Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)

Providence, RI

Rhode Island School of Design Campus. Image courtesy of Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. Photo: Jo Sittenfeld.

Introduction

Introduction

In 1877, Helen Rowe Metcalf persuaded the Rhode Island Women’s Centennial Commission to found the Rhode Island School of Art and Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. Originally focused on supporting Rhode Island’s booming textile, jewelry, and silversmithing industries, RISD became one of America’s most prestigious art schools, known for providing students with a thorough grounding in fundamentals and for encouraging them to explore multiple disciplines, to experiment, and to take risks in their work. RISD significantly fostered the growth of glass as an artistic medium during the studio glass movement’s first three decades, and many of its graduates went on to shape the glass field as artists, educators, and leaders. RISD alumni appear throughout Voices in Studio Glass History: Dale Chihuly (MFA 1968) helped establish RISD’s glass department and founded Pilchuck Glass School, where Tina Aufiero (BFA 1981) and Benjamin Moore (MFA 1977) held leadership roles. Richard Yelle (MFA 1976) founded New York Experimental Glass Workshop (later UrbanGlass), where Toots Zynsky (BFA 1973) later served as assistant director and hot shop head. Hank Murta Adams (BFA 1978) was a designer for Blenko Glass Company and creative director at Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. The  landmark exhibition New Glass 1979, organized by The Corning Museum of Glass, featured works by Moore, Howard Ben Tré (MFA 1980), Dan Dailey (MFA 1972), James Harmon (BFA 1975), and Steven Weinberg (MFA 1979). Finally, Paul Hollister reviewed and wrote about many of these and other RISD alumni, including James Carpenter (BFA 1972), Michael Glancy (MFA 1980), Mary Shaffer (BFA 1965), and Therman Statom (BFA 1974).

This section provides context for RISD’s strong influence in the studio glass movement. It describes the introduction of glass at RISD in the 1960s and the influence of Dale Chihuly as the department head. It also explores some of the work Chihuly produced at RISD in collaboration with his students, particularly James Carpenter, which helped bring attention to studio glass and push the art form in new directions. The section features interviews and correspondence with Hank Murta Adams, Howard Ben Tré, James Carpenter, Dan Dailey, Kate Elliott, Michael Glancy, Flo Perkins, Mary Shaffer, Steven Weinberg, Richard Yelle, and Toots Zynsky conducted between 2108 and 2021. It also includes excerpts from interviews conducted by Paul Hollister with James Carpenter (1991), Steven Weinberg (1981), and Howard Ben Tré (1980), clips from a recording for Hollister by Dan Dailey (c. 1989–1991), full transcripts of Carpenter, Weinberg, and Dailey’s recordings, and highlights from Hollister’s articles concerning glass artists from RISD.

 

Metcalf Building, Rhode Island School of Design. Source: Digital Commons @ RISD.

Howard Ben Tré talks about Providence and discusses architectural geometry and the use of copper in his work in an interview with Paul Hollister from 1980.

Playing04:15 Transcript
Howard Ben Tré

Howard Ben Tré talks about Providence and discusses architectural geometry and the use of copper in his work in an interview with Paul Hollister from 1980. Interview with Howard Ben Tré by Paul Hollister, May 1, 1980 (Rakow title: Howard Ben Tré interview / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168628) Clip length: 04:15.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Howard Ben Tré talks about Providence with Paul Hollister. Clip length: 01:33.

Paul Hollister (PH): This is May 1, 1980, Howard Ben Tré—Yeah—

Howard Ben Tré (HBT): May Day.

PH: —you came from New York—

HBT: —yeah, I grew up in New York—

PH: —and then you went—

HBT: —and then I went to Oregon—I almost went to Oregon to try and deny being so much a part of this kind of old, industrial world that I was living in. And then when I came back to Providence, and I got a studio in an industrial building, and I looked out my window and there were railroad tracks, and I just started—the world started changing and I guess I just really started working out all the things from my youth that had been a part of that industrialized system. You know, I had gone to an engineering high school and all those types of things. I know it had just sort of reflected it—it’s started to reflect itself—

PH: That’s when you went to the RISD [Rhode Island School of Design].

HBT: —right, right.

PH: And so the—Providence was always the thing that I went through on the train, it had, it was all machinery, and factories and so forth, we, it’s so long we don’t have to continue—

HBT: —oh that’s fine. [laughs]

PH: —we can do it some other time. But—

HBT: Yeah, that’s what Providence is, it’s just sort of a dying industrial town.

PH: Which is reviving in an almost chichi—

HBT: Uh-huh—

PH: —you see—

HBT: —they’re redoing that—

PH: —the arcade—

HBT: —the arcade, you know—

Time stamp: 01:35
Clip 2: Howard Ben Tré speaks about architectural geometry in his work. Clip length: 01:37.

Howard Ben Tré (HBT) Well, you know how my earlier work was very much a—it was a little smaller, it was very much a kind of investigation of those architectonic geometry that, that all the different civilizations—Mayan or Egyptian—

Paul Hollister (PH): Yeah.

HBT: —Persian and—

PH: Yeah.

HBT: And, then, well once again, when sort of I moved back here—I was, I felt like I should, sort of, update my vocabulary—

PH: Mm-hmm.

HBT: —and what I started finding was that [inaudible] man-made geometries, and they had just sort of, changed size, and they had become parts, or part of our industrialization. And, and hadn’t really, the geometries were the same and that’s why it’s sort of interesting that you would say that, but they look, you know I don’t know if this is Persian.

PH: Well, what do you mean when you say changed size?

HBT: Well, as opposed to being architectural. Although they still are that. They very much became, this size, it became mechanical size, it [inaudible] but mostly just that the, there were these—the geometries hadn’t really changed at all, it would just be used in different ways. So that—obviously this still exists architecturally also.

PH: Of course the geometric repetition you get all through everything.

HBT: —sure, anytime you get—I’m in touch with them—

PH: All of these things are—are repeated in designs—

Time stamp: 03:16
Clip 3: Howard Ben Tré talks with Paul Hollister about using copper with glass. Clip length: 00:59.

Paul Hollister (PH): Have you mixed anything with glass before and things you’ve made or have you just—

Howard Ben Tré (HBT): Copper.

PH: You—you have?

HBT: Yeah, these are just part of a evolution of—this has evolved into the December collection.

PH: But when you started doing glass up there, did you use copper then?

