Courtesy of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

Cybele Maylone

Cybele Maylone (1980– ) is the executive director of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. A non-collecting institution located in Ridgefield, Connecticut, The Aldrich was one of the first contemporary art museums in the country and is today one of the oldest. Prior to leading The Aldrich, Maylone spent five years as the executive director of UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, New York, overseeing the organization’s expansion and reopening in 2013. She has also held positions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and apexart.

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Cybele Maylone discusses UrbanGlass’s Brooklyn facilities.

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Cybele Maylone discusses UrbanGlass’s Brooklyn facilities. Oral history interview with Cybele Maylone, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:00.

Cybele Maylone: Yeah, so it looks like nothing else, and I think that’s always a joy for us to bring new people and artists into the studio because most people have never seen anything quite like it. So in some ways—kind of our origin story is still very much the story of the organization. UrbanGlass still serves this very basic need in New York City of making a material that is otherwise totally inaccessible, accessible to a really broad range of artists and the public. And—so our studio is 17,000 square feet. It is on the third floor of a former theater in Fort Greene or downtown Brooklyn, and then we also have about a 3,000 square foot gallery and store on our ground floor. And the studio has designated spaces that serve artists making work and really variety of—wide variety of glassmaking techniques. So we have a very large studio and a very large portion of that is dedicated to glassblowing. Of course, glassblowing is the type of making that has the greatest physical barrier for entry and some of the other things that artists do in our studio can be done in private studios more easily. So we have a professional glassblowing studio which has two—I can get super technical, you tell me when this gets boring—two thousand-pound furnaces and six glory holes, and then we have a student glassblowing studio, which has four glory holes and about a 700-pound furnace that uses recycled glass. We have a flat shop, which is home to artists making work in stained glass, imagery, any sort of kind of two-dimensional form of making. We have a cold shop with a wide variety of equipment dedicated to finishing, polishing, and engraving. We have a kiln studio with 11 kilns of a variety of shapes and sizes. We have a mold making studio with lots of equipment for plaster and wax mold making. We have a flameworking in neon studio, which supports artists doing everything from bead making to sculpture and neon.

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Former UrbanGlass Executive Director Cybele Maylone discusses NYEGW’s founding and early days.

02:01 Transcript

Cybele Maylone discusses NYEGW’s founding and early days. Oral history interview with Cybele Maylone, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:01.

Cybele Maylone: So UrbanGlass was started in 1977 as the New York Experimental Glass Workshop [New York, New York] and it was started by three individuals: Eric Erickson, who was primarily a stained glass artist; Richard Yelle and Joe Upham, who were recent—I believe they had both gone to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design [Boston, Massachusetts] and then Richard Yelle had received an MFA from RISD [Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island]. And Richard moved to New York and met Eric in, I believe, a stained glass class at Parsons [Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, New York] and had this brilliant idea that artists like himself needed to have an opportunity to make work in glass in New York. And that even at that point in the late seventies, real estate was expensive and complicated and equipment, of course, was expensive and difficult to use. And so—he really saw this opportunity, a need to start an organization. And so Joe comes in because he has equipment in Boston, and so he drives equipment down; and by equipment, I mean—I believe he actually drove a furnace down from Boston. And they originally set up what was, at the time, the New York Experimental Glass Workshop in the back of Clayworks [Clayworks Studio Workshop, New York, New York], which was an organization that serves to do a very similar type—provide very similar services to the clay community, and it was located on Great Jones Street. So Experimental was in the back of Clayworks and a woman named Rose Slivka who was an important part of that organization and was one of the earliest board members of Experimental. She also started Craft Horizons. So when Experimental kind of comes about, it really is thanks, I think, in large part to Clayworks, and Richard Yelle eventually became executive director kind of of both organizations. And then in ‘81, I believe, Experimental needs more and more space and moves to Mulberry Street. And for its first time has its own space.

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