Richard Winifred Yelle

Richard Yelle speaks about NYEGW as a growing  organization. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:07.

Richard Yelle: And there’s a lot of interesting people at Mulberry Street. And then you already heard the story of Tina [Yelle] coming back from Europe. And I needed a director on short notice. And I gave her the job. And I was busy at that time at Parsons School of Design [New York, New York] where I was the head of the Crafts Program. And, you know, I wasn’t able to do that job myself. But I was at that time, the chairman of the board of directors, I believe. And I—we had started writing grants and getting funding from NYSCA [New York Statue Council on the Arts] and the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] back at Great Jones Street. But we were on a much higher scale at Mulberry. And so I worked on forming a more substantial board of directors. And that has been, as you can imagine, a 40 year process of building up and then maintaining a real board of directors. And of course, that was the most important thing for us when we had to move to Brooklyn, because all of a sudden we were raising millions of dollars. So thank goodness for those 10 years at Mulberry Street, when we sort of were practicing [laughs] to be a bigger organization.

Richard Yelle talks about NYEGW’s move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:44.

Richard Yelle: We were trying desperately to stay in Manhattan—and we looked all over Manhattan, but most landlords, when they heard the word melting glass, and furnaces, and—there wasn’t for them. So we were extremely lucky to find the Strand Theatre in downtown Brooklyn. You know, it was a famous movie theater. The dome was so high that they were able to put three stories inside the dome. So BRIC, the Brooklyn Access Television, was on the second floor and we were on the third floor, which had 50 foot ceilings. And when we moved in, all of the metal straps that held up the plaster dome were still there. It was really raw space. And there was no HVAC and there was virtually nothing there except for 17,000 square foot of beautiful space. Thank goodness our board was pretty strong by then, and we had some major people on the board who actually knew how to raise money and had previous experience. We also had to do construction, and Tina was in charge of managing the construction. Jeff Beers—a long, long time Glass Workshop person, who’s an architect, designed the space. And we had a board member, he was a builder of malls, and one of his most famous malls was Short Hills in New Jersey, which is gigantic. So he would meet with Tina, with the construction workers and the contractors, so that they couldn’t rip us off too much. And you know, they couldn’t get away with a lot of shenanigans, which was very common in New York City at the time. So we actually struggled to get permits and everything because nobody knew what a glass furnace was [laughs] cause there wasn’t any. So there was no prior knowledge that the building department could draw on. So long story short, because of our board, people like Cynthia Manocherian and Carl Pforzheimer, and many others, we are able to raise two million dollars, and get through the construction, and we opened.

Richard Yelle talks about NYEGW’s re-branding as UrbanGlass. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:10.

Richard Yelle: We made our name change in Brooklyn from New York Experimental Glass Workshop to UrbanGlass and, so we rebranded. We wanted people to immediately understand where we are coming from. And so the word ‘urban’ was particularly important. And then glass of course was what we needed to do. So that’s how we came up with UrbanGlass. In reality, the name was too long. It was too hard to say, too hard to remember. You know, it was—it just wasn’t working for us. And, we hired a, a well-known design firm called Smart Design [New York, New York] to do the rebranding. And Smart Design, unless you know the design world, you might not know them, but they’re the people who did the OXO Good Grip products as an example. So they did our new logo, and we changed our name to UrbanGlass and the magazine to Glass magazine from New Work.

Richard Yelle talks about operating a glass facility in New York City. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:04.

Richard Yelle: Well, just think of—as an analogy, a pirate radio station, most of the artists—organizations in New York were like [laughs] like a pirate radio station. You know, they were just operating, they just started, they just opened their facility, and New York City, as I mentioned earlier, was dangerous and dirty and it was broke. And, although when you attracted the attention of a building inspector it usually meant problems or Con Edison. You tried to avoid them and you just kept going. Soho wouldn’t have been Soho if, if people paid attention to the building [laughs] inspectors. People just moved into those buildings, they were all empty.

Richard Yelle discusses the 1992 Dale Chihuly/Lino Tagliapietra Venetian series demonstration at the Brooklyn location of NYEGW. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:44.

