UrbanGlass (New York Experimental Glass Workshop)

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 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.

Bill Gudenrath discusses how he first began blowing hot glass with Joe Upham at NYEGW. Oral history interview with Bill Gudenrath by Barb Elam, March 23, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:23.

Bill Gudenrath: I was a laboratory glassblower growing up for summer jobs beginning in 1963 when I was 12. I got a chemistry set when I was eleven, that was 1962, which, of course, is the legendary year of the birth of the studio glass movement, so that’s, in retrospect, kind of ironic. Anyway, I was a very serious laboratory glassblower, loved it, was madly in love with it, and practiced glassblowing just like a kid practices the violin or the piano. And I worked for a large laboratory glassblowing company in Houston for the summers, and I did take home work the rest of the year, and by the time I was about fifteen I was a pretty good laboratory glassblower. And that stopped in 1967 because a couple of years before that I had begun to fall madly in love with music and the keyboard and the organ and the harpsichord and piano. So that began my period of activity in music, which I would say officially ended in 1979, when my glass career got back in gear, and I had found a laboratory glassblowing company in the Bronx, a real hole in the wall place that I was working at. And one Friday afternoon Joe Upham—everybody knows the name Joe Upham, one of the founders of New York Experimental Glass Workshop, now UrbanGlass—he came into this place to buy some glass tubing, and he and I started chatting, and I had always wanted to try furnace glassblowing cause when I was fourteen, in 1965, I made a pilgrimage to Corning from Houston where I grew up to see the library and to see the museum and above all to see the Steuben Factory [Steuben Glass Works, Corning, New York]. So I sat there for an afternoon, watched the glassblowers gathering the glass and I just pined to do that for years, never suspecting that I’d get the chance. And Joe said ‘We’re furnace glassblowing down in the Village,’ or SoHo, whatever he said, and I said, ‘What do you mean furnace glassblowing?’ and he said, ‘Well with the blow pipes,’ and I said, ‘When can I go and try this?’ and he said, ‘How ‘bout tomorrow morning?’ So that was a Saturday morning in 1979 and I didn’t leave, really, until we moved to Corning in 1995.

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.

Karen Chambers discusses writing about glass. Oral history interview with Karen Chambers by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, June 14, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:57.

Karen Chambers: You know, at first I was interested in the so-called fine arts, but I found that scene really boring in the early eighties. And I can’t pinpoint why I thought that, because I was interested in contemporary art and so I haunted the galleries and I saw what was up, and that’s—I would have liked to have begun writing about that, but I didn’t have an opportunity, so when glass came along it was like, ‘Okay, I can do this.’ As we all know, it’s a fascinating medium, and I have watched a hundred blowing sessions and I still am intrigued by it, and I liked the intersection of so-called craft and so-called fine art, and how they touch one another occasionally.

Karen Chambers talks about financial uncertainty during NYEGW’s early years. Oral history interview with Karen Chambers by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, June 14, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:24.

Karen Chambers: Well, it was very—as I said—kind of loosey-goosey. We didn’t have a lot of money, we weren’t—hadn’t really developed a donor base, and so it was always kind of hand to mouth. We had tiny circulation of New Work, which was a tabloid.

Andrew Page talks about the continued importance of Glass Quarterly. Oral history interview with Andrew Page, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:08.

Andrew Page: Glass Quarterly continues to be published and it’s always had as its focus to be placing glass in a contemporary art context. And we take that legacy really seriously, and we continue to seek out writers who write not just about glass to contextualize what’s being done to take part in a dialogue that transcends the material, because there is a real culture around the material. There’s a culture of galleries that specialize in glass, collectors who only are interested in work in glass, and artists who only work in glass. That’s breaking down, but at one point and I think it was the dedication of those groups to the material that allowed the technical advances that have taken place over the last few decades and which have set the stage for glass being more widely available to artists who don’t necessarily want to spend two decades learning how to do it themselves. There’s an incredible knowledge base, facilities, and also just skill that’s out there to realize a wide variety of outcomes in glass that is perhaps unique to this moment, and wouldn’t have been possible without that really dedicated group of artists who are pioneering the techniques that are used today.

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 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.

Tina Yelle describes raising money for NYEGW. Oral history interview with Tina Yelle by Catherine Whalen, conducted via telephone, April 30, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:00.

