Image courtesy of Ken Carder.

Ken Carder

North Carolina–based artist Ken Carder (1955– ) studied art at Bowling Green State University before relocating to North Carolina to focus on glass in 1981. After working as an assistant to Harvey Littleton for three years, Carder was an artist-in-residence at the Penland School of Craft from 1984 to 1988, a position that helped launch his career as a full-time studio artist.

Works

Black and Blue Clown, 2016. Glass. H: 23.5 in, W:10 in, D: 6.5 in. Image courtesy of Ken Carder.

New Taboo Front View, 2012. Glass. H: 23.0 in, W: 11.5 in, D: 9 in. Image courtesy of Ken Carder.

New Taboo Back View, 2012. Glass. H: 23 in, W: 11.5 in, D: 9 in. Image courtesy of Ken Carder.

Ken Carder discusses the high concentration of glass artists at Penland and in the surrounding area.

Playing01:00 Transcript
Ken Carder

Ken Carder discusses the high concentration of glass artists at Penland and in the surrounding area. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:00.

Ken Carder: The glass community, there was a large number of private studios in this area, you know, per capita, in relation to the population, there was probably no more—a higher concentration of glass artists in anywhere. And, as a young glass artist hungry to develop my own original ideas, but to be able to feed off of all these other people that are there also pursuing original ideas and developing techniques. It was extraordinary. I mean, it still is—the Penland area and Mitchell and Yancey County, North Carolina, I think are—I mean, it’s just, there’s a vast number of very creative people in that part of the world, you know, and it’s—you can you can trace most of that back to Penland School. I mean, it’s just—you’re talking generations deep now.

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Ken Carder talks about William and Sally Worcester’s role in Penland’s flameworking workshop.

Playing00:37 Transcript
Ken Carder

Ken Carder talks about William and Sally Worcester’s role in Penland’s Flameworking Workshop. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:37.

Ken Carder: They were teaching—you know, they would have been coming from Hawaii, and I don’t know if they would have came from Hawaii just for the workshop. And they used to teach on a regular basis at Penland, and they would teach—you know, if they came from Hawaii they would usually teach at least a two-week class. And I think they also taught a spring or fall concentration, which is generally an eight to ten week class—because depending on what the dates of the workshop were, Bill and Sally—I’m guessing they were there teaching, and Paul came down and did a one week workshop.

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Ken Carder talks about the paperweight set-up Stankard demonstrated in his flameworking workshop.

Playing01:30 Transcript
Ken Carder

Ken Carder talks about the paperweight set-up Stankard demonstrated in his flameworking workshop. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:30.

Ken Carder: I mean, he was able to place these figures or things that he lampworked into this tray, or into the little cylinder there. And it had a—you know, you can see where the vacuum pump is attached to the bottom. And it was graphite, and the graphite was perforated with these holes of different sizes and things depending, I guess, on the complexity of the figure and the motif. And it was preheated, so it wouldn’t—the figurine or anything wouldn’t crack, so it was warmed up, so when he hit it with the hot glass it wouldn’t crack. And, you know, it was preheated. Looking at the dial there looks like it’s probably set at about four and a half, or something like that, maybe. I’m not sure. But anyways, he set it on this hot plate and preheated it, and then he took the glass and got it, you know, really hot and runny, and dropped it in there and hit the vacuum pump and it sort of vacuum packed the figure into the glass and it evacuated the vast majority of the air through the bottom. You know, it was sucked out.

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Ken Carder discusses the image [above] showing a cylinder that came out of a paperweight mold during the flameworking workshop.

Playing00:30 Transcript
Ken Carder

Ken Carder discusses the image [above] showing a cylinder that came out of a paperweight mold during the flameworking workshop. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:30.

Ken Carder: And this is what I was just explaining a moment earlier. You see how Paul is holding the bottom stick, and there is glass on the end of it? That was the cylinder that came out of the graphite mold, and I don’t know, that might have been shaped just a little bit after, but it looks pretty close to the cylinder. And then more hot glasses is being applied to the bottom at that point.

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Ken Carder talks about why he attended Paul Stankard’s flameworking workshop.

Playing01:14 Transcript
Ken Carder

Ken Carder talks about why he attended Paul Stankard’s flameworking workshop. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:14.

Ken Carder: Well, it was—you know, anytime you can expand your knowledge about a material, it seems to have advantages, so. I think it was one, it was the mystery of seeing how this could be done, you know, encapsulating these three-dimensional figures in hot glass without trapping—or trapping a very minimal amount of air. That was for me, you know, a great mystery. And the other thing was, at that point, I don’t think I had met Paul [Stankard]. In fact, I don’t recall, you know, I mean—we were all showing at—there wasn’t a huge amount of galleries and a number of us showed at similar galleries, so that there’s a chance, but at that point, I don’t think I had met Paul. I’m sure Mark [Peiser] probably had known Paul at that point. And I knew of his work, obviously, but I don’t think we’d actually met, maybe, and things. So the other part of it was just, you know, to meet Paul Stankard.

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Ken Carder talks about being invited to work with Harvey Littleton.

Playing03:00 Transcript
Ken Carder

Ken Carder talks about being invited to work with Harvey Littleton. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:00.