HBT: Mm-hmm, yeah.

PH: You just—they go together?

HBT: Mm-hmm.

PH: —for you?

HBT: Well copper is one of the oldest fabricated metals—

PH: Yeah.

HB: —and glass is what, 25—

PH: Mmm.

HBT: 3,000 BC—

PH: Mmm.

PH: Especially in block form.

HBT: Yeah, you know the early sand—

PH: These are almost like—well, but I mean the, these are almost they remind of the blocks that were shipped around so that people could make things out of them.

HBT: Yeah.

PH: Just blocks of glass.

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Paul Hollister talks to Steven Weinberg about a piece he admires in a 1981 interview.

Playing00:57 Transcript
Steven Weinberg, Paul Hollister

Paul Hollister talks to Steven Weinberg about a piece he admires in a 1981 interview. Paul Hollister Interview with Steven Weinberg, January 13, 1981 (Rakow title: Steven Weinberg interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168607). Clip length: 00:57.

Steven Weinberg (SW): These, the small ones—

Paul Hollister (PH): You’re not gonna cut this up, are you?

SW: No. No, this is—

PH: That’s it.

SW: This is it, just needs to be polished.

PH: Oh. Isn’t that a honey. Wow.

SW: And these are complicated. These are freestanding forms. The half-inch dowels are freestanding outside, the three-quarter, and I’m trying to work—I have a technical problem, and that is, I’d like to have the same kind of form and [inaudible] just—one of these is a separate form—and cut, so that this is an object that moves within, that’s just entrapped, caged in. If you cut there, there, there, and there, like get a little hacksaw or something.

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Howard Ben Tré (left) casting a piece at RISD with Willie Dexter, 1979. Image courtesy of Wendy MacGaw.

Paul Hollister Interview Transcript
Paul Hollister Interview with Steven Weinberg, January 13, 1981.

Paul Hollister interviews Steven Weinberg in Weinberg’s Providence, Rhode Island, studio.
(Rakow title: Steven Weinberg interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168607)

Writings by Paul Hollister Bibliography

“Memories of the Mechanical Age: Gegossene Glasobjekte von Howard Ben Tré / Howard Ben Tré’s Cast Glass.” Neues Glas, no. 3 (1982): 127–33.

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“Howard Ben Tré’s Sculptures in Glass.” New York Times, April 1, 1982, C11.

Permalink: https://nyti.ms/2EegX5g

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“A Search for Inner Form.” Collector Editions 8, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 42–43.

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“Cast Glass by Steven Weinberg.” Glass Club Bulletin, no. 129 (Spring 1980): 5–8.

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“Steven Weinbergs Giesstechnik / Steven Weinberg’s Casting Technique: Something New Under the Sun.” Neues Glas, no. 4 (1981): 143–47.

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History of the Glass Program

History of the Glass Program

RISD’s glass program began in 1966, shortly after ceramicist Norman Schulman became head of the ceramics program. Schulman arrived at RISD from the Toledo Museum School of Art, where he had been the ceramics instructor since 1958 and had helped coordinate Harvey Littleton’s groundbreaking hot glass workshops there in 1962. At RISD, Schulman and his students built the school’s first hot glass studio on private property in nearby Rehoboth, Massachusetts. The studio helped persuade Dale Chihuly, who had studied glass under Littleton at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to enroll in RISD’s ceramics program the following year. After Chihuly earned his MFA from RISD, he was invited back to help build the school’s on-campus glass program. Chihuly became RISD’s first full-time glass instructor in 1969, the same year that Schulman squeezed a glass studio into spare spaces in RISD’s Metcalf Building, which also housed the ceramics and sculpture programs. During his eleven years at RISD, Chihuly expanded the glass program into a full-fledged department. His rapidly growing artistic reputation attracted students and public attention.

Norm Schulman, 1966. Image courtesy of RISD Archives, Providence, Rhode Island.

Dale Chihuly (standing) and Toots Zynsky, 1971. Photo courtesy of RISD Archives, Providence, Rhode Island.

“I was at Rhode Island School of Design in graduate school—1974 to ‘76. I was a very exciting time to be there. Dale Chihuly was my advisor. Jamie Carpenter was there, Toots Zynsky, a very long list.”

Richard Yelle

Toots Zynsky discusses her first encounter with glass at RISD.

03:45 Transcript

Toots Zynsky discusses her first encounter with glass at RISD. Oral history interview with Toots Zynsky, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:45.

Toots Zynsky: I was—did my freshman year at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island]. I was—you know, it’s a broad program where you do 2D, 3D—are introduced to lots of different materials to work with; and within those realms of two-dimensional and three-dimensional, a lot of drawing, and then we were supposed to choose a major at the end of the year and I was like, [laughs] ‘Okay. What am I doing here?’ And I actually thought I had made a mistake. [laughs] So. I took a leave of absence from school and then had a sort of second thought about that and thought, ‘Wait a minute.’ You know, we’ve been pretty isolated in those days in the freshman foundation building. I thought, ‘I don’t really know. I mean, what is in the rest of this school?’ Not in depth, I knew upperclassmen and I had sort of run by their departments to see them or something, but we were busy in the freshman foundation building. So I decided, ‘Well, I worked really hard to get in here. I’d better make sure that I’m not making a huge mistake.’ And so I went and got the map, all the buildings and grounds map of every building the school owned, and I went to one thing after another and opened every door and one department after another and I went, ‘Mm, no, not this,’ and ‘No, not this.’ And then finally I was out of departments, according to the maps. I was out of studios, I was out of programs, and I thought, ‘Okay. I’m going to med school.’ [laughs]. You know, and I actually was in the last building and I was on the top floor and I had to go to the end of it to get to the stairwell, and I opened the doors and there was this roar [laughs]. And this thumping music playing and people were sort of suddenly dashing in, out of a door and all it said on my map was ‘ceramics storeroom.’ And so I kind of went and looked in and everyone in the room was in really wild drag; and I’m not kidding, wild drag even by today’s standards [laughs], okay? And this is 1970, and I was from a small New England town [laughs]. I mean, we didn’t know about those things and of course I was riveted. And, you know, there was this guy standing there with jartelle and fishnet stockings and a peach-colored corset and a blue felt hat and bright red lipstick and, you know, false eyelashes, and—very, very curious-looking person. And—but there was this, they were swirling hot glass through the air like drawing huge long tubes of it and just swirling it through the air. No one’s crashing into each other and it was this great, spontaneous choreography; it was like this fabulous dance piece. And that person was Dale Chihuly [laughs] as it turned out, and they had just finished building the studio, and they had invited him. He had come back from a Fulbright, and they’d asked him to come and make a glass department—a glass studio, and it was an offshoot of the ceramic studio. And then the next day I ran into one of the guys on the street and he said ‘Oh, was that you looking in?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it looks really interesting.’ And he said, ‘Well, come and try it,’ you know. And I did, and it was just sort of fascinating. I—it just kept kind of going like this [laughs] but it was fascinating. It was alive and, and people were moving and that was really critical for me. I had too much energy and I needed to use it. I couldn’t sit still doing things. So this was a good solution [laughs]. This was—this was really intriguing and inviting to me.

