John Littleton

Kate Vogel and John Littleton talk about Bill Brown’s artists’ residency program and how it led to artists buying homes in the area. Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:03.

Kate Vogel: Okay. So I think of where I was at, I was talking about that Bill Brown started the residency program somewhere around 1965, early sixties. And that residency program was really core for building an amazing group of artists in our community. They came for approximately three years, and many of those people would buy a home after the residency was finished and build a studio and stay in the area. So that was sort of like a core group of really amazing artists. And then because of Penland School, we have people coming from all over the world here. They come both as teachers and students, and it keeps it a really vibrant, live community. During the summer, we often go up to Penland for the talks of the people who are teaching, so we can see what’s happening in all sorts of different fields, whether you’re talking about glass, ceramics, textiles—

John Littleton: Metal.

KV: —photography, even painters and drawing. So you just get this really—it’s an amazing exposure, and I think it just keeps our community really vibrant.

Kate Vogel and John Littleton discuss Bill Brown’s development of a glass community in North Carolina’s Southeast. Oral History Interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:42.

John Littleton (JL): Bill Brown had gone to the World Craft Council meeting in New York in 1964, I believe it was, and Dad [Harvey Littleton] had a furnace there. Bill saw it and said, ‘I’d like to get that for Penland,’ and Dad had promised the furnace to Haystack, [Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine] I believe.

Kate Vogel (KV): I think Bill also wasn’t ready for it yet that summer. I think he said, ‘I can’t do it this year, but I’d like to next year.’

JL: And so Dad helped get a studio built at Penland in ‘65, and that was fairly early on in the teaching glass to artists-craftsmen. It was a good start for the Southeast to have someone teaching glass.

KV: And I think it really built a glass community in the Southeast, probably; I mean, I say it, I don’t know that that’s absolutely true, but I really think that the Southeast and the area around the Penland was the first place in the country to have a studio glass, not like a factory glass or individuals, but actually a studio glass community that was working, and it was all about Penland. Penland also has gone through a number of changes up there. They’ve had three studios since their first studio, was basically—I don’t know if you know what homasote is, but it’s sort of like a composite board, that if you punched it or kicked it hard, you could put your hand through it. It’s usually like about an inch thick. The [inaudible] building had homasote walls and plastic over spaces that would be windows. It was pretty crude. It had a dirt floor in it. And then, at some point when they started teaching classes on a more regular basis that were focused on glass, we built a new place. And that was—wasn’t that the Bonnie Ford glass studio?

JL: I think so. Yeah.

KV: And that would have been—maybe in the seventies, sometime? And then in 1995 they built the present studio that they have and it actually opened during the Glass Art Society conference that was at Penland and Asheville. And I think another thing that’s really spectacular, Penland was the place that the Glass Art Society was founded and started. And I think that one of the things that Bill Brown really brought to Penland School was an openness to invite people in to do all sorts of different things. And if somebody had a crazy idea, he wouldn’t go, ‘Oh, no, that’s a bad idea. Don’t do it.’ He was much more open and would be like, ‘Yeah, figure it out, and then come back and tell me what you’re thinking.’ You know, he didn’t close the door on people. And so I think that there was a tremendous amount of creative activity that occurred up there that might’ve been either just not allowed someplace else or just never would have happened cause people wouldn’t have felt so comfortable and free to do whatever they thought was [laughs] interesting at the moment.

Kate Vogel and John Littleton talk about Harvey Littleton bringing glass to  universities. Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:53.

John Littleton (JL): Well, I think it was just that, in the beginning, Dad [Harvey Littleton] was so excited about actually being able to blow glass, and at the time he felt that it was a material for artists, as in, the action painting—that working with the glass, he felt like it was really important that the artist-designer handle the material itself. And so as he gained skill and the students gained skill, they all brought it back to each other so that they could improve together. There had been other artists working with glass in their own private studios, and there were certainly people in the industry that knew how to blow glass, but they didn’t share it. And that was—to me, that was the biggest difference. I think early on, maybe the second or so year that dad was blowing glass, he went off and did over thirty lectures or talks at university ceramic studios to introduce the idea. He knew that you had to get more people involved for it to grow. 

