Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center (WheatonArts) opened in 1970 as Wheaton Village, in Millville, New Jersey, a city that was once a major hub of glass manufacture, as was southern New Jersey as a whole. Frank H. Wheaton Jr., then head of his family’s Millville-based Wheaton Glass Company, established the nonprofit center to celebrate the history of American glass. WheatonArts re-creates the look and feel of a nineteenth-century American glassmaking community for visitors, with village shops and demonstration glassworking facilities. It also houses a collection of more than 22,000 objects in its Museum of American Glass and presents public programs, seminars, and exhibitions focused on glass. In 1983, WheatonArts added support for contemporary glass activity to its mission, establishing the Creative Glass Fellowship Program (formerly the Creative Glass Center of America) and offering annual residential artists’ fellowships.
WheatonArts has been an important gathering ground for glass artists and collectors since the mid-1970s and has proved invaluable to two groups in particular: those interested in paperweights, and emerging glass artists. This section describes WheatonArts’ origins and chronicles the enthusiasms, rivalries, secret-keeping, and artistic innovations of the paperweight community, which gravitated to WheatonArts’ Paperweight Weekends. It also details how glass artist Flora Mace led WheatonArts to create residencies for early-career artists as well as opportunities for the public to watch established artists at work.
Also included are interviews and correspondence, dating from 2016 to 2019, with Hank Murta Adams, Jane Bruce, Dan Dailey, Alan Kaplan, Kristin Qualls, Mary Shaffer, Gordon Smith, Paul Stankard, Lino Tagliapietra, Debbie Tarsitano, Gay LeCleire Taylor, and Victor Trabucco. This material is complemented by a video of a 1989 WheatonArts Masterwork Fellowship demonstration by Dan Dailey and Lino Tagliapietra; an excerpt from a 1977 conversation between Bob Banford and Paul Hollister; transcripts of a recording by Dan Dailey for Paul Hollister, c. 1989–1990; a 1988 lecture by Carol Cohen; 1986 lectures by Hollister and Dwight Lanmon; images from the Paul Hollister Slide Collection; and highlights from Hollister’s paperweight-related scholarship documenting his interest in artists who spent time at WheatonArts.
Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1977. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
Entrance to Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1982. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
The Glass Factory (now Glass Studio)
In 1972 Wheaton opened a new, large glass studio for glassworking and demonstrations. The Studio is inside a re-creation of Millville’s late-nineteenth century Wheaton Company glass bottle manufactory, with its single, central stack. T. C. Wheaton, doctor, pharmacist, and grandfather of Frank Wheaton, Jr., founded the original factory in 1888 to produce medicine bottles. Even as it vastly expanded, the Wheaton Company remained in the small-bottle business, making perfume and cosmetic bottles. In the late 1940s it produced bottles for French perfume companies like Schiaparelli as they struggled to recover after World War II. The business incorporated in 1971 as Wheaton Industries, Inc., which was sold in 1996 to the Swiss-based aluminum company Algroup. That firm, in turn, was acquired in 2000 by the Canadian firm Alcan.
Wheaton VIllage’s T.C. Wheaton Factory (now Glass Studio), Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1972. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
Original 1888 T. C. Wheaton Glass Factory, late 19th century. The photo was taken before child labor laws were enacted; children can be seen on the roof and elsewhere. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
Public glassmaking demonstration in Glass Studio amphitheater, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1976. Courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
“We were the first public amphitheater hot shop. So all of the other ones are designed off of us. Ours opened in ’74. Corning sent their museum people to come down and study ours and study our museum, and then they opened theirs.”
Kristin Qualls, director of exhibitions & collections, Museum of American Glass, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center
Glass Studio interior (detail), Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey, 1990. Bard Graduate Center, Paul Hollister Slide Collection. Photo attributed to Paul Hollister.
Glass Studio, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey, 2014. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
“[Frank Wheaton’s] idea was to build our glassmaking facility on the grounds as a replica of that original building with a single stack, with six pots that would go around the stack, but have contemporary modern furnaces inside the stack and operating that way. The first glassblowers were old-time, retired glassblowers from the glass industry who worked and demonstrated to the visitors as they came. There were galleries built around the perimeter so you could sit and you could watch, and demonstrations would go on daily.”
Gay LeCleire Taylor
Glass historian Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses the history behind the brick stack in Wheaton’s glass Studio.
Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses the history behind the brick stack in Wheaton’s glass Studio. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:03.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: So this is a brick stack which has seven openings, would’ve had six openings for pots, historically. And, of course, they were little furnaces, but visually to the visitor, it looked like an historic stack with the arches that would’ve had pots behind, and the floor below would’ve had a draft of air coming through and the fire in the middle. Historically, a furnace would’ve had clay pots made, and the glass would’ve been melted in clay pots. And that was a real art and if you had a bubble in them, they could explode. By going to a furnace and making a brick furnace, it’s much easier to handle and everything else. So it was more a historic façade, so if you were a visitor it would have the image of what the original T.C. Wheaton Factory would’ve had, with the pot openings. But we had modern furnaces controlled by computers inside, hiding out.
Kristin Qualls discusses Frank Wheaton and the origins of Wheaton Village. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 01:14.
Kristin Qualls: If I’m understanding correctly, the origins of Wheaton Village was, again, Frank Wheaton thinking about, you know, Henry Ford has a historic vision and Rockefeller had a historic village, and Rockefeller had his historic site in Williamsburg, and so all these industry magnates—that he was, because Wheaton Glass Company was one of the biggest glass companies in the country, had factories all over the world—so I think he had this vision of this tourist attraction that was going to draw all the people to come here. So not so much for local folks, but this tourist attraction that would be this village that represented when his grandfather founded Wheaton Glass. And the original plans for this place was to be twice as many buildings, including a church and a cemetery, and a boat building and a farm, and so it really was to represent in a sort of, again Sturbridge Village [Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, Massachusetts], Greenfield Village [Dearborn, Michigan], Colonial Williamsburg [Williamsburg, Virginia] kind of way, which I’ve always thought with my background in museums was partially influenced by how history was sort of being taught in that way, and what was popular in terms of these historic or faux historic contexts in which to learn it, especially as you’re heading into the Bicentennial era and that kind of idea.
WheatonArts has a significant collection of molds and historic glassmaking equipment from the turn of the twentieth century. In the early 1970s, Frank H. Wheaton, Jr. purchased a large number of antique molds from Geraldine Kemple, who, with her late husband, John, had used the molds in their business, Kemple Glass, to make reproduction glass tableware and decorative objects. The Kemples bought and sold many molds in their company’s years of operation (1945–1970). Frank Wheaton, Jr., in turn, used many of these molds in his Wheatonware line before closing that division in 1975 and transferring the molds to Wheaton Village. Some twenty years later, Wheaton factory workers collected additional molds during a midnight raid on the Wheaton plant—it had been sold to an overseas conglomerate and was slated to be shut down—and gave them to WheatonArts to preserve. Oscar “Skip” Woods (d. 2007), a paperweight maker who owned Old South Jersey Glass, in Vineland, New Jersey, had close ties to the Wheaton community and donated other historical equipment to WheatonArts’ collection.
Historic molds, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey. Bard Graduate Center, Paul Hollister Slide Collection. Undated photo, attributed to Paul Hollister.
“So when you walk into our glassblowing facility—the Glass Studio—because first it was a replica of the T. C. Wheaton Glass Factory, Mr. Wheaton had it built and designed to look like the original glass factory that the company operated. So when you came in the front door, molds were on the right, and there are all these historic blow molds and historic pressing molds and other things like that. So that’s now on view for the visitor.”
“Oh yeah—they’re all historic molds that we had in the collection. So things from 1905, 1920s, those kinds of dates…”
So you can see on the top shelf wooden blow molds, which are almost like a log split in half, and then the ones below are a lot of different blow molds and some dump molds—the squarish rectangular things with the handle sticking out.”
Gay LeCleire Taylor
Historic molds, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey. Bard Graduate Center, Paul Hollister Slide Collection. Undated photo, attributed to Paul Hollister.
“Because I think you lose a lot, and that’s part of my industrial heritage background, is the idea [that] if you don’t use these machines, you will forget how they run. Or you won’t be able to run them anymore if you don’t use them and keep them oiled and keep them functioning. They’re going to gum up, and you won’t be able to use them ever again. So [it’s] to be able to maintain not just the physical, tangible part of the history, but that intangible knowledge and passion and interest in the glass that happens in conjunction with having the working studio.”