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Michael Glancy as a student at RISD, 1976. Image courtesy of the Glancy Family.

“In 1976 Glass Art Magazine devoted an entire issue to RISD students. And I think Dale has been quoted as saying at his ten-year period at RISD, he had 15 students, full-time students, and I was one of those. I was pretty surprised at how few there were, but that’s people who were in that department full-time.”

Michael Glancy

Michael Glancy discusses RISD’s early glass program and the department’s limited resources.

Playing05:44 Transcript
Michael Glancy

Michael Glancy discusses RISD’s early glass program and the department’s limited resources. Oral history interview with Michael Glancy by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, October 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 05:54.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Michael Glancy discusses buying a used sandblaster for RISD. Clip length: 01:45.

Michael Glancy: Sandblasting, that’s a carving of the glass with a sandblaster. I encountered that in 1977, right after being married. I went to Pilchuck [Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington], and enrolled in a Dan Dailey course, and with that—that’s the first time I saw sandblasting. We didn’t have a sandblaster at the Rhode Island School of Design. And so after that summer, I said to Dale Chihuly, ‘We need a sandblaster.’ He said, ‘No, I don’t have the budget for a sandblaster.’ He was more interested in the hot glass stuff. And so I went out and found and issued grant money—you know, applied to grants, got enough money to buy a sandblaster. It was used, but it was a sandblaster. We found it in a machine place in Boston, and the school—so I got the money, I got the machine. The school wouldn’t pay to have it transported, so I had to rent a truck with an Australian friend. We took the sand machine apart. Took it—put it on the truck, took it to the School of Design. We had a room for it but had to take the doors off the elevator to get the pieces in, take it up to the fourth floor, put the doors back on the elevator, push it down the hall, and put it in a room, and then the school took, I think, close to six months before they actually plumbed the sandblaster to the air compressor, which was four stories down. [laughs] But we did get one.

Time stamp: 01:48
Clip 2: Michael Glancy talks about RISD’s cold working shop being in the men’s bathroom. Clip length: 00:18.

Michael Glancy: And I mean, Dale [Chihuly] had the cold working shop. He really didn’t care about the cold working. He was only interested in hot glass. He had the cold working shop in the men’s bathroom. And the women in the department—or the students—had to do their cold working in the men’s bathroom.

Time stamp: 02:09
Clip 3: Michael Glancy discusses the lack of space and materials budget at RISD. Clip length: 00:42.

Michael Glancy: The big problem with a school that’s over a hundred years old is space. And so there was no space for cold working at the time, and [laughs] now—it didn’t last that long. But for instance, another thing, the sandblaster needed the abrasive—it’s not sand, it’s an abrasive, aluminum oxide. And he didn’t have a budget for that, so we had to put a coin-operated—like a washing machine, you get 15 minutes for a quarter—[laughs]—to generate funds to buy the abrasive. I tell you. It was—it’s a jungle out there.

Time stamp: 02:54
Clip 4: Michael Glancy discusses why RISD invested in a heat recycling exchange system for their glass shop. Clip length: 02:49.

Michael Glancy: When I first arrived it was summertime. And I arrived with my wife, who is—still is, and was, very pretty, blonde—but I arrived with her, her younger sister, and their younger sister. So I had these three really good-looking ladies following me in, and for the first time that I went into the glass shop at Rhode Island School of Design as an incoming student, and Dale was in there—it was the summertime, and the furnaces were on. But he and Jamie were in there just sitting and measuring the temperature at the benches. And it was like, I don’t know, 90 degrees outside and 106 in the benches, which is incredibly cool. And the reason for that was because Dale had installed these massively gigantic fans behind the hood, behind the furnaces that would take all of the air in the studio itself and remove it in under 30 seconds. Now this pumps out not just the air of the studio, which was hot, but sucked out all of the air in the building. And when RISD did this aerial survey, infrared survey, they found that the glass shop was emitting as much heat as the asphalt—open-air asphalt facility that was making asphalt for making roads, which was an open-air blast furnace, basically. And so the school then invested a quarter of a million dollars, which would have been, you know, probably three-quarters of a million dollars today—in a heat recycling—in a heat exchange, much more efficient. That was right after Dale left and Richard Harned took over as head of the department, and he convinced—the school had done this survey, and they were debating the cost of the glass program, and it’s only because of Dale’s notoriety and the students that he produced, who became ambassadors to glass in the United States and around the world, that the school continues with one of the most expensive departments that, you know, energy-wise, but it’s funny how we get where we get to.

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Richard Yelle discusses RISD as a great “incubator” of talent.

Playing01:16 Transcript
Richard Yelle

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.

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Dale Chihuly and RISD

Dale Chihuly and RISD

At RISD, Chihuly collaborated with students, gathered groups for stints at blowing, and brought in established guest artists for demonstrations and critiques. His travels in Europe significantly influenced his approach to glass. Supported by a Fulbright grant in 1969, he met Italian glassmakers and had a residency at the Venini factory in Venice. He also visited and learned from artist Erwin Eisch in Germany, and makers Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtová in Czechoslovakia. Chihuly adopted European collaborative approaches to glassblowing, in which teams of artists worked together to produce designs. His preferred teaching method was to ask students to fully immerse themselves in glass, work hard, learn by observing and assisting, and explore their own projects. Several of his students, including James Carpenter, Dan Dailey, and Toots Zynsky, traveled to Venice. In articles written for Neues Glas, Paul Hollister described how Chihuly’s example launched a steady flow of American glass artists traveling to Italy to study. After Chihuly founded the Pilchuck Glass School in 1971, many RISD students moved back and forth between Pilchuck, where they were invited to serve as teaching assistants in the summer, and RISD, where they spent the academic year. In 1976, while recuperating from a near-fatal car accident in which he lost sight in one eye, Chihuly was asked to direct the sculpture department at RISD. There was no official glass department at the time. Because of his difficulties with depth perception, Chihuly began transitioning from glassblowing to directing a team to produce his designs. Kate Elliott, who had first met Chihuly as a student at Pilchuck and later worked as an employee there, took on administrative and teaching roles at RISD also and assisted Chihuly in the studio. To help students learn how to make a living as artists, she and Chihuly developed a “professional practices” curriculum that they implemented on both coasts. Chihuly helped forge a close-knit community that included other RISD faculty and affiliates, such as painters David Manzella, Hardu Keck, and Mary Shaffer. Shaffer, who began working with glass in the early 1970s, went on to become a founding figure in the studio glass movement. The innovative work coming out of RISD’s glass program in these years drew public attention.