Richard Yelle: So this 1992 event with Dale Chihuly and Lino was a important event for UrbanGlass—and it is the Brooklyn facility. And we probably had only been there a couple of years. And one of the reasons it was so interesting was that Lino was the real star of this event. And we’re more used to Dale being the, you know, the most important artist in the room, so to speak. And Lino has a great story. And fantastic skills. And he eventually became a board member at UrbanGlass, and is still on our advisory board. So he has been a big supporter all of these years, maybe 15 years, I want to say. These events—as I mentioned, I believe, earlier—were very popular with the public and with the glass collector community. And Tina and I think that this event may have gone on for quite a number of hours. And this may be one of the groups from New Jersey visiting. So you could expect these events to have a steady stream of visitors coming and going. And it was really good for UrbanGlass to have people in our facility because they could also look at the—whatever exhibit was in the gallery, and become familiar with Glass Magazine, and maybe even purchase something in our gift shop.

Richard Yelle talks about Gianni Toso at NYEGW. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:47.

Richard Yelle: Gianni Toso, of course, was from Venice, and he specialized in very technically competent Venetian style blowing, but he mainly made small objects, like I remember him making a chess set and showing it to us. And the chessmen were—looked like they were addressed in a Italian uniforms, say from Vatican City [Rome, Italy.] or something like that. So he—in this photograph, my recollection is that he was demonstrating his fine Venetian skills.

Richard Yelle discusses learning Venetian techniques both from Americans who went to Venice and Venetians coming to the States. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:48.

Richard Yelle: And we were all very excited about learning Venetian techniques. That’s how we came to have marvers [laughs] in our, in our shops. I remember being—somebody explaining to me that that’s the Italian word for marble. And a number of guys, including Dan Dailey, did a Fulbright in Italy and picked up a lot of the Venetian techniques. I think Jamie [James Carpenter] did the same thing. So it wasn’t just Lino bringing Italian glassblowing to America. It was some Americans going there and learning and coming back.

Richard Yelle talks about not wanting to go to Pilchuck. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:30.

Richard Yelle: I remember seeing some photographs [of Pilchuck] I think Jamie [James Carpenter] was showing me, and he was [laughs] sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag. You know [laughs], with no tent or anything. And I just, ‘No.’ I—‘Nope.’ And also, you know, I really wanted to do something more than just blow glass.

Richard Yelle discusses RISD as a great “incubator” of talent. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:15.

Richard Yelle: ‘74 to ’76, I was at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design]. Glass is in the sculpture department at RISD, so that was—glass ceramics and pure sculpture. But I found glass particularly exciting. And I had just come from MassArt [Massachusetts College of Art and Design] where I had studied painting and ceramics. And then we built that, the first glass studio at MassArt, and Dan Dailey was hired as the first glass professor ever [laughs] at MassArt. And so I went straight from MassArt to RISD and then straight from there to New York. But I would like to mention at RISD it was a particularly interesting time, cause as I mentioned already, Jamie [James Carpenter] was there, Mary Shaffer was there, Toots [Zynsky] was there. Bruce Chao, who eventually became the head of the RISD glass program. And of course, Dale [Chihuly], and there’s many other people. So it was quite an incubator at that time.

Richard Yelle talks about NYEGW’s first visiting glass artist, Patsy Norvell, and first student, Bill Gudenrath. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:31.

Richard Yelle: So I stayed in touch with Rose, and Rose became the first board member of the New York Experimental Glass Workshop. And then Dan Dailey was the second board member. So we ran a joint operation for a couple of years. We had a endless stream of clay visiting artists. My favorite, of course, was Jun Kaneko, who I had known at RISD. He lived in Great Jones Street for a year, making his work. And, there, there were many others, including Hannah Wilke. But I remember—this, this is important. I remember our first glass visiting artist and her name was Patsy Norvell, and she made gazebos. And the first project that we did was she sandblasted some glass panes for a gazebo to exhibit at a gallery called A.I.R. Gallery [New York, New York], which is kind of a famous gallery. It was the first woman’s cooperative gallery in New York City. So anyways, from Patsy Norvell on, we’ve been bringing in visiting artists of one type or another [laughs] for 40 years now. And I, I just still remember that. So we, we had a lot of excitement at Great Jones Street because we started an education program, and one of our first students was a musician named Bill Gudenrath. And he was a clavichord player from Julliard [The Julliard School, New York, New York]. And, of course, he’s a well-known glass person now and runs the Corning [The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York] studio. But the education program took off really quickly and people just started showing up. And it was a little tricky cause we were having trouble paying our gas bill, so we had to keep the doors locked. And so we were letting in students and artists and having openings, but always watching out for Con Edison [laughs]. One, once in a while they would get in though and shut off our gas. But we always got it back on.

