Image courtesy of Mary Shaffer. Photo: Mary van Klein.

Mary Shaffer

Sculptor Mary Shaffer (1947– ) began her career as a painter, earning a BFA in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1965 and an MFA in painting from the University of Maryland in 1987. She began experimenting with glass in the early 1970s and is well known for developing a process for bending plate glass that she called “mid-air slumping.” Her sculptures combine such elements as wire, metal, and found objects with folded or draped clear glass layers. Shaffer taught at several academic institutions, including Wellesley College, New York University, and the California College of the Arts, as well as lecturing in over 40 museums.

Works

Couple I, 1979. Slumped glass with wire. H: 70 in, W: 32 in, D: 10 in. Image courtesy of Mary Shaffer.

Manifold, 2020. Hot glass with found autopart. H: 39 in, W: 42 in, D: 29 in. Image courtesy of Mary Shaffer.

Nail Pillow, 1972. Slumped and fused glass. H: 16 in, W: 16 in, D: 10 in. Image courtesy of Mary Shaffer.

Mary Shaffer discusses being reviewed in fine art magazines and being considered a conceptual artist.

Playing0:47 Transcript
Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer discusses being reviewed in fine art magazines and being considered a conceptual artist. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:47.

Mary Shaffer: I was more of a conceptual artist there. I was showing in main art galleries like the OK Harris Gallery [New York, New York] and the Warren Benedek Gallery [New York, New York] and being written about by Art News and stuff like that, so I was not—I was in the glass world, but I was also in the other world. I had my foot in both. So I didn’t, and I wasn’t—people in the craft world wanted to sell their work. I didn’t really care if I sold it or not. I mean, I needed the money. In 1977, I lived on four thousand dollars supporting two children—so I obviously needed money then, but it wasn’t my primary purpose.

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Mary Shaffer discusses Pilchuck’s origins.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer discusses Pilchuck’s origins. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:03.

Mary Shaffer: So Dale [Chihuly] had the idea, just like Richard Yelle wanted to start up a public glass place, Dale had the idea of starting a glass school to be near his mother, because his mother lived in Seattle, and she—you know, his brother had died when he was quite young. So my husband Hardu [Keck] helped him write the proposal along with another RISD professor, both of those together—I forget his name offhand—helped Dale write the stuff. And we would tell Dale little tricks like, ‘Oh, always fly—’ I would say, God, because my father was a captain for Pan-American, so I would get to fly first class and I would sit next to these amazing people that would usually offer me a job. And so I said, ‘Dale, fly first class, you really meet a lot of people that can help you.’ So anyhow, that was one thing that he did and he did get a lot of connections that way, but. So Pilchuck was started, as you probably know, because a lot of other people know it better, and they made their own houses—and Toots [Zynsky] was one of the students that went out with him, and Buster Simpson was there. Fritz Dreisbach was there. A bunch of people you probably know. I think Dan Dailey was one of the early people out there—so they went out and they built their houses, their little houses out of leftover materials and started this glass school, which was fantastic. And then once it really got going with more money and more space, then he decided he wanted to upscale it. So that’s when he decided he wanted to have visiting artists there that would do their own work. So that was great.

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Mary Shaffer discusses sexism in early study glass.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer discusses sexism in early study glass. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:00.

Mary Shaffer: I wanted to say the macho aspect. For instance, Life magazine came and wanted to take pictures of different glass people and what they were doing. It was pretty cool. I think there were five of us. I was the only woman and I told them, I said, ‘Well, go out and see Dale Chihuly at Pilchuck, but be sure you get a picture of Billy [William] Morris with his shirt off’—[laughs] and that’s exactly what they did because, you know, God, I mean, he was just a hunk of a man. You know, he looked great. And so anyhow, they did that and Billy Morris was that. So there was a lot of macho stuff. I didn’t have to experience it because first of all, I was not in the market as a married woman with children—and I didn’t have to blow with a team or anything like that. So I was independent in my studio working with my own kilns. And so I didn’t experience that, but other women, I’m sure did. You know—and I think that the trouble is, I think there’s still, as you all probably know, there’s sexism and there’s ageism—and I definitely am experiencing ageism now, and sexism. There are shows that I’ve been in for 20 years and they’ll include the guys but they won’t include the older women. It’s really annoying. But anyhow, I think it was probably very hard, and then some really strong women started appearing that could lift as much as men, and they—they did really well. Unfortunately, some of them haven’t had the staying power that I would have expected of them, and some of them have gone off and made other kinds of work or have just been on the side.