Toots Zynsky and Therman Statom reflect on their work, collaborating with each other, and their time at RISD with Dale Chihuly. They also discuss their community engagement projects.

Left to right: Jim Engebretson, Dale Chihuly, Bruce Chao, Toots Zynsky, 1971. Image courtesy of RISD Archives, Providence, Rhode Island.

“And so Dale was—and then I think the department—it didn’t become a department until, like, ’74. I mean, it was right at the very beginning of the program. And there were a lot of students who came in and out, but there was this core group, and then this core group would be invited to be teaching assistants and ultimately faculty at Pilchuck. So you did that in the summertime. And that has proven to be—you know, Bruce Chao was a graduate student when I first arrived. He was building pot furnaces at Pilchuck and taking that technology and bringing it back to RISD. And so, you know, Dale—it was all-encompassing, really.”

 Michael Glancy 

“And, so for instance, professional practices—what we know of professional practices are classes that are taught around the country. Now Dale created this class called ‘Professional Practices’ at Rhode Island School of Design. What it was, was he would invite his friends who were successful artists to come and talk about their journey. That’s professional practices. And that is what it is today, too.”

Michael Glancy

James Carpenter talks about learning to blow glass at Venini through RISD’s European Honors Program.

0:44 Transcript

James Carpenter talks about learning to blow glass at Venini through RISD’s European Honors Program. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 00:43.

James Carpenter: I graduated from RISD, I went ‘71-72 on the program from the school’s European Honors Program. And then I went and worked at Venini for a year in Venice, and Dale came over and we did some stuff in Europe together for a period of time and I sort of side-stepped this. I actually really did focus on learning how to blow glass. I mean designing things for Venini and learning the process of blowing glass sort of in the Venetian way, using, you know, the marvering tables and all of that. And sort of brought that back a little bit when I came back to RISD, and I taught at Berkeley [University of California, Berkeley] first and then I got hired at RISD; I actually ran their natural history museum. They had a natural history museum on campus.

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Dan Dailey talks about his time at Venini and his tripod-form works in a recording for Paul Hollister (c. 1989–1990).

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Transcript
Dan Dailey

Dan Dailey talks about his time at Venini and his tripod-form works in a recording for Paul Hollister (c. 1989–1990)Dan Dailey Interview for Paul Hollister, c. 1989-1990 (Rakow title: Dan Dailey self-interview [sound recording] / for Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168376) Clip length: 07:40.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Dan Dailey talks about Dale Chihuly’s visits to Italy as inspiration for work at Venini and reminisces about Ludovico Diaz di Santillana. Clip length: 03:39.

Dan Dailey: I’ve been thinking about it, the subject of my work at Venini and those times for me and other people, and what got me to go to Italy in the first place was on one hand a suggestion from [Dale] Chihuly, who was my teacher at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] when I was a graduate student. I was his first graduate student—so when I was in school, Chihuly told me that he had gone to Italy and worked, I don’t know how much work he did there, but he really enjoyed his time there, and it made a lasting impression on him. He’s been going back and forth to Venice ever since. But the idea intrigued me, and I had already been entertaining a notion of moving to Europe for a period before I ever went to graduate school, so it just sort of fell in with my thinking, and I applied for a Fulbright grant through RISD and eventually I got the award, and then time came and I moved over there. When I went to Venini, Mr. Santillana [Ludovico Diaz di Santillana] was extremely receptive, he really was a very hospitable man—he died recently. I don’t know if you knew him or not. He was quite a person. I’ll tell you a couple interesting things about Santillana. I remember one night we were walking on the street, it was about one o’clock in the morning in Venice, and it was a winter night, not too cold, but a rainy sort of dreary night, very, very dark. And we were standing on this bridge or standing on some balcony or something and sort of looking at this cityscape, and there was a man sort of passing by in the shadows a little distance away. You could see him but you couldn’t hear him, and Ludovigo said, ‘Here’s the mark of a true gentleman, he’s got rubber soled shoes.’ Now I’m not saying that was a profound remark, that’s just a characteristic remark of Ludovigo Diaz di Santillana. And another thing I remember, he’s a hell of a driver, a hell of a driver, he had this Citroen—the DX, or DS, it wasn’t a Maserati, it was just DS. And we went on this business trip one day, and Santillana was speeding along, came to a rotary in the highway, and as we went around the rotary, this woman in some little Italian hotrod cut us off, passed on the inside of the curve. He started swearing in I don’t know what languages, and he was absolutely furious. He stepped on the gas and we chased that lady [background noise (gear shift) audible] maybe half an hour out of our way [DD’s car likely stopped at this point] to catch up with her. I don’t remember if he ever did, but he was an interesting character. I was sorry to hear that he died.

Time stamp: 03:42
Clip 2: Dan Dailey relays a story about Ludovico Diaz di Santillana of Venini reacting to the lamps he designed for them. Clip length: 01:56.