Richard Yelle talks about New Work. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:18.

Richard Yelle: So how did I get a magazine edited and published? Well, Rose [Slivka] helped with the publishing. She knew a Chinese printer in Soho that printed Chinese dailies for Chinatown. And so we are able to get a small run, and it was fairly inexpensive on, on newsprint. And, a fellow named Albert Lewis showed up from Utah. Albert Lewis was the founding editor of Studio Glass magazine, which no longer existed even at that time, but it had, it had been the only glass magazine that I knew of in the world, except for maybe Neues Glas, which was a German publication. But Albert Lewis was on, at loose ends, and he had editorial experience and he knew how to typeset. In those days, it was a machine, a huge machine that looked like an enormous typewriter. And you typed on a certain kind of paper and then you pasted it up on boards, and then they made plates at the printer, and they would just turn it into a newspaper. So I have to give Albert some, some real credit on that. So, of course, much later, New Work magazine turned into Glass magazine, which was, at the time I was told that New Work was too obscure. And, and we had to do a better job at branding. And that’s much later—probably closer to being in Brooklyn.

Richard Yelle discusses founding New Work magazine. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:57.

Richard Yelle: One of the most interesting things that happened during that period of ‘78 was the founding of New Work magazine. And I had very specific reasons why I founded that magazine. And that is—I’m trying to think of the right words. That is because I thought the, the glass world at that time was unsophisticated, I guess. And I thought that they needed to be a publication that had very high standards and talked about the concept and the reason for making the work as much as how it was made. And I loved our first two issues. In the first issue I, if I remember correctly, Dan Dailey had a piece on the cover. And it was a big glass vase, and I don’t know if you know this about him, but he used to be really into red rubber as a mixed media material. And so his, his vase [laughs] had little, little pencils with red rubber erasers attached to it. It was hilarious. And there was a rubber place on Canal Street that was just, like, incredible. It had every kind of rubber you can imagine. And that second issue had a cover story on Jamie [James] Carpenter. And I still remember that issue very clearly because one of Jamie’s premises was that stained glass was actually the first cinema, and if you think about it, it made perfect sense to me at that time.

Richard Yelle discusses NYEGW at Mulberry Street. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:29.

Richard Yelle: Mulberry Street was a Godsend. It was concrete, so it was fireproof more or less; it had a loading ramp. [laughs] It was right on Mulberry Street in little Italy, so you couldn’t beat the food. One of the only problems was the San Gennaro people had their office immediately next to us. So if you can make the translation, the San Gennaro festival in little Italy—it’s the mafia. And so they actually tried to shake us down a little bit, once or twice. But Tina [Yelle] was just incredible. She just acted like a dumb blonde, and she just pretended she didn’t know what they were talking about. So [laughs] she did it on purpose. She knew exactly what was happening, and so they never bothered us. In fact, they were friendly towards us, and there was all—a steady stream of young people coming in and out of the place, at all hours. Everybody had a key. Joe [Upham] was very instrumental in getting everything up and running, but there are some other people that contributed a great deal. One was a fellow named Ray King, who is a very well-known architectural artist from Philadelphia. He literally built our first gallery on Mulberry street, and it was nice. It was a really nice gallery. One of the best stories though from Mulberry Street was about Toots Zynsky. She had this friend from Holland. And he worked on movie sets and he was sort of the prop guy. And so he literally built a little machine at Mulberry to pull threads. And it was just like a metal arm that would go to the right, and it would grab a little bit of hot glass and then slap to the left, pulling a piece of cane. And that’s how Toots’s work happened, because all of that cane that she uses—to pull that by hand was an insane amount of work. And so this little machine was, you know, that was really cool. I thought that was the best.