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Mary Shaffer talks about being a Wheaton fellow at the same time as Lino Tagliapietra.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer talks about being a Wheaton fellow at the same time as Lino Tagliapietra. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:23.

Mary Shaffer: Okay. Wheaton Village was really important. It was important to me because I’d had a fire in my house, so I didn’t have a place to work and they invited me to be a visiting artist. And Jane Bruce was there, I think she’s the one that either taught me—I think she taught me how to polish glass, which was amazing. And Lino [Tagliapietra] was there. I mean that was a very important time for, I think all of us that were there. Lino was just starting out here, and I think Wheaton Village continues to be that, because they have these residencies where artists can go and work and have free materials and a free place to live. So—I mean that was a very important kind of center for people.

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Mary Shaffer discusses the importance of the Europeans in the studio glass movement.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer discusses the importance of the Europeans in the studio glass movement. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:07.

Mary Shaffer: I don’t think that in the early days, we really knew about the European art. I mean, people started going—we knew about Erwin Eisch, of course, and [Harvey] Littleton because together they started the American Glass movement. Littleton wouldn’t have done it on his own. He went to Europe and met Erwin Eisch, and Erwin Eisch’s father owned a glass factory and had a kiln, and anytime artists go to visit Erwin—who is a real artist, he’s a painter and a poet, not just a glassmaker—he would say, ‘Hey, do you want to play in the kiln?’ And so he and Littleton would say, ‘Wouldn’t this be a great idea to have individual kilns that artists could play in?’ And that’s how it really happened. And Harvey told me the same thing that it would not have happened without Erwin. You know, so they both told me the same stuff, but I don’t think we knew the Europeans then. Dale started going to Italy and people started going to Italy to improve their glassblowing skills. To Venice.

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Mary Shaffer talks about her experiences with sharing in early studio glass.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer talks about her experiences with sharing in early studio glass. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:43.

Mary Shaffer: I think that my influence towards others was probably stronger because it was conceptual and now there’s a lot of people internationally that are making great conceptual work. So I think because the glass world in the early days really was vessel and object-oriented and I wasn’t, as you can tell if I wanted my pieces to explode—[laughs] I probably didn’t care about the object, per se, but—yeah, I think we were just sharing ideas and techniques and as I said, I was more of a teacher to a lot of those young people in the beginning.

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Mary Shaffer talks about her connection with glass artists in the Czech Republic.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer talks about her connection with glass artists in the Czech Republic. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:44.

Mary Shaffer: I got a grant from Wellesley [in 1979] because I was teaching painting at Wellesley, and they gave me a grant and then I went to the Czech Republic and wrote an article about it for—do you know the name Rose Slivka? Yeah, well, she started a magazine—International Craft, I think it was called, or something very much like that. She was an editor for Craft Mag—for Craft Horizons, and then she went on to start her own magazine, and it was called International something or other. The fir—her first publication, I wrote an article for it about traveling to the Czech Republic and meeting all these different artists and stuff. And then I gave a lecture at The Corning Museum of Glass [Corning, New York] on the Czech artists. And I think that was a really important thing too. There were the Venetians teaching glassblowing techniques, and then the Czech artists, because they were subjugated by the Russians. Their work became abstract because through abstract art you can give ideas. You can share concepts in a different way than you can with a vessel. A vessel is a vessel. It’s either beautiful, or perfect or whatever, but abstract art has a way of being able to carry ideas and the Czech artists at that time, like Marian Karel and Dana Zámečníková, if that’s how you say her name, and [Václav] Cigler. They were making conceptual work and it was pretty fantastic, and so I think that was also a big influence. 

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Mary Shaffer discusses the Corning ‘79 exhibition and its international artists.

Playing01:50 Transcript
Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer discusses the Corning ‘79 exhibition and its international artists. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:45.