Kate Vogel (KV): When you look at—I mean, when I think about Harvey’s contribution, it wasn’t that there weren’t people who had ever worked with glass before, but it was that he brought it to university level and that he shared it openly across the board and got so many people involved. And I think that’s really the difference. I mean, if you look at people like Edris Eckhardt, who made incredible work, but she wasn’t out teaching and selling it—the concept of using it as an artistic material to other people. Or, I mean, there’s so many people in the field that you could look at that. I mean, even Dominick Labino who ended up being a champion of glass in the end, in the beginning, was very, very reserved about sharing his knowledge from industry. I mean, he had a hot shop set up in his own studio, but he wasn’t going to share the information. And he was involved with the first workshop as in, he came in after they were having all sorts of problems because someone had sent some of the wrong materials for the workshop. A lot of people go, ‘Oh, they didn’t know what they were doing, they were incompetent. They mixed bad formulas.’ That’s why Dominick had to step in. Well, Harvey had been melting formulas in his own studio since the late fifties, and had been doing fine with it. He had made quite a few pieces from it, but really where Dominic stepped in was making it possible for them to complete the workshop because—I can’t remember if it was the lime or something—

JL: There were a couple of materials that were substituted, and it didn’t work.

KV: And then it just wouldn’t melt well. Because if you look at the 475 marbles that Dominic shared with everyone, if you’re talking about a glassblowing material, it’s terrible; [JL laughs] It’s really horrible. But what it was, it was something that was readily accessible and really easy to use. But before that time, Dominick had not really been willing. I mean, he shared privately with Harvey some, but he did not share and did not teach in the early days.

Kate Vogel and John Littleton discuss West Coast glass and Havery Littleton’s connections with European glassmakers outside of Italy. Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:02.

Kate Vogel (KV): I think that the West Coast was much more influenced by the Italian style of glassmaking than the Southeast was. And part of that is both who Penland brought in as teachers, and also who Harvey had connections with. Harvey was much more connected with the Swedish and the German—maybe even some of the people from the Czech Republic. His stronger connections in the eighties were not with the Italian artists.  

John Littleton (JL): He was kicked out of all the studios in Murano. 

KV: Because of his name being Littleton, they were concerned about his connection to Corning, and his father’s reputation. Cause his father had been the chief—

JL: And that was in the late fifties, so—

KV: Yeah.

JL: He never really made the connections with the individuals in Italy, where he did with the individuals in Germany and in Sweden, and—

KV: Amsterdam and—

JL: Yeah, other places. 

KV: Yeah.

Kate Vogel and John Littleton talk about the importance of the Midwest to glass. Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:52.

Kate Vogel: And there’s been some pretty amazing people who have come out of Madison [University of Wisconsin-Madison] and, you know, the different schools in the Midwest over the years that have influenced people. I mean, if you start doing a—I don’t know what you want to call it, a family tree or whatever, and look at who was a student of who, the Midwest had a huge impact across the country. Because, I mean—people like Marvin Lipofsky, Mark Peiser is originally from the Midwest, he’s from Chicago area. I mean, if you look at how those people spread out across the country, whether they were teaching art or residents, or became part of a glass community someplace, it’s pretty significant. Pretty much in the early years, if you were involved with glass, you had some connection to the Midwest in some way.

John Littleton: Yes.

John Littleton and Kate Vogel discuss Harvey Littleton’s work. Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:27.

John Littleton (JL): For me, his style was hands on and reacting to the material in the moment of making. Most of the time—sometimes he’d add—after it cooled he’d do a lot of work with it and work with the properties of cold glass. So I think it was just his, his working with the material, mostly; but also, he’d have a vision of what he wanted as well. 

Kate Vogel (KV): And I think his work really changed and progressed. I mean, I think in the early years, most of the artists didn’t have access to a lot of color in a lot of their—their palette was pretty limited by the glass that they were blowing.

JL: They knew ceramics—chemicals and how to get color with ceramics. But they didn’t know the particulars of glass. 