Kristin Qualls
Studio demonstration using historic press, with artist Beth Lipman (right), then studio director of education and artist services, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey, 2005. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
Kristin Qualls talks about WheatonArts’ large mold collection and its connection to Wheaton Industries.
Kristin Qualls talks about WheatonArts’ large mold collection and its connection to Wheaton Industries. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 02:30.
Kristin Qualls: We do have a large number of molds because of our connection to Wheaton Glass Industry, the Wheaton Industries who had molds, so they had revived—was it the Wheatonware line that they revived the old molds from, like Kemple [Kemple Glass Company]?
Dianne Wood: Yes.
KQ: Yeah. So a lot of the molds we have came from—they’re made in the McKee Glass Factory in Jeanette, Pennsylvania around the turn of the last century, 1915, 1920s. Then they were sold to Kemple Glass in Ohio, then they were sold to Wheaton Industries, I think it was at that time, who then revived this—again, the sort of historic idea to revive some of these old patterns. And then when the Wheaton Factory was sold off, the story is that the day that the workers found out they’re going to change the locks and so no one who had worked there was going to be allowed back in, they were going to sell everything. And of course, this is an overseas conglomerate who doesn’t necessarily have an interest in glass, certainly not an interest in American glass history. So they snuck in and stole—put on their truck beds, and they’re all their pickup trucks all the molds they could find and that they could carry, and get out of there before they changed the locks, and then brought ‘em and dumped him here just to save them. I mean just to save them, the whole point was preservation. So that’s how we came by this large amount of molds plus other glass factories in their—Skip Woods, for example, donated a lot of molds to us, so we do have some molds from that. So we do have a lot of molds, which gives us the opportunity to have them be used so that they—again that idea of they serve as inspiration for artists coming through now, they serve as new tools, unique tools that they might not be able to find and other glass studios that they can experiment with and use while they’re here; again, you’re just connecting it back. You can find the piece maybe that was originally commercially sold—
Catherine Whalen: Mm-hmm.
KQ: —in the 1900s in our collection and then get a new piece that they’re making from the same mold. So it for me again, it’s that idea of it’s not necessarily a linear history. But these molds might have been used very much in 1920 and then all of a sudden today, someone’s re-engaging with them on a different level and bringing a modern sensibility to it and an artistic sensibility to it. So we do have, again, a number of them that are in use and a few in the collections that they’re preserved and Rembrandt rule and all that good stuff. But to let them continue to be muses for today’s glass artists and into the future, I think is, again, an important way of keeping—preserving the history and keeping it alive by allowing it to change and morph and become relevant to today.
Millville, New Jersey, was well known to Paul Hollister and other paperweight aficionados as the origin of the Millville Rose, a paperweight design developed in the early 1900s by a group of Millville glass factory workers—most notably, Ralph Barber—during their off-hours. In 1975, to broaden interest in American paperweight styles and makers, Wheaton Village launched the first of what would become a biennial three-dayevent, the Paperweight Collectors Weekend. Hollister attended as the author of the influential Encyclopedia of Glass Paperweights, a book that makers and collectors avidly studied.
Paul Hollister, The Encyclopedia of Glass Paperweights (New York: C.N. Potter; distributed by Crown Publishers, 1969). Bard Graduate Center Library Collection.
Paul Hollister, The Encyclopedia of Glass Paperweights (New York: C.N. Potter; distributed by Crown Publishers, 1969). Reprinted 1986 (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Paperweight Press). Bard Graduate Center Library Collection.
Glass historian Gay LeCeire Taylor talks about Paul Hollister’s scholarship educating paperweight collectors.
Gay LeCleire Taylor talks about Paul Hollister’s scholarship educating paperweight collectors. Oral history interview with Gay LeCeire Taylor, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:51.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: What’s happened is Paul Hollister devised a book where he really looked at the millefiori canes and realized, if you knew a star that had five points, well, that could be Baccarat, or if something had six points, that could be Saint-Louis or the New England Glass Company or Boston [Boston and Sandwich Glass Company]. So he started to draw those canes. So these collectors that are out there today have their jeweler’s loupes, and they’re looking in their weights, and they’re identifying every single thing. And then there’s the whole contemporary glass artist field of artists that are making contemporary paperweights that are just extraordinary with flamework designs on the inside, and Paul Stankard being one of the, the leaders in that form. And so they are doing historic paperweight information and contemporary at the same time during these conventions.