Tina Yelle: Let me tell you how I got involved. I’m a painter—I was trying to be a painter, not a glass artist, and I had been living in Europe, and I was one of those people that didn’t really have a career path, per se. I wanted to paint. I came back from Europe to New York, and I was working a dead-end temp job. And Richard—of course he knew that, we were very close. He went down to the Workshop one day and found the place in disarray, I guess; you can get his version. He fired the director on the spot, and then in his typical bossy brotherly way, he phoned me up and told me to get down there the next day because I was just working a stupid temp job, and he just needed a warm body in there. So I thought that was fantastic. Of course, I’m young, open-minded, didn’t care, walked down there and it’s kind of like love at first sight. Not so much the glass itself, but the artist attitude.

Tina Yelle describes raising money for NYEGW. Oral history interview with Tina Yelle by Catherine Whalen, conducted via telephone, April 30, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:55.

Tina Yelle: And the other thing is, that looking at some of those workshop photos and so on, I don’t think I can take credit for inviting all of these really great, interesting people to the workshop. [clears throat] I was the mechanics person in the background, raising the money making things happen in that way, but I didn’t say, ‘Oh, we should have Gianni Toso come.’ It was the people who had a deep connection in history with glass that wanted Gianni Toso or whomever to come, and made that kind of thing happen. But I think that people who came like that enjoyed the vibe of New York and the art world in the eighties and in the nineties.

Tina Yelle discusses running and maintaining New York Experimental Glass Workshop on Mulberry Street. Oral history interview with Tina Yelle by Catherine Whalen, conducted via telephone, April 30, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 09:28.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Tina Yelle talks about growth and transition at NYEGW. Clip length: 00:59.

Tina Yelle: Well, when I joined the organization, it was very small and ramshackle, it had a budget of under $200,000 a year. And it wasn’t a very well-funded transition, to say the least. And there was a lot of transition while we were still on Mulberry Street, and then the, you know, the move to Brooklyn it’s kind of like a growing-up process, in a way for the organization, and certainly while I was involved, I always cared about art, you know? So I tried to keep that focus on the organization. Not collecting, not shopping, not anything else, but I really cared about artists and art. And I didn’t care what they did, but that’s what I cared about.

Time stamp: 01:01
Clip 2: Tina Yelle talks about NYEGW artists’ need for better glass and a better furnace. Clip length: 02:46.

Tina Yelle: Let me tell you a brief story about when I first started. Well, so I walk in there and I had absolutely no experience in anything relevant because I had managed—lucky me, I had managed until I was about 30 to flit around and paint and do nothing productive or career-oriented. So, you know, no organizational experience or anything like that. But I walked in there, and almost no staff, mostly a barter system and you’re probably aware that when you have a hot glass operation, you have to feed the monster every night. And then it has to cook, and then you have to get stuff out of the annealers in the morning. So, we had a barter system where people, usually the instructors who would teach at night would charge the furnaces afterwards, and someone else would come in the morning and, you know, empty the annealers and so on. And usually those people were trading for studio time. You know, a large glory hole, hot glass even in those days was twenty or thirty dollars an hour. And in 1985 for a young artist, if you’re serious about blowing and you want to have ten hours of blowing time a week, where’re you going to get that money? Especially if you’re not making something saleable. So there was a barter system. Every single person had a key, and I guess the guy who was my predecessor just didn’t pay much attention. He drew a salary and didn’t do much work, the place was running in the red, and it was pretty ramsack—shackle. So, what I did is I actually talked to the artists, and I said, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ And the first thing that they said to me was they wanted better quality glass. And so I walk in there, I know zilch, we’re running a deficit, and the first thing that we decide to do is build a new furnace [laughs] Cause, well, the artists wanted better glass. And we had like a tank furnace, which was fine for teaching classes and so on—that’s another thing we did—had been doing all along is classes. And we built another furnace that had a pot furnace and it had better quality glass which was more for the professional artist and at the end of about my first year, whatever the timing was, we had a guy come in, Stanley Balsky, who did our audit for years. And I think that I hadn’t opened any bank statements or done any kind of accounting. And Stanley’s rolling his eyes and he thinks this is going to be a disaster, and then he did the work in our office over several days and kept scratching his head very perplexed. And so I had wiped out the deficit and shown a profit for the first time, and it made sense, because our product was glass, and if we had good glass, reliable service, stuff ready on time, and focused on the essentials, artists came.