Dan Dailey: I had a nice group of lamps, and they actually in a funny way looked like Venini product because it was their colors, their materials, but the style was really my own. And I remember Santillana came in for a critique one day, near the end of the time that I was staying there, and I had this room all set up with the lights on and everything, and it looked pretty good. He walked around the room for a while, and he obviously was amused by it, he was smiling and he liked the pieces and he turned them off and on and he was playing with them and then he started smacking his forehead just, ‘These are mad, these are mad pieces,’ and he had these English expressions, I think he learned his English in England. But he just kept on saying, ‘These are mad pieces, it’ll never work for Venini,’ and it’s right, it never worked for Venini. So, in a way, without realizing it, I didn’t pay enough attention to Venini’s style and try to incorporate myself in that sense. All I did was I went there and I went to Italian showrooms and looked at fantastic contemporary Italian design in the time I was there, which was 1972. And I was highly influenced by the playful, energetic quality of Italian design. And all my pieces were a response to it, and they were lamps that worked. So I thought, ‘Well, Venini might be able to do this.’ But as it turned out, it wasn’t Venini, it didn’t look like Venini. And despite the diversity of all the efforts of artists who worked with Venini, there is a Venini look. A very definite Venini look. And my look was not the Venini look.

Time stamp: 05:41
Clip 3: Dan Dailey talks about his tripod forms being inspired by Shang bronzes. Clip length: 01:59.

Dan Dailey: The work at Venini—I made a lot of things with tripod and odd symmetry. The tripods came out of an interest in Shang bronzes because of those very interesting forms, you know, like they used the gourd shape or other natural forms as a basis for their bronze forms. And maybe they even used actual fruits to cast the bronze with that method of casting that they had, a little bit like a ceramic shell casting, really interesting technology that was developed in the most crude ways, but very sophisticated results. But I always liked those shapes, especially that tripod form, and, of course, it became very popular with a lot of ceramicists during the seventies. And they’re still making kind of pseudo-oriental work, a lot of American crafts people. But the tripod form, to me, was interesting because of the way it affected the symmetry of the object. Because many times when you view a vase, especially a Greek vase, it’s bi-symmetrical, even though it’s a piece in the round it’s kind of a bi-symmetrical object. And the bronze—the tripod form comes from—it really does make you view it in the round, it makes you aware of the other side of the piece in a different way.

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Writings by Paul Hollister Bibliography

“Die magische Anziehung Venedigs / The Pull of Venice.” Neues Glas, no. 1 (1990): 4–9.

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“Die magische Anziehung Venedigs / The Pull of Venice: Part 2.” Neues Glas, no. 2 (1990): 82–88.

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Paul Hollister Interview Transcript
Transcript of Dan Dailey Interview for Paul Hollister, c. 1989–90.

Dan Dailey discusses working for Venini, in Venice, and his collaborative work with Lino Tagliapietra.
(Rakow title: Dan Dailey self-interview [sound recording] / for Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168376)

Kate Elliott (left) laying out Blanket drawings for Dale Chihuly with Kevin Gleason in background, RISD, 1975. Image courtesy of Kate Elliott.

Dale Chihuly, Navajo Blanket Cylinder, made at the Rhode Island School of Design with the assistance of Kate Elliott, 1975. Overall H: 19.1 cm, Diam (max): 8.9 cm, D: 12.5 cm. Collection of The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York. Gift of the Ben W. Heineman Sr. Family. (2007.4.140).

“At the end of the summer of ‘74 Dale got an NEA grant for a bunch of us to stay on at [Pilchuck] for a few weeks in the fall. I think it was for the month of September. And that’s when Jamie Carpenter came up with the bending of threads technique to marver into the glass. I took over the thread work at the torch while everybody else blew glass. Everybody was very excited about this technique. We didn’t know that it had been done a bit at Venini 25 years earlier. After that NEA session, Dale and I went on the road and did a couple of workshops, one being at Madison, and one being at Illinois State University….[then] Dale said, ‘come to RISD, you can be my assistant. You don’t have to pay as a student, but you’re going to have to try to find a grant to help pay you,’ which I did. We got the first Master Craftsman Apprenticeship Grant issued by the NEA in 1975. That was the year Dale began the Indian blanket cylinders with me laying out the thread drawings on the marver at the glass shop. The next year Flora Mace joined him [making thread drawings] at Snowbird in Utah, as I started working more in the background on Dale‘s career, finding galleries, etc.”

Kate Elliott

Kate Elliott at RISD’s sculpture department, 1977. Image courtesy of Kate Elliott. Photo: Dale Chihuly.

Flo Perkins talks about Dale Chihuly as a community builder.

Playing01:07 Transcript
Flo Perkins

Flo Perkins talks about Dale Chihuly as a community builder. Oral history interview with Flo Perkins by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, August 20, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:07.

Flo Perkins (FP): I mean Dale was smart. He found a really good school and became the head of the department, you know. Dale is smart. He’s a very smart man.

Barb Elam (BE): Yeah. I mean, he really did play an integral role in all of these kind of connections, I mean.

FP: Can I tell you something?

BE: Yeah.

FP: I’d say vital. And I don’t know, you know, people don’t give Dale the credit anymore maybe, but, you know, you notice there’s not such a buzz in wood, metal, jewelry, etcetera—fiber, because no one stepped up and did this dynamic leadership thing that Dale did. Dale took it somewhere, and at his expense. Okay? And he gave—the thing about Dale, he was unbelievably generous to everybody. He set up several people in their glass shops, so they could make pieces for him, but he set them up, you know. And were their intimate relationships involved, yes, and it was very personal and it was very ‘in-crowd’ and it remains so. And but there was not a leader like that in any of the other disciplines.

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Hank Murta Adams discusses being part of Chihuly’s community at RISD.

Playing00:40 Transcript
Hank Adams

Hank Murta Adams discusses being part of Chihuly’s community at RISD. Oral history interview with Hank Adams by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, June 7, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:40.

Hank Murta Adams: Cause I was a student of Dale’s [Chihuly] at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island] undergrad—I was a painter. I started to hang out with Dale’s ‘family,’ so to speak, and it was entrancing, and it was community, and it was also new. And so I completely embraced that, and the cast of characters that were there—and it was Howard Ben Tré, Toots Zynsky, Steve Weinberg—all those people within the ten years that Dale taught there were sort of—I was at the tail end, I think it was at year eight or nine there, I’m not sure. So it was very much a family and embracing for me.

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RISD students in the late 1970s. At left: Michael Scheiner. Image courtesy of RISD Archives, Providence, Rhode Island.

Designer Erica Friedman (with glass) and artist Joan Waltemath (center) as RISD students in the mid-1970s. Image courtesy of RISD Archives, Providence, Rhode Island.

Erica Friedman (left) and James Carpenter (right), late 1970s. Image courtesy of RISD Archives, Providence, Rhode Island.

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

Playing00:26 Transcript
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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Mary Shaffer talks about Dale Chihuly’s impact.

