Image courtesy of Sydney Cash. Photo: David Lubarsky.
Sydney Cash
Largely self-taught, American artist Sydney Cash (1941– ) earned his BS in mathematics from Wayne State University in 1965 before coming to New York City. There, he was influenced by the painter and sculptor Ben-Zion, a founding member of the expressionist group “The Ten,” and by the Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca. Though Cash is perhaps best known for his experimentations with slumped-glass sculptural forms, he has worked in a diverse range of media that includes flat glass, mirrors, and found objects. In addition, his paintings on paper have explored pattern and portraiture over the course of his career.
Works
Clear Cryptic Motion, 1991. Image courtesy of Sydney Cash. Photo: Todd Wienstein
Diamond Bowl, 1984. Image courtesy of Sydney Cash. Photo: David Lubarsky.
Trifold Color, 1980. Image courtesy of Sydney Cash. Photo: David Lubarsky.
Media
Artist Sydney Cash discusses learning to bend glass from Maurice Heaton.
2:17 TranscriptSydney Cash discusses learning to bend glass from Maurice Heaton. Oral history interview with Sydney Cash, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:39.
Sydney Cash: I ended up being involved with Bloomingdale’s—stores around the city. And I started selling wholesale, I was selling wholesale in and around the country. Soon after, I had a shop in Greenwich Village. I was making mirrors, I was casting these frames and embedding the mirror into it. So it—the mirror was there, I didn’t have to frame it into it or glue it in, it was already into it. And at one point when I went to Europe to look for stuff to buy to replicate, I bought a fancy frame that had a convex mirror. And I fell in love with the mirror, and I fell in love with reflected imagery that wasn’t just straight. So I ended up [clears throat] going to all these—looking for everything I could that was curved. Found a guy in SoHo, an old Italian glazier, who could mirror anything for me. I would go to these glass-bending places and buy their rejects that were sitting around. There were actually glass-bending facilities in Manhattan, in Chelsea at that time. And I started showing that stuff in the—that store that I had. And [clears throat] I got a lot of attention from it. Bloomingdale’s where I’d been selling these things as well as accessories, loved the mirrors. I got—I did a lot of work for them. And at one point I said, ‘Oh I need to start bending the glass myself.’ So I contacted the American Craft Museum [Now Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York] who connected me with Paul—not Paul, Maurice Heaton. And he was an Englishman, fifth-generation, bending glass to make plates or lighting fixtures. And he lived up in Westchester; I went and visited him. He told me how to make a kiln and sent me on my way, and I made a kiln and all of a sudden I’m bending glass in Tribeca.
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Artist Sydney Cash talks about teaching a glass-bending class for NYEGW at Mulberry Street.
00:58 TranscriptSydney Cash talks about teaching a glass-bending class for NYEGW at Mulberry Street. Oral history interview with Sydney Cash, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:57.
Sydney Cash: I taught some classes at UrbanGlass. I taught a couple of classes, like weekend classes, and people would fly in around the country. They’d learn how to make a little kiln and how to bend glass. And the second time I did it, they didn’t order the right fire bricks, so instead of these soft ones they were hard. And I said, ‘Oh no, they said we can’t do it, what are we gonna do with it, we can’t get them—this is—it’s Friday night, you know these—but you’d better use them.’ So I used them. So we made the kilns; we did everything. We would make the elements, we’d put it all together and they’d do a couple of firings. So Sunday night, everybody’s done, they’re taking their kilns apart. They take it off the table, there’s these big burn marks underneath [laughs] where the kilns were. And we didn’t know any—you know, they didn’t know, but—so I never got invited back again, and I think that was fine.
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Sydney Cash talks about his early glass slumping experiments.
2:12 TranscriptSydney Cash talks about his early glass slumping experiments. Oral history interview with Sydney Cash, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:16.
Sydney Cash: I ended up being involved with Bloomingdale’s—stores around the city. And I started selling wholesale, I was selling wholesale in and around the country. Soon after, I had a shop in Greenwich Village. I was making mirrors, I was casting these frames and embedding the mirror into it. So it—the mirror was there, I didn’t have to frame it into it or glue it in, it was already into it. And at one point when I went to Europe to look for stuff to buy to replicate, I bought a fancy frame that had a convex mirror. And I fell in love with the mirror, and I fell in love with reflected imagery that wasn’t just straight. So I ended up [clears throat] going to all these—looking for everything I could that was curved. Found a guy in SoHo, an old Italian glazier, who could mirror anything for me. I would go to these glass-bending places and buy their rejects that were sitting around. There were actually glass-bending facilities in Manhattan, in Chelsea at that time. And I started showing that stuff in the—that store that I had. And [clears throat] I got a lot of attention from it. Bloomingdale’s where I’d been selling these things as well as accessories, loved the mirrors. I got—I did a lot of work for them. And at one point I said, ‘Oh I need to start bending the glass myself.’ So I contacted the American Craft Museum [Now Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York] who connected me with Paul—not Paul, Maurice Heaton. And he was an Englishman, fifth-generation, bending glass to make plates or lighting fixtures. And he lived up in Westchester; I went and visited him. He told me how to make a kiln and sent me on my way, and I made a kiln and all of a sudden I’m bending glass in Tribeca.