Time stamp: 03:50
Clip 3: Tina Yelle talks about managing to keep NYEGW safe and in order. Clip length: 01:37.

Tina Yelle: Essentially, no one was minding the shop before, and I came in and I just—I loved it. I loved the people. I loved the attitude, and it’s more or less that somebody was there minding the store, making sure that people did actually pay for things. You know, if you have classes, advertise them a bit so people come. And people—artists would be very discouraged if they came in and the glass was bad. You know, if you’re paying $60 for a couple of hours of hot time and then you take your stuff out of the annealer the next day and it explodes because the glass is bad quality or the annealer temperature was wrong or something, you’re not happy. So, anyway, that was really fun. I really enjoyed that. And I am still amazed and grateful that we never blew up anything. Here we have—we didn’t have a licensed plumber in sight, right? And, you know, plumbing is how you move gas around. So we had this place crawling with, you know, furnaces, gas, all of this stuff, electricity, water everywhere, this bombarder, all built by artists with no electrical or plumbing license. And we never blew up [laughs] which was really, really good.

Time stamp: 05:29
Clip 4: Tina Yelle discusses NYEGW’s introduction to Carl Pfozheimer. Clip length: 02:20.

Tina Yelle: You’ve probably come across Carl Pforzheimer who’s been on the board for many many years. Well, here’s one of those ‘it’s a small world’ things. Richard and I were down there in New York, and so on. Meanwhile, my youngest sister Mary who’s nine years younger was living up here in Cambridge and—at her first job out of Bryn Mawr [Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania]. She was working at a Harvard [Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts] office and met an undergraduate there named Gary Pforzheimer and they married, had three kids, and lived happily ever after. So just like any young couple who fall in love and talk, they tell each other about their family, and Mary says, ‘Oh, by the way, my brother Richard started a glass organization in New York,’ and Gary says, ‘Really? My parents collect glass.’ And that was just totally random. So of course we hear about it. Carl comes down to Mulberry Street for a tour, and I meet him there, and he loves glass, and we set him up taking glassblowing lessons every Saturday with Bill Gudenrath. And talk about, you know, a match made in heaven. They had so much in common: music, glass. They just liked each other; food, you name it. And so Carl was really wonderful. Naturally, I got the hang right away of inviting people to be board members based on their ability to help. And he had all the experience in the world on organizational development, how to run a board, how to do everything that I didn’t have, and so he agreed to join the board. He told us that he’d be the treasurer, thank you very much. And he was just instrumental. He recruited people to help me. For instance, he recruits some twenty-something Wall Street banker to come up and teach me Excel, and then he recruits somebody else from GE [General Electric Company, New York, New York] to talk about more general business things and then he recruits other people. He was just somebody who quietly, with no fanfare, just was helpful. And, you know, he was one of many influences that help the organization kind of grow from where it was in 1985 to an organization that was—you know, we had a couple million dollar capital campaign; doesn’t sound like much today, but it was a lot for this organization with a budget of $150,000 a year, the first year, in order to move to Brooklyn.

Time stamp: 07:52
Clip 5: Tina Yelle describes her love of the people, culture, and rawness of NYEGW’s Mulberry Street space. Clip length: 01:35.

Tina Yelle: I didn’t really think of it as collaboration, though I think that that probably is a pretty accurate term for what it was. It comes from liking something. I liked everything about the concept. You know, so philosophically I was very in-tune with things I cared about. I liked the people. I liked the mess. I mean, you’ve seen photos of Mulberry Street. It was pretty rustic, and glass is a messy business. You’re hot, you’re sweaty, you’re messy, you’re splashing water on the floor. Your—you know, your clothes get dirty. It’s—you know, I like mess—and I just like people. And I don’t generally like people, I wouldn’t say that I’m somebody who just likes everybody, cause I don’t, but I think that what you’re seeing as collaboration came from that. I liked what was going on and I like the people involved and it was natural to just work hard, and there was a lot of trust because as I say, everybody had a key. You know, there were people in and out of there night and day, and there’s a lot of responsibility. And we had, I’d say, in the ten plus years that I was involved, there might have been one or two incidences when there was any hint that somebody might have stolen something. So that was in Brooklyn when we were much bigger and had a much larger group of people coming in and out. But, generally there was a lot of trust and respect, and it was very collaborative among the artists because they—with hot glass in particular, you can’t do it alone.