Playing01:14 Transcript
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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Maiya and Saarin Keck, daughters of artist Mary Shaffer, in the RISD Glass Hot Shop, 1973. Image courtesy of Mary Shaffer.

“I had two small children…and we were paid once a month….so I went and got a job with the government, but I cooked, so all these people would come over for dinner. Dale [Chihuly] probably ate at my house—I mean, everybody says they fed Dale all the time—so I remember him eating with us at least three times a week….and actually that’s how I met Toots [Zynsky]. She was at the door, and she came in, and Toots was just so wonderful. And she started babysitting for me; she was great. She said, ‘Mary let’s have a show at Woods-Gerry [Woods-Gerry Gallery, RISD].’ So she organized it, which was terrific. And then, as I said, she would sometimes regulate the kilns for me at RISD.”

Mary Shaffer

Mary Shaffer, Untitled, made at the Rhode Island School of Design, 1975. Overall H: 9.5 cm, W: 23 cm, D: 12.5 cm. Collection of The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York. Gift of the Ben W. Heineman Sr. Family. (2006.4.71).

Mary Shaffer talks about identifying herself as a sculptor.

Playing01:04 Transcript
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.

Playing02:20 Transcript
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 recalls Dale Chihuly inviting her to critique glass artists’ works at RISD.

Playing01:24 Transcript
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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Collaboration: Chihuly and Carpenter

Collaboration: Chihuly and Carpenter

When Chihuly returned to RISD as a faculty member in 1969, he and one of his students, James Carpenter, embarked on a series of collaborative pieces that explored the material properties of glass, such as transparency, luminosity, and capacity to reflect light and images. Working at RISD and, in summer, at Haystack School of Crafts and Pilchuck, Chihuly and Carpenter combined dripped or blown forms with neon, ice, and/or dry ice in dramatic installations both indoors and outdoors. In the early 1970s their work was exhibited at RISD and in several major museum shows, including the Toledo Glass National III (Toledo Museum of Art, 1970), the 1st National Invitational Hand Blown Glass Exhibition (Tacoma Art Museum, 1971), and Dale Chihuly / Jamie Carpenter / Glass at New York City’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts (MCC, later the Museum of Arts and Design, 1971). At MCC they installed Glass Forest, a 500-square-foot environment in which scores of tall, white, organic-looking blown glass forms were illuminated with argon and mercury gases. The work was featured on the cover of Craft Horizons magazine in December 1971; it anchored the issue’s feature article on Chihuly by fellow RISD faculty member David Manzella. Glass Forest was exhibited in different configurations both at the RISD Museum and the Museum Bellerive in Zurich in 1972. Throughout this period, Chihuly and Carpenter effectively pushed glass as a medium away from functional objects and toward conceptual sculpture; their works garnered worldwide attention and placed them at the forefront of the studio glass movement. In 1972, Chihuly and Carpenter began a series of doors and windows made from assembled blown or cast glass pieces, drawing on Chihuly’s earlier training in interior design and Carpenter’s interest in architecture. Carpenter later founded his own firm to focus on architectural commissions in glass.

 

 

 

James Carpenter discusses innovation rather than glass history being a focus in his early days with Dale Chihuly.

0:42 Transcript

James Carpenter discusses innovation rather than glass history being a focus in his early days with Dale Chihuly. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 00:41.

James Carpenter: The history really wasn’t very prominent [laughs] in our thinking. Because we were, we would look at people like [Maurice] Marinot or some of these early glass artists but, I don’t think we were looking at it in depth in terms of history—longer term history, but going to Venini of course, yeah, you become exposed to that whole Venetian tradition and awareness of that. And in that sense also the awareness of the level of craft that was so highly refined. But I don’t think Dale and I were, we weren’t really thinking about that very much at all. It was more about creating something new that hadn’t really existed before. It’s a little bit about what I keep trying to do.

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Cover, Craft Horizons Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 6, December 1971, with detail of Glass Forest by Dale Chihuly and James Carpenter. Cover illustration accompanied an article on Dale Chihuly written by fellow RISD faculty member David Manzella. Photo courtesy of American Craft Council Library & Archives.

Dale Chihuly and James Carpenter unloading work from an 18-foot Ryder truck they drove from Providence, Rhode Island, to New York City for their joint exhibition, Dale Chihuly / Jamie Carpenter / Glass, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (later Museum of Arts and Design), September 24–November 7, 1971.1 Photo courtesy of American Craft Council Library & Archives.

James Carpenter and Dale Chihuly at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Maine, 1971. Image courtesy of RISD Archives, Providence, Rhode Island. Photo: Gary W. Gilbert.

James Carpenter and Dale Chihuly, Corning Wall, made beginning at Pilchuck Glass School and later at the Rhode Island School of Design with the assistance of Darrah Cole, Kate Elliott, Phil Hastings and Barbara Vaessen, 1974. Overall H: 199.4 cm, W: 125.8 cm. Collection of The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York. (74.4.186).

James Carpenter discusses experimental work he made with Dale Chihuly.

02:03 Transcript

James Carpenter discusses experimental work he made with Dale Chihuly. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 02:02.

James Carpenter: Well sort of both. I mean I think you probably, maybe you know a lot of those early neon pieces. [inaudible] with Dale. They were all things we started working on together. And we did a show at the Craft Museum [Museum of Contemporary Crafts, now Museum of Arts and Design, New York], in ’71 I guess, that had these tall, seven or eight foot tall blown glass forms. I mean the experimentation I think had to do with going back to some of this I just said a moment ago was not the formality of using wooden blocks and blowing a vessel and punties and all of that. It was more about letting the glass actually find a form that it naturally wanted to take and that’s where we got into this whole thing of blowing it, gathering up our glass, letting it fall on the floor and then inflating the pieces and actually learning that the floor material itself, you know if it was wetted before you dropped the glass on it, it would produce steam. It would actually begin blowing its own forms, so that you could control just by letting the steam escape. You know, it’s on a blow pipe but it’s where you are using two different ways of working with the glass. So it was a lot of experimentation with process, I think, which has stayed with me and stayed with the underlying foundation of the studio. And I think that Dale and I were after like trying to do things that were truly more sculptural and were also on the edge of that whole conceptual art movement and land art movement type of thing. So my own work began to be sort of in the ‘72, three, four there began doing more photography on glass and film installations and that coincided with some work I did at Corning on photosensitive glass. So I got invited to go to work at Corning which I did for several years. So—and that introduced me to obviously a much more technical level of glass making and I worked with a really terrific person there, fortunately, who invented glass ceramics so I learned a lot.