Mary Shaffer: Well, that was earlier. Exhibition—oh, that was an incredible—that was done by Bill [William] Warmus and he’s actually doing a report on that now and that was ’79. The Corning show was like the first show where Americans glassmakers from all across the country got to meet each other, like Marvin Lipofsky and people on the East Coast, the West Coast. And we all met each other. And international ones and that’s when I was first introduced in ‘79 to these Czech artists that I then went to visit [a year] later because I had this grant and could go. And [Stanislov] Libenský was amazing. I mean, he was such a big influence on people and still is. I mean I think Lino [Tagliapietra] is the pretty glass. The virtuoso kind of thing. And Libenský was much more of a sculptor and concept—he wasn’t a conceptual artist, but I’m sure you know his pieces—those last pieces he made, the angels. I mean, he was sick. You know, he had this bad, bad cancer and he was making these angels of death which were so powerful. You know, even before he realized, and his wife realized that he was sick and they both became very close friends of mine. I met them and stayed with them and he said, ‘Mary, I love your work. I want you to come here,’ and actually after he died, [Jaroslava] Brychtová [his wife] said, ‘Why don’t you take over our studio?’ You know, ‘Why don’t you come here, live here, and take over the studio?’ I mean, what an opportunity—but I never had enough money to do stuff like that.

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Mary Shaffer discusses how Hardu Keck introduced Dale Chihuly to Italo Scanga.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer discusses how Hardu Keck introduced Dale Chihuly to Italo Scanga. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:58.

Mary Shaffer: You wanted to know about Hardu Keck, K-E-C-K, which was my first and only husband, former husband, he’s dead now, and he and I introduced—because I loved to cook and still do and have people all the time for dinner. And, and so we introduced Dale and Italo [Scanga]—at a dinner at our house—and they became really, really close friends. You know, and Hardu actually spoke at Italo’s funeral—and I just got a really nice letter from Italo’s kids wanting me to identify people in a photograph. So that was Bruce, Bruce Helander and in fact, people in this photograph ‘cause he ran the Provincetown Arts Center—one summer and everybody came out. Italo came out. I don’t think Dale came out, but Italo was there, Bruce Helander, who writes art criticism for The Huffington Post. He was in that photograph. Anyhow, let’s see. Yeah, no, Italo was an important person in the glass world—because he started using tools. He used glass. He loved to play in the hot shop and he was good. And then they started blowing these vases for him that he would put in front of his paintings. You know, these sort of installations, and he was very influential because—he was just so out there. I mean, I would be walking down the street in Providence, Rhode Island, a public street with traffic going to both the directions and he would be on the opposite side. He would drive his car across traffic—go up on the sidewalk and say, ‘Hey, Mary, how are you doing?’ That was Italo. You know? Wonderful.

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Mary Shaffer talks about Dale Chihuly’s impact.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer talks about Dale Chihuly’s impact. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:14.

Mary Shaffer: And Dale was so generous. I mean, you talk to anybody—there was a guy in the Czech Republic and I said, ‘What are you doing here?’—he was going through my notebook, looking at all my drawings—and said, ‘What are you doing here? How can you afford to be here?’ He said, ‘Oh, Dale pays my salary. I’m just here to keep an eye on things.’ You know, I mean, that was incredible, and or—right in the beginning, I said to somebody, ‘God, what a great coat.’ He said, ‘Oh, Dale gave it to me.’ You know, I think it was—not Billy [William] Morris, but the other one that helped him so much—Richard Royal. I mean, that was the difference. And still is, ‘cause I went out to work at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma [Washington] I think two years ago, I’m not sure. And there were people coming that were there that had been invited there from, say, France or something, and Dale had said, ‘Oh, you know, just bring all your work. We’ll pack everything for you.’ You know, I mean, it’s just a great generosity.

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Mary Shaffer talks about the camaraderie in the developing studio glass movement.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer talks about the camaraderie in the developing studio glass movement. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:11.