Fred Kahl discusses being a New York University student and studying glass at NYEGW. Oral history interview with Fred Kahl by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 25, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:55.

Fred Kahl: So just in a nutshell—so when I was in school I studied a weird mix, I did a lot of, I was doing photography and then I was doing glass work, and at NYU there was a really pretty amazing photo department with a lot of really—sort of like these Postmodern kind of photographers. I did a class with Richard Prince—and Louise Lawler is another artist I studied with. Louise taught Intro to Photography freshman year of college was my—that was like my intro to photo teacher, and then—because NYU had the program with International Center of Photography, all these amazing artists like Richard Prince were teaching at NYU and it was mostly the grad students, but I got to like go into all these classes so I was kind of like getting this really heady sort of like art world stuff and then—at the same time was studying—they started this glass program with New York Experimental and not—that was Jim Harmon, and then later Jane Bruce came in to teach that as well, so it was kind of like this weird split between very sort of like thinking art and very crafty art, and that was always this sort of like weird dilemma—you know, or just this push pull, in terms of my influences. So around the time this was done I guess I was still really into glass, but slowly started kind of pulling away, just, you know, looking at, I guess, there was this sort of like this movement away from glass, which was so elitist, like you—only a handful of people come out to see the shows, and it was really sort of like catering to sort of like the one percent sort of audience, and I was doing work that was about illusion and magic and kind of like all started street performing and was kind of interested in just making work that was more sort of like democratic and approachable to more sort of like the common people, so—it sort of segued into this performative work that I was doing out in Coney Island and just moved away from work that was about sort of like showing in a gallery where like maybe a hundred—a couple hundred people are going to see the stuff, and really looking at creating more sort of populist work.

In this 1982 interview with Paul Hollister, William Morris discusses working with molds for his large-scale pieces. Interview with William Morris by Paul Hollister, October 9, 1982. (Rakow title: William Morris interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168577) Clip Length 08:45.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: William Morris discusses the challenges he and his team were experiencing maneuvering glass before it went into a mold. Clip length: 02:27.

William Morris (WM): But we’re working with some—small amount of people [inaudible], but also physically it was really demanding for my crew. One [inaudible] fellow I had on, we blew over four thousand pounds of glass in 14 days, and [inaudible]. So, physically it also kind of damages, so you have to be careful about that. Not to try to do too many [inaudible].

Paul Hollister (PH): Which—what is the physical problem? Is it in the, the blowing, at the point where you—

WM: No, it’s the carrying, and the maneuvering of the glass before it goes into the mold.

PH: As it grows.

WM: Yeah.

PH: Yeah. As it goes back and gets more on it.

WM: Well, it’s that last gather. And getting that heat built up to a point where it’s hot enough to fill the mold and get the proper definition and yet, you can still handle it. That’s the hardest part. See, I’ve ruptured my wrist from working [inaudible]. So that’s been a bit of a problem.

PH: There must be something technical in the Pilkington archive that might be of use to you to read on how large cylinders were blown, because they blew ‘em regularly, up to six feet—

WM: Yeah.

PH: —[inaudible] and so forth—

WM: Right.

PH: —and they didn’t have any trouble. And you shouldn’t have any trouble.

WM: Well—

PH: Not only that, they were absolutely even in thickness.

WM: Yes, but that’s, that’s the shape itself. My pieces are not even. They’re uneven in thickness.

PH: They’re uneven, right.

WM: But the thing is, that’s because where the glass grows, the [inaudible] volumes, areas in the mold, there’s no way I can get [inaudible]. Unless I shape the glass properly, you know, to begin with.

Time stamp: 02:30
Clip 2: William Morris discusses how glass responds to different types of molds. Clip length: 02:58.

William Morris (WM): You know, I think I just was thinking about like other materials, like outside metal. Steel. Using steel and having—trying to—cold, try heating with a torch. Steel, we’ve had some success with, but not much, because—as far as knowing your exact temperature, and also have to come—we use a steel pattern and outline and then wood on each side. So that the profile of the piece would be out of steel, but the faceplates would be out of wood. We didn’t, we didn’t try the faceplates out of steel yet, but the problem is knowing how hot you can get away with having it, because the glass will heat the material, and the glass will want to stick to it if it’s too hot.