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James Carpenter discusses learning equipment construction at RISD and building special annealing ovens with Dale Chihuly.

01:07 Transcript

James Carpenter discusses learning equipment construction at RISD and building special annealing ovens with Dale Chihuly. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 01:06.

James Carpenter: Yeah, you learned it at RISD, because it was sort of—well, you have the ceramics program, so kiln building is pretty well established. And then there was sort of a format, sort of a rudimentary idea of what refractory materials you would use for small glass furnaces. So you know, we all we literally all just build everything furnaces, and welded up the steed frames to hold them and built the annealing ovens and it was particularly true for the stuff that Dale and I were doing then as you need a completely different type of annealing oven that was sort of the size of this table but the top was flexible. You could actually, you had these insulated panels you could move and this tall forms. You know they’d be in the shallow oven, actually about the same height as this. You could actually put the thicker glass piece down in the annealing oven, but the narrow pieces would come up, you know, like six or eight feet out of the annealing oven. So in a sort of way you’re designing the equipment to accommodate what you are trying to make. So it wasn’t like you were just doing a standard annealing oven furnace or making the furnace a different type of opening so that you could get more glass out of it or something.

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Writings by Paul Hollister Bibliography

“James Carpenter: Adventures in Light and Color in Space.” American Craft 51, no. 3 (June/July 1991): 28–35.

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“James Carpenter: Adventures in Light and Color in Space.” American Craft 51, no. 3 (June/July 1991): p. 24.

“James Carpenter: Adventures in Light and Color in Space.” American Craft 51, no. 3 (June/July 1991): p. 30.

Paul Hollister Interview Transcript

Paul Hollister Interviews with Edward Larrabee Barnes and James Carpenter, c. 1991.

Paul Hollister interviews Edward Larrabee Barnes and James Carpenter, in their respective New York studios.
(Rakow title: James Carpenter interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168555)

James Carpenter at RISD’s Nature Lab

Carpenter’s interest in natural history led him to explore organic forms in glass in his collaborations with Chihuly, and to undertake his own experimental projects with photography and film. As an undergraduate student at RISD (1968–1972), Carpenter frequented the school’s Nature Lab. Founded by RISD faculty member (and alumna) Edna Lawrence in 1937, the Lab has enabled students to explore natural forms, patterns, structures, and processes through a natural history collection of more than 80,000 specimens; imaging equipment, including powerful microscopes and high-speed cameras; and a small collection of living plants and animals. As a student, Carpenter undertook paid work making botanical drawings. He also spent two summers in the Amazon collecting plants and animals for zoos and scientific study; occasionally, he brought things back for Lawrence and the Nature Lab collection. When Lawrence retired, she asked Carpenter to return and run the Lab, which he did for several years beginning in 1973.

James Carpenter discusses his interest in the natural world.

1:04 Transcript

James Carpenter discusses his interest in the natural world. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 01:03.

James Carpenter: I sort of grew up in Maine and Vermont. But sort of always had more of an interest in the natural world, generally. I could have very easily become an ethnographer, or something like that. But I do think that there are collective ideas about nature that we tend to think don’t exist around us in urban environments but there are ways—and this is where glass as a means of unlocking properties of light and unlocking information that light carries can actually bring us back to revisiting some of these phenomenon that you normally associate with a remote, natural context. But it’s actually present around us at all times. That’s sort of how I think about glass, more of a vehicle for unlocking properties of light that carry information. By that I mean information of what surrounds us or what’s happening with the sun angles and reflected information.

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James Carpenter discusses overseeing RISD’s Nature Lab.

01:59 Transcript

James Carpenter discusses overseeing RISD’s Nature Lab. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 01:59.

James Carpenter: Well the woman who started it was—her name was Edna Lawrence. And she began it probably in the—I’d say even in the thirties. So it really became part of the core freshman program—every student had to take a class. Primarily a drawing class in the Nature Laboratory and she actually sort of taught that class. It was on detailed drawings of, you know, natural forms basically—shells or butterflies, whatever. So you actually had to, one day a week, you were in there drawing something, usually bones, or something. Anyway, I was—because I had done botanical illustration before I got to school I was sort of interested in what she was doing. And I’d always had an underlying interest in natural history and when I was even a student at RISD, I used to work the summers down in South America for the Food and Drug Administration and collecting plants basically. So anyway, I used to bring her things, I really liked her and I liked what she was trying to do, so I was using [inaudible] to bring it back. So when I was teaching at Berkeley she just wrote me a very nice letter, just saying, you know, she thought she wanted to retire and was concerned about what would happen to this Nature Lab and would I consider coming back and taking it over so—I thought it was a good idea.

Barb Elam (BE): Yeah, no, it’s great. Is your name on any of the—are you listed as a donor for the—

JC: Oh, no, I don’t know about that.

BE: For the specimens from South America?

JC: No, I don’t know about that, but I did a lot of little expeditions with students down to you know Arizona to collect cacti and stuff like that, and then I sort of shifted the course actually a little bit from purely nature drawing to actually more natural processes like [inaudible] camouflage and migration. And you had all students, you had architecture students or sculptors. So it was really trying to talk about principles of natural history that influenced all these different disciplines. So we, yeah, had a good time there.

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James Carpenter discusses historic, nature-based lampwork with Paul Hollister and gives Hollister a book he illustrated on herbs in a circa 1991 interview.

Transcript
James Carpenter

James Carpenter discusses historic, nature-based lampwork with Paul Hollister and gives Hollister a book he illustrated on herbs. Paul Hollister Interviews with Edward Larrabee Barnes and James Carpenter, c. 1991 (Rakow title: James Carpenter interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168555) Clip length: 00:50.

Paul Hollister [PH]: And of course you’ve seen all the [Herman O.] Mueller lampwork at the Natural History Museum [American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York].

James Carpenter [JC]: The one at the Peabody? [Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts]

PH: New York. New York.

JC: No, here. Right. And all the animals, and the sea life—

PH: Protozoa, diatom, radiolaria, and all—

JC: Right, right—that’s fantastic.

PH: Unbelievable.

JC: But also the collection at the Peabody, the glass flowers was always very impressive.