Mary Shaffer: I mean nobody had been in a hot glass shop before, and so when you went in, there’s this huge noise and all the air and everything like that, it was just energy—and everybody was young and it was like, everybody was just running in all these different directions like Karla Trinkley and all these early people that you can probably see in that original book, the Corning [The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York] show in ‘79. You know, everybody was just trying different stuff. [Jon] Kuhn was making little rocks—you know? Everybody was just having fun and nobody was stepping on anybody’s toes or really copying anybody so—because of course, I didn’t know Sydney Cash’s wire work—so anyhow, there were some—a little bit of copying, but not really. Everybody was fresh. And huge energy and so much fun. I mean, I was at a show in—what was it, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I was going down the escalator and Marvin Lipofsky was going up the other side. And he yells at me, ‘Mary, would you come to California and talk to my students?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ you know. And so everybody was so open—and Joel Philip Myers who made these beautiful little black vases—invited me out to talk to students and I talked to so many—like John Luebtow, I don’t know if you know who that is, but he’s a sculptor that works with glass. I mean, I talked to him when he was a student. But he wasn’t at RISD, and I talked to Steven Weinberg—and to his other friend, [William] Carlson. They were both students—and I went out and lectured to them and showed them my work and talked to them, and talked to them about their work. They were students when I met them. So I was moving all around doing that, but it was so open—everybody was sharing, everybody was open, everybody was intermingling. And I think glass—GAS—the Glass Arts Society conferences. I think it’s still that way. Young people recognize each other, they know each other, they work together. You know, it’s fantastic. I mean, and it’s so open, and that was really what was going on way back then.

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Mary Shaffer talks about John Brekke’s outdoor demonstration at NYU.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer talks about John Brekke’s outdoor demonstration at NYU. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:46.

Mary Shaffer: At New York University, we did a street—well, the first day when I was teaching there, my department chair came in and said, ‘We’re not giving you any of our students. You have to go find your own.” Which was a shock, cause classes started, like, in a week. So anyhow, one of the things I did to get students was with John Brekke, who was at Bent Glass in Queens, he worked there sometimes, he and I built this small furnace. A portable small furnace. And we had it on the streets of New York, and we actually—or he actually—taught people how to blow glass. Anybody could come up and he would show them how to blow glass. And that was promotion for my classes.

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Mary Shaffer talks about Marvin Lipofsky’s personality.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer talks about Marvin Lipofsky’s personality. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:31.

Mary Shaffer: But in the beginning he was sort of an open, loud-speaking man, and he would sit [laughs] in the back of the lecture, no matter who was giving the lecture, and he would heckle the person—he would do this at GAS conferences. He’d yell out, ‘That’s not right!’ you know. [laughs] But he did leave an incredible collection to Corning. He kept everything. You know, he kept every single piece of paper, everything. Which was pretty amazing.

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Mary Shaffer talks about identifying herself as a sculptor.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer talks about identifying herself as a sculptor. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:04.

Mary Shaffer: I think of myself as a sculptor. I didn’t grow up through the craft. I wasn’t taught a craft. I wasn’t taught how to blow glass or work with glass. I was a painter—a painting student, and studied with different painters in my early life, and that’s what I studied at RISD was painting and illustration. So I’ve always thought of myself as an artist, not a craftsperson, and so I think of myself as a sculptor and people say, ‘Oh, you’re a glass sculptor,’ which is fine with me, because I’m known for developing midair slumping, and the thing is that I—it was my only tangible work because I worked in conceptual art, my work would be put up, put in a box and it would not be visible. So the only tangible work I made was the glass work. That’s why a lot of people think of me as a glass artist, because that was the tangible work.

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Mary Shaffer discusses how she got involved with slumping through a suggestion by Fritz Driesbach at RISD.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer discusses how she got involved with slumping through a suggestion by Fritz Driesbach at RISD. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:20.

Mary Shaffer: So [Wassily] Kandinsky is very important to me. He back painted on glass. I went to an art school where I learned so many different techniques—not an art school, high school. We would do theoretical classes in the morning and so-called practical classes in the afternoon, like wood carving, sewing, making patterns, working with wood, building things. And so I had a lot of hands-on experience with stuff like that, so we did watercolors, and watercolors are amazing because it’s like back painting on glass. The first mark you put down is the mark you see. You can’t fix it. So I was interested in windows and window light and I wanted to paint on an undulating surface. So I was making wooden structures in my basement studio at my house. And we were very generous. A lot of people stayed at our house. [Dale] Chihuly went on a sabbatical, a mini-sabbatical and Fritz Dreisbach came to take over the glass department, and so he lived in our basement. And when he saw these wooden frames that I was trying to make, he said, ‘Mary, why don’t you bend glass?’ And I said, ‘Well, how do you do that?’ and he said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I think they use sand or something.’ So I started working with bending glass, and Toots Zynsky was a student there, and also would babysit for me, and she was using the kiln, so she would regulate the kilns at first, and then Therman Statom gave me a little kiln. He stole the kiln from RISD and gave it to me as a present, so I took it into my painting studio and every day that I went to paint I would make a small piece in this kiln. It only took about four or five minutes. And it was amazing because nobody was slumping then, that we knew about. Nobody knew that Sydney Cash was doing stuff, so everything I made in this little kiln was like brand-new, so that was really intriguing to me. And I call these tiny little pieces that were like, two to three inches high, test drawings. I thought of them as drawings even though they were small sculptures, and that became the basis of a lot of my future work.