Paul Hollister (PH): Mm-hmm.

WM: Okay? And like you said, it thickens inside. The wood—I mean, theoretically the wood’s better because you get the thick and thin spots because of the shape.

PH: Right.

WM: Okay? It—the cooling that takes place is really—it’s funny with the wood, because the glass really doesn’t come in contact with the wood like per se [inaudible]. Because the wood is moist, so there’s this intense pressure of steam that backs up from the wood. And what happens when it just [inaudible] sort of a layer—

PH: Mmm.

WM: —you know, that’s—

PH: An interface of steam.

WM: Yes, of steam. Which is coming in from all sides—

PH: Yeah.

WM: Now, some of the cracking—and you’re very right about this thick and thin spots, Paul, we’ve done some interesting things this last session working, there’s certain shape molds that even though the pieces survive and come out and they’re fairly even, they’ll eventually crack because of the stress of the shape of the mold, for some reason.

PH: It seems that with the wood, that the shapes were a little bit arbitrary, I mean, that they were not quite fluid enough. It’d be a place where I just got a look at one mold that was over at Heller [Heller Gallery, New York, New York].

WM: Mm-hmm.

PH: —yesterday, the only one that was open—

WM: Right.

PH: —and that one had real sharp corners, a real pocket.

WM: Yes.

PH: And those are the kind of places that, that you could have trouble, it would seem to me.

WM: Well, there are some of the pieces over there, and there’s two of ‘em in that chair that came out of that mold. That’s the only mold I sent over. I can show you what I mean, there’s two pieces that have—where you can see exactly what you’re talking about with sort of variation in thickness.

PH: So they’re over-articulated in a sense.

WM: Mm-hmm.

Time stamp: 05:31
Clip 3: William Morris discusses designing and building molds for his pieces. Clip length: 03:14.

Paul Hollister (PH): Who designs those, do you design them?

William Morris (WM): I design them, and then—

PH: John builds them?

WM: John builds them, but I’ll design ‘em off of a two-minute sketch that I’ll give him. There’s a lot of things that he has to make decisions on because of what he can put together. So he—there’s a lot of responsibility as far as his—you know, he does changes in the patterning, and that sort of thing. And—

PH: That’s why I think it may be the wrong, maybe medium—

WM: Material.

PH: —wood. Yeah.

WM: I’m sure I could find something that would be a little quicker to—

PH: Because what you do, then it goes and it gets either sharpened up too much—

WM: Mm-hmm.

PH: —or a detail gets eliminated because it simply can’t—

WM: Well, if I have the time and I can work directly with John, I will draw a full-scale drawing. And John will duplicate it perfectly in wood. He has that skill to do that. If it’s along the—if it’s along the lines, technically, I know—how we know how to build the molds better. You see, because we’re still just learning how to build the molds and put ‘em together.

PH: Yeah.

WM: So, he’s starting to learn what he can do, as far as construction and also, he needs the strength [inaudible] because the amount of pressure in these molds is unbelievable.

PH: Mmm.

WM: Unless they’re constructed right, they’ll just blow apart. The wood will blow open. The wood will actually [inaudible] chair will get completely split in half with the pressure that you see in his molds.

PH: What is the inner wood?

WM: The inner wood is cherry. And then we back with, usually a lot of plywood on the outside. Reinforcements. That’s how—so that’s put ‘em together so they don’t blow apart, because it’s a problem—

PH: Yeah. And I remember seeing all those huge c-clamps around them.

WM: Well, you see, and also, so the clamps, they’ve gotta come off of the form quickly. And if you use another material, and it’s heavy and heated up and difficult to move, the ways of opening it—

PH: But if you had a, if you had a ceramic one I was telling you about—not really ceramic, but I can’t think of these names of the sculpture stone stuff that were powder to mix with—

WM: Something like a hydrocal—

PH: Hydrocal, that was—or some kind of a thing that would be, would be receptacle to heat and amenable to heat, being heated up, but at the same time would be tough and you could just then screw in the actual clamp mechanism to that, so they would be a fairly easy process instead of putting clamps around it all—

WM: Oh, I see what you’re saying.

PH: —like furniture clamps—

WM: I see what you’re saying—

PH: You have things like big steel furniture clamps. But in this case, the clamp would be a part of the mold.