PH: Oh, yeah, yeah. I took my anthropology course there.

JC: I was just looking for a book that I could give you, actually. I have a—where would it be? I might have it upstairs, but I should give you a copy of a book that I did on herbs [The Herbs of Lost Thyme, by John Ferris, illustrated by James Carpenter (Shelburne Mass: The Lost Thyme Press, 1971)].

PH: On herbs?

JC: Yeah.

PH: Oh.

JC: Around ’70. Actually done around 1971.

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Nature Lab, Rhode Island School of Design. Image courtesy of Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. Photo: Jo Sittenfeld.

James Carpenter giving tour of RISD’s Nature Lab, c. 1973-1976. Image courtesy of RISD Archives, Providence, Rhode Island.

Faculty Interconnections

Faculty Interconnections

Many RISD graduates have returned to become RISD faculty. After Chihuly resigned from his teaching post in 1980 to pursue his own studio work full time, one of his former students, Richard Harned (BFA 1973, MFA 1977), briefly succeeded him as head of RISD’s glass program. Another former Chihuly student, Bruce Chao (BFA 1973, MFA 1975), took over the position in 1982, following a successful early academic career building the glass program at Ohio State University. Chao formalized RISD’s glass curriculum and established the Degree Program Workshop, which, with its regular schedule of invited artists and group interaction, has remained a foundation of the school’s glass program. Michael Glancy (BFA 1977, MFA 1980) pursued graduate studies at RISD in glass, with Chihuly, and metals, with Louis Mueller. Glancy embraced both of these interests in his own work, using electroforming to fuse copper and other metals onto blown and sandblasted glass forms. Paul Hollister wrote several articles about his distinctive approach. Glancy taught in RISD’s Jewelry and Metalsmithing program for nearly forty years.

Michael Glancy teaching in his RISD electroforming studio with jewelry artist Chubai Liu (MFA 2018), 2017. Image courtesy of MJ Tyson.

Michael Glancy talks how he became involved with metalwork at RISD.

Transcript
Michael Glancy

Michael Glancy talks about how he became involved with metalwork at RISD. Oral history interview with Michael Glancy by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, October 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:49.

Michael Glancy: I was a student at Rhode Island School of Design. I came with an undergraduate degree, and four years of liberal arts, and that equipped me with the knowledge that—to do what I wanted to do as opposed to what someone expected me to do. And so I wanted to study glass with Dale Chihuly; I went to the School of Design with that specifically in mind. And the school, itself, requires you to take professional electives, and outside your department. I was only interested in—they had waived all of my liberal arts credits because I had all of that. I was just taking studio courses, and—to get a second BFA, and then to continue and get an MFA. And the school required that we take things outside our department, and so Dale was a good friend of Louis Mueller, the head of the jewelry department. And, you know, there’s just this symbiotic relationship between glass and metal that could be characterized through [René] Lalique’s work, for instance. Lalique was a goldsmith in Paris, when they passed a luxury tax that made his work prohibitively expensive. And to circumvent the luxury tax he got into glass, because it’s like in gems. And so the link between metal and glass, as well as—you can go all the way back to Egyptian times, the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun, for instance, it took them 20 years to realize that it’s all glass except for the lapis lazuli and the turquoise and the coral in the face. Those were real materials. And that’s not because it was a long walk to Turkey to get the lapis lazuli, which it was, but rather because to the Egyptians, to emulate nature so effectively was to put you on a parallel with the Creator. And so they were particularly interested in their ability, and their skill was of such a high level that it took 20 years after [Howard] Carter had discovered this find, for them to realize that this is glass, not lapis, or the other turquoise. And so, you know, smoke and fire, blip, blip, blip.

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Writings by Paul Hollister Bibliography

“Michael Glancy’s Glass and Metal Objects: Prunkstücke fürs Kuriositäten-Kabinett / Treasures for the Cabinet of Curiosities.” Neues Glas, no. 1 (1982): 38–44.

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“The Matrix Transformed.” American Craft 42, no. 4 (August/September 1982): 24–27.

Full issue: https://digital.craftcouncil.org/digital/collection/p15785coll2/id/16745/rec/223

American Craft Council, Digital File Vol42No04_Aug1982

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“Elegant Glass Made by Masters.” New York Times, December 13, 1984, C7.

Permalink: https://nyti.ms/2V5r0z7

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“Review of Exhibitions: Michael Glancy.” Glass, no. 48 (Summer 1992): 50.

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Visiting glass artist Richard Marquis with Jack Wax (left foreground) and then-RISD Glass Department head Bruce Chao (background, standing, left of window), RISD, 1984. Image courtesy of Rhode Island School of Design Archives, Providence, Rhode Island. Photo: Paul A. Roselli.

Then-RISD Glass Department head Bruce Chao (standing, right) with students, RISD, undated. Image courtesy of Rhode Island School of Design Archives, Providence, Rhode Island.

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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RISD: 21st Century

RISD: 21st Century

Two other RISD alumni have led the School’s glass program since Bruce Chao stepped down as head in 2001 (Chao continued teaching at RISD until 2018). Rachel Berwick (BFA 1983) served as department head from 2001 to 2020, and in 2016–17 she oversaw the program’s fiftieth anniversary, marked by a year-long series of public events and a commemorative book, Wonder: 50 Years RISD Glass (RISD, 2017). Jocelyne Prince (MFA 1994) succeeded Berwick as program head in 2020. RISD’s glass program remains a highly regarded training ground for glass artists, and new generations of alumni continue to make significant contributions to the field. In 1979, the Corning Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition New Glass: A Worldwide Survey, included work from ten RISD students and alumni at the forefront of the studio glass movement. Forty years later, an equal number of RISD alumni were represented in New Glass Now (2019), Corning’s follow-on exhibition of contemporary art glass, which included work from ten students who had earned RISD degrees between 1990 and 2014. The cover of the New Glass Now catalogue, which doubled as the fortieth-anniversary issue of Corning’s New Glass Review, featured a work by the recipient of Corning’s Rakow Commission for 2018, RISD graduate Rui Sasaki (MFA 2010).

Glass Program, Rhode Island School of Design. Image courtesy of Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. Photo: Jo Sittenfeld.

Glass Program, Rhode Island School of Design. Image courtesy of Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. Photo: Jo Sittenfeld.

Glass Program, Rhode Island School of Design. Image courtesy of Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. Photo: Jo Sittenfeld.