those groups to the material that allowed the technical advances that have taken place over the last few decades and which have set the stage for glass being more widely available to artists who don’t necessarily want to spend two decades learning how to do it themselves. There’s an incredible knowledge base, facilities, and also just skill that’s out there to realize a wide variety of outcomes in glass that is perhaps unique to this moment, and wouldn’t have been possible without that really dedicated group of artists who are pioneering the techniques that are used today.
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