Tina Yelle, Geoff Isles, James Harmon, Jane Bruce and Fred Kahl discuss NYEGW’s transition from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Oral history interview with Tina Yelle by Catherine Whalen, conducted via telephone, April 30, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Geoff Isles by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, February 6, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Jim Harmon by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, February 8, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Jane Bruce by Barb Elam and Mike Satalof, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Fred Kahl by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 25, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 08:48.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Tina Yelle talks about NYEGW’s lease being up on their Mulberry Street location. Clip length: 00:22.

Tina Yelle: I, I think that—for us, it was—at least for me, in my perspective, it was a gradual process. And I don’t think that we actually started out with a vision of, ‘Oh, we want to be a world-class organization.’ It was more like, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do? Our lease is up, where are we going to go?’

Time stamp: 00:25
Clip 2: Tina Yelle talks about fundraising and NYEGW’s transition from Mulberry Street to Brooklyn. Clip length: 01:37.

Tina Yelle: That’s more how I remember it, and things happened that were a part of the group like the Christie’s Auction [Christie’s Auction & Private Sales, New York, New York.]. We went from that little Xerox glass glug letter on Xerox paper that I sent out my first fundraising effort, to Cynthia Manocherian joined our board of directors, and I forget who recruited her, but she’s a glass collector. And somebody on a different—more of a New York society level, and just the—again, a fantastic person who has been with the workshop as a board member for years and years, and she and Doug Heller and other people were instrumental in putting together a benefit auction for us at Christie’s. And we raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and it was, you know, one of those stunning events that was just a huge success. So that was a big transition from the little things that we had done on Mulberry Street. And so, that transition from Mulberry Street to Brooklyn and sort of a bigger stage—to me, it was happening gradually over all of those years.

Time stamp: 01:41
Clip 3: Geoff Isles discusses New York Experimental Glass Workshop’s move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Clip length: 01:48.

Geoff Isles: And there was a lot of financial uncertainty back then. We had a lot of loans out, we still owed money to a lot of vendors, and it was a very risky point. You know, we brought over enough people for a 3,000 square-foot studio, not a 17,000 square-foot studio, so we had to over time figure out how to fill in the gaps and bring more people in and start new programs and change a lot of things, and in many ways make the studio more professional. I remember the old studio, every single artist had a key for that studio and you could go and work there 24 hours a day, and there was usually people in there late at night and early in the mornings. And in this place, for obvious reasons we couldn’t do that, and so right off the bat we had to limit the time and shut down at 9 o’clock at night and open at 8 o’clock in the morning the next day. And we had to get more professional with our staff in the studio. Back in the old studio, all the different artists sort of did this volunteer barter system in order to keep the place going, and there was a studio manager but there was no technicians or anything like that, so people would volunteer to stay late in the day to throw the raw glass into the furnace and charge the furnace at night, or if there was a piece of equipment that needed to be rebuilt or stuff, people volunteered. And it was kind of chaotic over there, but that all had to change and the place had to become more professional. And we were kind of amateurish at it at first, but over time things got better.

Time stamp: 03:33
Clip 4: Jim Harmon speaks about NYEGW’s transition from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Clip length: 01:31.

Jim Harmon: Yeah, this was—we’d just gone through some growing pains, and when we had to move, it was a three-year project. I was actually the head of the artists’ planning committee for the whole move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. And I met with the team of—I don’t know, about six to eight people depending on who needed to be there, almost every week for a couple of years before we even moved in there. Just figuring out how much space we needed, what space was gonna be allocated for flow, traffic flow, and then I worked with Jeff Beers, the architect, quite a bit on designing spaces. And it was scary. Everybody was scared [laughs] cause it was so much bigger than what we had had. And we knew we were going to go into debt. Carl Pforzheimer was the treasurer I think at the time, but he figured it all out for us and we got loans and everything. But I remember there was a little bit of tension because we needed to start charging for regulars or people who were in the studio, using the studio a lot—even if they weren’t actually blowing glass or using an annealer. If they had locker space they had to have a membership and stuff like that, and it was just growing pains.