Ken Carder: I went to school as an art student and didn’t get involved with glass until after I’d been in school on and off for a few years, and when I got interested in glass I had an opportunity actually to come down and work for Billy and Katie Bernstein—William and Katherine Bernstein for a summer kind of thing. So I left Bowling Green, Ohio and it came down to work for Billy and Katie as a apprentice, I guess you’d call it, and I worked there for three or four months, and before I was going to return back to Ohio, we went to Harvey’s studio to do cold working, because at the time a lot of the small studios, independent studios, around that part of North Carolina didn’t have really good cold shops for cutting and grinding. Everybody could blow glass but they didn’t have very good facilities for cutting and polishing and things. So a lot of people would go up to Harvey’s. Harvey was generous enough to let people come into his studio and use their cold shops. So Billy and I drove up about a half hour drive or so from where they lived over by Celo Lake [North Carolina]. We came up to Harvey’s studio to cold work and Harvey was was was in a ruckus about me wanting to get find a printmaker because his printmaker—he just started this process of printing off of glass plates was going to be leaving, and Billy introduced me and my last name is Carder, C-R-D-R, and Harvey got a big kick out of that because Frederick Carder was the gentleman that started Steuben and I think Harvey actually probably knew Fredrick Carder when Harvey was quite young. And he wanted to know what I knew about printmaking and I’d taken a couple printmaking classes, and I had done a lot of drawing so I knew a little bit about paper, so he hired me as a printmaker and this was huge because I had just gotten introduced to glass basically not much more than a year before, and I was really really interested to it and things, so the next thing I know I’m—you know, hired to work for Harvey Littleton, and I hadn’t even finish my undergrad degree and had only about a year or so experiencing glass—maybe just a little over a year, and then the next thing I know I’m in North Carolina working at Harvey’s studio and the printmaker ended up not leaving, so—her name was Sandy, Sandy Wilcox. She stayed and Harvey didn’t need two printmakers, so he put me in cold shop and then eventually into the hot shop, and I had some carpentry skills so I ended up being involved with building a new print studio, and that was this huge door that opened for me, because all of a sudden I’m working in Harvey’s studio and there’s these fantastic international visiting artists coming by to work and do prints and being in the hot shop, and it was close to proximity to Penland and there was a community of glass artists that were former residents at Penland: Mark Peiser and Katie and Billy Bernstein and Rob Levin and Steve Edwards and Harvey’s son John [Littleton] and daughter-in-law Kate [Vogel], you know, were in the area.

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Glass artist Ken Carder discusses the importance of the Penland School of Craft as an “environmental utopia.”

Playing01:55 Transcript
Ken Carder

Ken Carder discusses the importance of the Penland School of Craft as an “environmental utopia.” Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:55.

Ken Carder: Oh, it’s just, you know, you could go on for hours about why Penland’s important. Especially its involvement of Bill and Jane Brown in the early sixties and things it coincided with the resurrection of traditional craft materials coupled with the whole sixties idea of a certain type of independent thinking and what was happening in art schools around the country and what was happening with a younger population around the world essentially. You know, and Penland was this very idealistic place in the mountains of North Carolina where the surroundings were absolutely beautiful. And then you have an environment that’s basically a creative utopia. You know, where you got people working in all these different materials, and building equipment to work with these materials and the technology was being developed from the ground up, you know [laughs] literally from the dirt up, and it was a very inspiring environment, because when you get that many different creative minds in a very small location, things really bubble up and sparks fly and and it’s just amazing things that can happen, and that, you know, started in the sixties. So by the time I got there in the early eighties, it was a creative force to be reckoned with, you know, there was so much things going on in ceramics and metalworking and iron working and glass, and there was, you know, people that were working in photography and it was just a super creative environment.

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Ken Carder discusses the importance of Bill Brown’s artists’ residency program at Penland.

Playing02:36 Transcript
Ken Carder

Ken Carder discusses the importance of Bill Brown’s artists’ residency program at Penland. Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:35.

Ken Carder: Let me mention one more thing—Bill Brown created this artist-in-residency idea at Penland, and it was—basically, the foundation of it was to bridge between working with a material and trying to develop that material to a point where you could sustain your livelihood from working with ceramics, or working with glass, or metals. It was a way—the residency program was a period where you could live and stay at Penland and build equipment and develop your skills and try to find in established markets where you could sustain your lifestyle being a creative craft artist. And when I say craft, it’s not necessarily—it’s just describing what would at that time been considered craft disciplines—weaving, ceramics, glass, metals, woodworking, things that we associate with like traditional vocabulary of craft and stuff. But that residency program was this grace period between either, you know, undergrad, grad school or whatever you were doing prior, if your goal was to be a working artist and sustain your lifestyle as a working artist, Bill had this vision where if you could give people that little break right there at the beginning and they were in a very creative environment where they could sort of network out and develop their work to a point where it was interesting and accomplished, then they could get over that hump. And once they got things started they could keep it rolling, and he was instrumental in that, and people that came through that decided to stay in the area because you know, but that point you’re a little spoiled because it’s a beautiful environment, but it’s also a very creative environment. And at the time land and property was still rural, western North Carolina, so the property values were not as inflated as they were in a lot of the more developed urban areas around the country and things, so it was very affordable also to stay in that area, and so a lot of people did. And then, you know, once those seeds were planted they grew. 

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