Richard Yelle discusses the history of NYEGW at Clayworks, including stories about Joe Upham, Bill Gudenrath, and Rose Slivka. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 05:53.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Richard Yelle discusses NYEGW’s history with Clayworks. Clip length: 02:15.

Richard Yelle: RISD was—I graduated in 1976, moved straight to New York, worked at the display company called KayCo. And, we were at actually 90, 91 Fifth Avenue, just above 14th Street. And we start [laughs] Joe’s [Upham] furnace in the basement of that building. It was hilarious, actually. But so, in 1978, we started with the New York State Craftsman’s Fair at the Coliseum in Columbus Circle. And the same year we did the Arts and Antique auction on Channel 13, which was very exciting. And then I discovered a arts organization called Clayworks Studio Workshop. And the two women that ran it were Rose Slivka, who was then the editor of Craft Horizons, and a woman named Susan Peterson. And I asked them if we could rent space in their facility at 4 Great Jones Street. And so this was 1978, they had 5,000 square feet with a gallery, living quarters, studio space. The entire basement was a clay studio and they had a very large gas kiln and they invited artists into working clay, non-glass—[non-]clay artists. So they did rent us a space, and we moved in, and the night we moved in, there was a fire and the, the ceramic kiln set the first floor on fire [laughs]. So the next day, Susan Peterson asked me if I wanted to be the director of Clayworks Studio Workshop.  She’s—quote unquote, ‘You’re the person on deck.’ And so I took that, I took that job. So I was the director of the New York Experimental Glass Workshop [New York, New York, later Brooklyn, New York, now UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, New York] and Clayworks Studio Workshop at the same time, at 4 Great Jones Street.

Time stamp: 02:17
Clip 2: Richard Yelle talks about Joe Upham and NYEGW’s neon studio at 4 Great Jones Street. Clip length: 00:49.

Richard Yelle: Joe was living at 4 Great Jones Street in the back on the first floor, and that’s when we opened our neon studio. He single-handedly built the neon studio back there, where he was living. In hindsight, it sounds hilarious, but we were getting work done though. And, and that, that was the important thing. It was a great experience for me. I was living on Spring Street in a loft. I [laughs] couldn’t live at Clayworks Studio on Great Jones Street, although Great Jones Street, it’s probably beautiful now, it was—I wanna say an extension of the Bowery back in those days, so.

Time stamp: 03:09
Clip 3: Richard Yelle discusses art organizations opening at the same time as NYEGW. Clip length: 01:55.

Richard Yelle: At the time that New York Experimental Glass shop opened, almost literally at the same time, Art on the Beach opened, the New Museum, PS1, just above midtown, Franklin Furnace, Artists Space, Book Arts [Center for Book Arts], all opened in New York City. So it was a really interesting time for me, especially, because I went to all of these places every, every week. And then when the galleries started moving to Soho, I went to Soho, you know, and did the gallery run, so it was an incredible time in New York City. I found a new loft space, so I could do some of my own work. And my girlfriend and I rented a loft from a conceptual artist on Franklin Street in what’s now Tribeca. And his name was Dennis Oppenheim. And I—you’re probably familiar with his work. So Dennis bought this raw building—vacant building on Franklin Street, and he had this incredible penthouse on the top floor. And then a bunch of artists like me rented floors. There were two big lofts per floor. And we got to know Dennis very well, and he always hosted parties in, in his loft area, and it was a great place to live, but dangerous. It was just dangerous to go outside. That was kind of the problem. There wasn’t very much of anything in lower Manhattan. Soho was barely occupied except for artists.

Time stamp: 05:06
Clip 4: Richard Yelle discusses meeting Willem de Kooning at Rose Slivka’s house in the Hamptons. Clip length: 00:46.

Richard Yelle: I met a lot of Rose’s friends, and she used to invite some of us out to her house in the Hamptons. And I remember on one of those visits I—we got to go and visit with de Kooning, because his wife was one of her best friends. And I was sitting there with de Kooning and we were talking about, guess what? Glass. It turns out that he was a glass painter in Holland before he came over. So he—the conversation happened because he asked me what I did, and I said I was a glass painter. And, so then he told me that story.