Time stamp: 05:06
Clip 5: Jane Bruce discusses changes at NYEGW when it transitioned to Brooklyn. Clip length: 01:03

Jane Bruce: To run a 18,000 square foot facility is a lot different from running a 5,000 square feet facility. So it became more—as staff, we had to be more—in a way, more serious, I guess—in a funny sort of way. There was still the sense of community, and also, there was a slight—through the early ‘90s there started to be a slight, in a way, a slight generation shift, because I left in ‘94, Chris Cosma had gone, Tina not long after that. Tina Aufiero not long after that went out to the West Coast. So there also started to be people leaving that had been very much part of Mulberry Street. Jim Harmon had moved to Philadelphia. So it was also a shift in the community of artists using it. And I didn’t come back for—you know, I didn’t really come back for ten years. So that’s also what different was—the personalities started changing. People started changing.

Time stamp: 06:12
Clip 6: Fred Kahl discusses adjusting to NYEGW’s Brooklyn building. Clip length: 02:35.

Fred Kahl: And then they put this resin coating stuff on the floor—and it was a major deal I remember Lino [Tagliapietra] just being so like hating on it because any time you spilled a—you cut a piece of glass and fell on the floor there was like this toxic fumes—coming off this—it was like a resin-base. They had to somehow seal the concrete so it wouldn’t leak. That was like a contractual thing, and it just caused such terrible problems with stuff cause it just was, just this nasty toxic fumes any time glass was spilled on the floor. And it was just like a chronic problem with this place, and that was like one of the things that they actually dealt with, I guess, finally with the new renovation that happened up there. But that was like a huge plague, and then I remember all of the outlets in this place were, it was like an aesthetic thing, the architect wanted them sideways—but really like the way plugs are designed they want to go the traditional vertical way so that you know the plug doesn’t fall out of the wall. It was like this aesthetic decision they had done—drove me crazy cause you plug in the extension cord and get across the room and it would fall out. So there was a—you know they had all these grandiose visions of a heat reclamation system, and then in theory they’d be able to run air conditioning or heating with all the waste heat from the furnaces and they went to great lengths to build this elaborate duct system and then it never really built the heat reclamation system so, that was like, sort of like the phase two thing that never got gotten to. So yeah, there was just a lot of weird stuff like that—but in general it was such an improvement over Mulberry Street, and then it was all new facilities, but then it was also sorely lacking in terms of storage and stuff, so this was definitely the sort of breaking in period, and—when it first happened.

Jim Harmon discusses glassblowers learning techniques from Lino Tagliapietra. Oral history interview with Jim Harmon by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, February 8, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:55.

Jim Harmon: I mean at least all the glassblowers that were of any quality were—realized that he [Lino Taglipietra] was giving us information, detailed information, about techniques, Venetian techniques that—if you go there as an artist and visit for a week or a month, you’re never going to pick up all these little subtle details of how something is handled as much as when he came here, he really devoted his time and effort to showing everybody exactly, ‘This is how you put this on,’ and, ‘No, you don’t do that, you do this. This is what the temperature is like.’ When you’re visiting a factory, they really don’t let you get up close that much in Venice.

Martin Blank discusses working with Lino Tagliapietra during Chihuly’s 1992 Venetian series demonstration at NYEGW. Oral history interview with Martin Blank by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 31, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:17.

Martin Blank: And so as I’m watching Lino, I can see that he’s sort of looking like he’s trying to sort of see around the other side. So I’ll turn, turn, turn, and then I could see him move in, and I’ll just instinctively know, firm up on the blowpipe, hold it tight, steady, he’s going to push. And then he does, he reaches right in. And if it’s not quite right, he’ll give me a little twitch with his hands, like a little signal, like he’s like—imagine like if you’re reaching out for a glass of wine or a glass and then you shake your hand, like you’re turning clockwise to turn it clockwise, or, or counterclockwise. That’s his hand saying little more, little more, little more, little more, and then it’ll dive in or it, or if a big gesture, that means turn a lot, turn a lot, turn a lot. But if it’s these little shakes clockwise, I know, ‘Okay, turn a little bit, a little bit. Stop, freeze, anchor. Here comes the piece,’ and then he’ll turn with his head, he’ll nod his head, ‘To the right to the right, more and more and more.’ And they’ll be, and then he’ll use some Italian ‘Gira, gira, gira, basta,’ you know, turn, turn, stop. ‘Ferma, ferma,’ you know, that means hold it tight, you know, strong, be strong. And then he’d be also like, ‘Pieno,’ slowly, slowly, and then, ‘Perfetto, mi piace.’ That’s perfect. I like it.

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.