KV: And so I think that they were much more experimenting with it strictly just as a material as it came out of the furnace. And just learning, ‘What can I do with it?’ So I think that there was that high level experimentation early on, and as I think as Harvey developed skills and started to understand what the possibilities for the glass were, I think that that influenced what he was doing with the glass and the ability to start working with color and thinking about layering it and playing with the way the light transferred through the glass. And I always find that there’s a really interesting correlation between the prints from glass plates that he made, and the actual pieces he was making in the hot shop with his glass, where the print he would be printing plates and primary—well, maybe not primary colors, but they could have been. So you might be printing one plate in red and one plate in yellow, and where the yellow and the red overlapped you got orange. And he was using very much that same sort of thing with his glass where he would have layers of glass and the inside color might be a red and he might overlay a yellow on it, and where the yellow didn’t overlap the red, it would stay pure, but where it did you would get more of an orange quality to it, and I think he really liked that idea that, in a sense it’s like mixing colors, but you weren’t mixing them. It was overlaying them and really working with that transparency to see how the colors interacted.

John Littleton and Kate Vogel discuss Harvey Littleton’s students getting teaching jobs.  Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:55.

John Littleton: In the early years, Dad’s [Harvey Littleton] students could pretty much—most any of them could get a job teaching.

Kate Vogel: So many students who had gone through college on the GI Bill, and there was a huge expansion of art departments during that time period in the sixties. And so there was a lot of places that were hiring teachers, where in the past there hadn’t been a lot of positions, and I think that some of it was the right time, the right place. So those people graduating from Madison [University of Wisconsin-Madison] with a degree in ceramics or glass, if they were one of Harvey’s grad students, he had the connections to help connect them with those people and encourage them. And he also was going around the country at that time, encouraging art departments to start a glass program. So if they wanted to start a glass program, he was the person that they would call and say, ‘Gosh, who do you recommend?’

John Littleton and Kate Vogel discuss the scarcity of equipment to early studio glass artists. Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:09.

John Littleton (JL): In the early years, there weren’t readily available equipment suppliers, so part of the development of the complexity and advances in the artwork that was produced was also tied in with—as better equipment became known, how to build it, where to get the materials, the controls—

Kate Vogel (KV): [Inaudible]

JL: —for the ovens. The first annealing was done in vermiculite. You just put that hot piece of glass in a bucket and covered it. 

KV: [Inaudible] 

JL: And as you got to making thicker and thicker pieces, that just didn’t work. You had to have controlled annealing and you had to know the theory of it, and all of that developed along with the idea of glass as an art material. So a better furnace, you could get better glass, you’d have more clarity. More knowledge about refraction and reflection in the glass, how to get a bright looking piece of glass instead of that green color [laughs] that the marbles had.

John Littleton and Kate Vogel explain Harvey Littleton’s “technique is cheap” quote. Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:58.

John Littleton: Well, I think the—Dad [Harvey Littleton] brought that into glass from the pottery field, and [clears throat] at some point, I think he rejected it, along with the idea that technique was cheap. You could go and find out how to do most anything. It was really your ideas and how—the artwork that you produced that became most important to him. So I think that his ideas had changed a little bit on that, at least from my point of view on it. 

Kate Vogel: I think there are—at the same time that his ideas may have changed, as far as—I think people oftentimes get the ‘technique is cheap’ a little bit backwards, in that they think that Harvey didn’t think that it was important to have any skills, and I don’t think that was at all about that. I think for him it was really, the ideas have to come first, because you’re going to have all the skills you want in the world, but if you don’t have any ideas that doesn’t get you anywhere.

Kate Vogel and John Littleton discuss Harvey Littleton’s emphasis on  understanding materials and making your own equipment. Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:16.

Kate Vogel: And I think, at the same time, one of the things that I think has also driven a lot of innovation and a lot of artist’s ability in glass to do some amazing things was building their own equipment, really understanding the materials, melting their own glass, because then you could build the equipment to make a very specific piece, or you could change your glass formula to get a certain quality, and Harvey did all of those things. So even though—and in the end he sort of like said, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ I don’t think he disregarded it, and I don’t think he would have created the work he did if he hadn’t have dug in so deep and done everything. And I think a piece of it was, it was a necessity though as well, because there wasn’t someplace he could go out and buy a furnace. There wasn’t some place that he could buy a lot of the equipment, so he made do or made his own. And I think he also was always very interested in innovation, so he had an electric furnace in his studio long before people thought that was the thing to do.

