Carey Hedlund

Former Penland archivist Carey Hedlund discusses the Penland School of Craft’s influence. Oral history interview with Carey Hedlund by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, October 2, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:42.

Carey Hedlund: You know, Penland truly is important to glass and it is the first working small-scale studio except in university settings, so it’s the first place where this kind of immersive workshop starts taking place in a glass studio that was built in ‘65. So very early. So they’re using glass cullet early on and they are the cowboys of glass. They are inventing it as they go in the late sixties and early seventies. So all of the names, you know [Mark] Peiser and [Richard] Ritter, Harvey Littleton, I mean it was his student from the Midwest who came and built a studio and then taught our first classes—so Bill Boysen who later went on to SIU [Southern Illinois University School of Art and Design]. I mean, Penland is kind of the hub of the wheel in so many ways for studio glass at its inception. And I think it’s partially the atmosphere and partially, you know, it’s not academic, they’re working in a studio. You know, Bill Brown was the director from 1962 up until the early eighties and he really created that kind of atmosphere here. He opened the studios 24 hours a day. He brought in university instructors from all over the country and in some cases from around the world. So there were international glass instructors here by the seventies.