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Sydney Cash discusses what drew him to glass.
1:43 TranscriptSydney Cash talks about why glass interests him. Oral history interview with Sydney Cash, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:43.
Sydney Cash: Well, the fact that I could actually—heated up this flat solid thing and all of a sudden they became like cheese in a toaster oven, wow, that was cool. That it was malleable. And I had some interesting relationship to glass, to mirror primarily. The only time I can ever remember being angry as a kid, I was maybe 8 years old. I came home from school—we lived on the second floor of a two-family flat—I knock on the door to get—I was there to get, to eat lunch. My mother wasn’t there, the door is locked and, ‘What? Where is she? I’m hungry,’ you know. And I bang on the door and I’m so angry and right across from the door is a big closet with a door that has a full length mirror. And I take that door and I slam it as hard as I can and the whole mirror shatters. And I’m a little shocked by that, and I kind of leave, and then I go in the backyard, my mother’s hanging out the clothes. She had forgotten that I was going to be there and what time it was. And so I really like the fact that I had a relationship of being angry with—and breaking mirror. And the other thing is to do with mirror around that age. I had a big mirror in my room that was like a boat steering wheel, and I would take it outside and I would shine it down the block in people’s houses, at cars—it was powerful, and it was fun. I could make that image of the sunshine go a thousand feet. It was wild.
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Sydney Cash talks about the Manhattan glass company Leo Popper.
2:02 TranscriptSydney Cash talks about Manhattan glass company Leo Popper. Oral history interview with Sydney Cash, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:01.
Sydney Cash: Just know, there was no community there [in Manhattan in the 1960s and early 1970s]. There was a guy in the building behind me; his name was Richard Krasner. He was working with glass. He was cutting [clears throat] flat pieces into shapes and gluing together forms, and he was also showing with Ivan Karp. So we had some communication and we played ping-pong a lot. And so he was the only other guy I really knew that was working with glass, although there were some glass places in Tribeca. There was a place called Leo Popper which was a glass—they imported glass, they sold stained glass, they were—they have been there for over a hundred years, I think. And they ended up going out of business the year before stained glass became this American hobby, popular thing. So when they went out of business, I bought a lot of stuff—strange things they wanted to get rid of, they were throwing away container after container of really interesting glass and I—my studio’s only three blocks away, so I would have this cart, there’s something I would bring, I would fish out of the dumpster. And also then Bendheim was close in there, that area, that time too. But there was somebody in the Village who was making clothing that—covering it with jewels that he got from Leo Popper. Leo Popper, they were selling buttons, jewels, all kinds of—they had facilities to make those things too in the back. I don’t think they were being used when I was there, but it was very old-school and very cool.
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Sydney Cash talks about why glass interests him.
0:50 TranscriptSydney Cash talks about why glass interests him. Oral history interview with Sydney Cash, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:50.
Sydney Cash: Yes, light certainly has been some aspect of it. And in—if we—certainly with mirrors, anything with mirrors, but we—I was making jewels and I was interested in the vibrancy of color and light in the—what could happen with it. And even, that I—some of the times I was using this Deco pink flesh glass and when I would bend it into form it would reticulate so it would have this soft patina, very sweet, and if there was light on it it just glowed, you know. Yeah, I mean that’s the color and the glowing and that was—that’s a big aspect I think for everybody, for—about glass.
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Sydney Cash talks about Paul Hollister writing an article about his work.
1:39 TranscriptSydney Cash talks about Paul Hollister writing an article about his work. Oral history interview with Sydney Cash, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:39.
Sydney Cash: I would see him at openings in New York. In 1968—no, 1978-79, somebody sent me to show my work to Douglas Heller, and so Douglas got interested in my work cause I had been doing a lot of work with glass for a long time, and he knew it was not what everybody else was doing, and he wanted to show it. So he started showing work [clears throat] and I would see Paul at openings and that’s how, you know, I knew him from that. And then that article came out and he came down. And aft—one, maybe 10 years after that article, and I had been changing what I was doing. I was using industrial glass and imagery to make kinetically optical sculptures and some other stuff, and he said to me, ‘Sydney,’ he said, ‘Sydney,’ he said, ‘this is good. I thought you were just going to be a one-trick Johnny.’ I [laughs] always remember that he thought I was just going to do this bending over wire. And it was certainly an interesting technique that I fleshed out in a lot of ways, but I find that I get bored, or I can run through something for a few years and then it’s like, ‘Oh, this seems more interesting than what I’ve been doing.” And I go off in another direction.
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Sydney Cash talks about using glass as a material in the SoHo arts scene.
0:25 TranscriptSydney Cash talks about using glass as a material in the SoHo arts scene. Oral history interview with Sydney Cash, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:25.
Sydney Cash: I was really focused on SoHo art scene. It was like art, the material I happen to be using was glass. There was no sense of its specialness, it was just another material. You know, it was special to me. I enjoyed it, but there was no community sense of, ‘Oh my God, we’re all artists working with glass.’ There was none of that.
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