John Littleton: In the mid-seventies, yeah. Maybe even early seventies.

John Littleton discusses his father Harvey Littleton’s persistence. Oral history interview with  Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:05.

John Littleton: Oh gosh. Well, I think he was persistent; he was at the right place at the right time. He had enough background in glass with my grandfather being at Corning Glass Works [Corning, New York], and some of—there were some contacts through Corning that helped out along the way. But he also believed that you needed enough people doing it, making glass with the artistic intent that was part of his mode of operation. That was part of what he wanted to achieve. So, I think all those things came together, and, at the same time there were others who were experimenting with glass, but they didn’t put it all together the same way. And I think that that’s what really made dad successful with his aims to make glass a part of the university art departments and part of the world as we see it today anyway.

Kate Vogel and John Littleton discuss Harvey Littleton as a “convener of people.” Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:30.

Kate Vogel (KV): I also think Harvey was an amazing convener of people. So whether it was in his teaching capacity when he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—I mean, he got NEA grants to do a coldworking workshop and brought in engravers from Corning and from all over. And when it was printing, he would bring together printers—master printers to come and print at his print shop. Or he was—when we worked in Harvey’s studio, he was inviting people in from all over the world. So he had [Andries Dirk] Copier who is a master designer at Leerdam [outside of Amsterdam].

John Littleton (JL): In Holland.

KV: Come in—come and work at a studio or he had Erwin Eisch coming and working in his studio or Dale Chihuly came and—

JL: Raoul Goldoni came, yeah. 

KV: —and having those kinds of—bringing those kinds of people to the community—and when he had them, he didn’t just invite them in and like close the door and it was just himself and those, he would invite the other artists in the community to come and meet these people and spend time with them. Or he opened his studio to people like Billy and Katie Bernstein, or Rob Levin or Kenny Carder, or any of the people who work for him and said, ‘Oh, you need coldworking equipment? Come and use my cold working equipment. Come and do your coldworking here until you can afford your own equipment.’ So he created a place where people made connections with other people, and were able to really learn from it. And, you know, it was just an exchange of knowledge and also of just building relationships. So many of the people who met Erwin Eisch went and taught at Frauenau at Bild-werk. And I think that many of the people who might have met—so the Valkemas [Sybren and Vernonique] who would come and visit your mom and dad, who were really dear friends of theirs, they helped—because of John’s parents were friends with their children or their child, their one child and his wife. And that’s—

JL: [inaudible] Sybren also started a glass program at the Reitveld Academie in Amsterdam. 

KV: So I think that you have that sort of—being a convener, being a connector is part of what made his impact so strong, is that he was always pulling in other people. Like if you came to visit him [laughs], you had to go out to lunch with him, and he would basically hold court in a sense over lunch and any other artists or anybody who walked in, he would always like, ‘Oh, you should come join us for lunch at the restaurant. You should come join us.’ Because he really thrived on that. And I think when he quit blowing glass, part of the reason that he—besides the fact that he loved the idea that printing from glass plates with something that was cutting edge and somebody else wasn’t doing, he also thrived on the activity of having people come to the studio and produce additions with his master printer, cause he could come in and be involved in it. And it gave him that continued community that he could, in a sense, lecture to [laughs], but also just like share what they were excited about with what they were discovering and what they were learning. And his print studio was run very much the way he ran his teaching process in that it was considered to be collaborative. When you came in, the idea was you would bring your ideas, your techniques, and you would collaborate with the master printer and he—the, the studio kept the plates. They would be canceled when the addition was completed. It wasn’t to be printed from again, but he wanted those plates to stay there so that they could be used as a teaching tool so the next artist who came in, so that they could actually look at how the plate was created, and understand what they had learned from the last printer who was there.