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Mary Shaffer discusses Sydney Cash’s work and obtaining glass from Bent Glass in Queens.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer discusses Sydney Cash’s work and obtaining glass from Bent Glass in Queens. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:11.

Mary Shaffer: Yes, Sydney Cash. He—well, this is what happened was Ben Mildwoff had this factory in Queens called Bent Glass. And he saw my show at the—he saw Tom [Patti] and my show at Doug Heller’s gallery, which was called Contemporary Glass Art Gallery, and we had a show called Glass Works. So Tom Patti and I both had a show, and Ben Mildwoff saw it, so he invited us for breakfast. And then he drove us over to his factory, and he had all this glass, it was a bit damaged. It was, I think a quarter inch or three eighths of an inch—maybe, I don’t think it was a half an inch. I don’t think it was that thick, but maybe three eighths thick, and it was relatively small. And he sent a whole bunch of that glass to me and to Tom, and Tom ended up putting it in a kiln, cutting it small, heating it up, and then blowing into it with a blowpipe. And I ended up making these bundles that Paul Hollister talked about later. So I would fuse them together and—fuse them and let the top part heat up more than the bottom part, and that’s when I sort of had an argument with a scientist at Corning Museum. They said, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ You know, ‘That’s impossible. You just can’t do it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m doing it.’ You know, and I thought, well, it would be cool. They said the pieces would explode, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool. Somebody’s going to pay money for ‘em and then they’re going to explode. That’s pretty cool.’ So that was sort of my attitude then. But for Sydney Cash, so when we were in Ben Mildwoff’s office, then we saw—Sydney—he had a little tiny piece in the corner that was Sydney Cash’s work, and he worked with these wires and had made these sort of—well, you know his early work, it sort of slumps. Small, couple of inches high, slump pieces, and that’s the first I ever saw his work. But before that, 1972, my first pieces were already being published in national glass magazines. So my work was right out there really fast.

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Mary Shaffer recalls Dale Chihuly inviting her to critique glass artists’ works at RISD.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer recalls Dale Chihuly inviting her to critique glass artists’ works at RISD. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:24.

Mary Shaffer: So I studied, as I said, painting and illustration and graduated in 1965. And my former husband and I went and we ran the European honors program in Rome, and when we came back—we met Chihuly there, and we became friends then. So when we came back to the States, I was already exhibiting. Kynaston McShine, he curated my paintings into an exhibition that was in Providence, and I was showing at the Tyler School of Art [Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]. So I was already showing my paintings. So Dale admired that—that I was already a so-called ‘known artist,’ and he would invite me in to critique the students’ work in the glass department. So it was Howard Ben Tré, who was making these little tiny pieces, and I said, ‘Look, Howard, these pieces look like ashtrays. You have to make ‘em bigger.’ And he did, you know. And then Therman (“Tree”), Bruce Chao. Bruce Chao, I got a show at OK Harris [OK Harris Gallery, New York, New York, now closed]. His work was fabulous. And then he ended up running the Rhode Island School of Design glass program for many years. But anyhow, so, yeah, those people and also—God, just name some names and I’ve critiqued their work.

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Mary Shaffer discusses Bruce Chao’s work.

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer discusses Bruce Chao’s work. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:30.

Mary Shaffer: But the person that was the best glassblower back then was Bruce Chao. So Bruce Chao would blow glass and every morning you came in, there would be a wall with all the work that had been blown the night before, taken out of the kiln, and Bruce was the innovator. He would start something and then everybody was copying him—including Dale [Chihuly]. You know, so Bruce was really the most creative of the students there.

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Mary Shaffer discusses Dale Chihuly putting “glass on the map.”

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Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer discusses Dale Chihuly putting “glass on the map.” Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:26.

Mary Shaffer: But he [Dale Chihuly] was, you know, he was a force. He was an amazing force and he’s the reason that we all make money in the glass world—because he collected people. He collected artists, his students, and he collected collectors, and museum people. And really put glass on the map with his publications.

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