Millville Rose. Attributed to Ralph Barber, 1905-1915. Collection of the Museum of American Glass, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey (2000.001.017). Photo: Al Weinerman.
Kristin Qualls talks about the origins of the Millville Rose.
Kristin Qualls talks about the origins of the Millville Rose. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 01:50.
Kristin Qualls: The Millville Rose comes from Millville. So Ralph Barber who was most well-known within the glassblowing world as [an] excellent x-ray tube maker, so again, this is an example of that factory worker who’s brought up through the apprentice system and learns from the factory from making these utilitarian items and then on his off time creates this paperweight motif. He was also a rose gardener. So it was—for him, I can imagine it was he loves roses, can I make a rose paperweight, and develops this crimp that allows you to blossom the rose as you’re rounding out the paperweight. And there are stories about again that being a secretive technique—arguments between him and Emil Larson about who came up with the technique. And I know I’ve heard stories that Tony DePalma, who is our king of the Millville Rose—he would lock down the Wheaton studio. So Tony had sort of been handed—it was almost like ‘the handed down to certain mentor protege’—hand down how this happens. Tony DePalma hands it down to Don Friel who’s the one who makes our Millville Roses now. And so certain people again in this insular community kind of pick it up if they show interest that sort of it’s happening so if you make yourself present and that you want to learn this and you get the trust you eventually learn and then—I mean, I think education changed how things—how people learn information changed, and it stopped being so secretive. Because now I think my instinct is that people understand you have to have a skill set in order to make a beautiful Millville Rose so you can show anyone in the world you want about how to make a Millville Rose, there’s still only going to be a handful of people who are going to be able to make it well.
Attendees at the first Wheaton Paperweight Weekend, titled “A Collector’s Weekend: Contemporary American Paperweight Artisans, 1975.” All but four of those pictured were paperweight makers at the time. Front row, from left: Charles Hannah (glasscutter), Paul Stankard, Harold Hacker, Francis Whittemore, Oscar “Skip” Woods; Back row: Albert “Pete” Lewis, Carolyn Smith, Barry Taylor (Wheaton Village Director), Jack Choko, Hugh Smith, Ray Banford, Ronald Hansen, Robert (Bob) Banford, Frank H. Wheaton, Jr. (Wheaton Village founder), Roy Horner (lampworker). Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
Paperweight Collectors Association and American Paperweight Guild
The Paperweight Weekends’ focus on American-made weights intentionally counterbalanced the dominance of European weights in the Paperweight Collectors Association (PCA), the main organization serving collectors at the time, and gave rise to brief but intense rivalries. PCA founder Paul Jokelson was a dealer of French paperweights—he represented both Saint-Louis and Baccarat—and was notoriously uninterested in promoting those companies’ modern American counterparts. After the first Paperweight Weekend at Wheaton Village in 1975, the short-lived American Paperweight Guild was created, and Wheaton Village founder Frank Wheaton, Jr. became a member. Jokelson was so vehemently opposed to the establishment of the new organization that he rescinded the memberships of several PCA associates who joined it—including Paul Hollister, whom he had always considered as a rival. The American Guild dissolved once American collectors and makers were welcomed back into the PCA; however, WheatonArts still holds Paperweight Weekends every other spring, alternating years with PCA’s biennial conventions. The Paperweight Weekends remain important events for the paperweight community, bringing artists, collectors, dealers, and curators together for an intensive program of exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and social activities.
Paul Stankard discusses Frank Wheaton and the American Paperweight Guild, and the Paperweight Weekend.
Paul Stankard discusses Frank Wheaton and the American Paperweight Guild, and the Paperweight Weekend. Oral history interview with Paul Stankard, March 23, 2018, Stankard Studio, Mantua, New Jersey. Clip length: 02:13
Paul Stankard: Frank Wheaton really enjoyed my work. When Pat [Stankard] and I were—when the children were young in the late—I think Wheaton Village [now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey] opened in 1970—I was still working in industry. I would take Pat and the kids and we would go down and look at Wheaton Village and I would watch them make paperweights. That was the main theme down there, they were making paperweights. And there were public demos and all. So I had a chance to talk to Frank. And Frank went to a Paperweight Collectors Association convention and was taken aback by—the focus was on the antique French and the American paperweight makers were kind of like—we were anxious to share our work. But there was this idea that they were not even close to what was—what had been done by the French. So Frank—I remember talking to Frank about starting the American Paperweight Guild along with Reese Palley, a art dealer in Atlantic City. So Reece Palley Frank Wheaton—and I was involved a little bit—started the American Paperweight Guild. The second conference was at Wheaton’s and it was a huge success. So every two years in between the Paperweight Collectors Association convention, Wheaton had their paperweight weekend. And it was a magnet for all the American paperweight makers [laughs]. And it also was a—became successful because the collectors supported it. And the collectors didn’t have to pay ten thousand and fifteen thousand dollars to buy an antique French paperweight. They could buy something—they could buy a Paul Stankard for six hundred bucks. Or they could buy a Charles Kazian for maybe a thousand dollars. So it was really fascinating to see this paperweight—Wheaton Village’s paperweight weekend change the culture of the paperweight collecting world.
Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses Paul Jokelson and the beginnings of the Paperweight Weekend. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:53.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: The sort of beginning is a little controversial, okay? I’ll give you a background that—I don’t know if Paul [Stankard] mentioned Paul Jokelson, who is the founder of the Paperweight Collectors Association—and he is a Frenchman who came to New York and settled, but was sort of this importer, and somehow he got himself involved with Saint-Louis and Baccarat and importing these new weights that they were making. And he ran this organization more as his clientele, I guess you could say, that were buying his weights and everything, and then he sort of had this club that you could join. But American paperweights seemed to never be able to break through to what he was doing and marketing and everything else, so there were a group of collectors and there were a group of artists who wanted American paperweights to be recognized. So really what we tried to do is set up an organization that was the American Paperweight Guild, I think is the correct name of it, and so this is in the seventies. And we had a meeting in 1976 in one of the casinos in Atlantic City, and tried to get this idea that American makers could be represented and American history and American weights would be discussed and everything else. And so Paul Jokelson fought it, you know, we were upstarts, and what were we trying to do? Or whatever. But after this huge feud, it sort of settled down, and Paul Jokelson eventually gives up his presidency and turns it over to the membership, and he then becomes this every other year. Wheaton Village would have it on the even years, or it just sort of fell out that way, and then the more international one would be during the PCA and our weekends really began being more focused on American weights. Now we’ll have an international speaker or, or someone come in and speak, but it really was focused more on American and American collecting and the history of American paperweights, you know, from the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, and the New England Glass Company, and all of those things, so. It was really pushing the envelope against the Paperweight Collectors Association that we started having our weekends. And it was Mr. Wheaton who was the driving force on getting Americans represented: ‘Well, then we’ll do it here.’
Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses Paul Hollister coming to the Paperweight Weekends. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:45.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: So that’s why Paul Hollister, you know—to give lectures and to do things like that on paperweights. Paul Jokelson wasn’t allowing him to be at any of his events, so he started coming to our events, where he could meet, you know, could be with paperweight people and everything else. And he never had a car in New York, he would always ride the bus from Manhattan down to Millville. I think we had to pick him up by the IGA or something like this [laughs] it’s this bus stop. We needed a bus terminal in Millville being this small country place and then—so we would take him back to the bus and he would go back up to New York. You know, it was never beneath him to ride a bus. Never beneath him, you know? Just amazing.
Alan Kaplan discusses discusses the rivalry between Paul Hollister and Paul Jokelson. Oral history interview with Alan Kaplan by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, April 25, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:34.
Alan Kaplan: We knew Paul Hollister and Paul Jokelson from the very beginning. And the two of them used to have this friendly competition. You know, listen as I said, when you’re a dealer, you never take sides on anything. Everybody’s your friend, and everybody’s your customer, so—you sort of stand on the sidelines and watch the goings on. I mean, we certainly know of the rivalry, and it was always there. I don’t know if it was the fact that each of them wrote books, and each of them considered themselves the top, you know, expert in the field? I mean, Paul Jokelson was the one who founded the Paperweight [Collectors] Association and basically subsidized it for all the early years. I think that was ’54, his first bulletin. And the same thing, it didn’t cost anything to join. He would subsidize the conventions, himself, but, you know, I mean say what you want. Yes, he did import weights, so it was self-serving somewhat. He had loved the whole thing. And Paul Jokelson came over here as a ‘war bride’ after the second World War. You know, he married an American nurse—and came over. But why? I don’t know. It just could be that each one wanted to be the center of attention in the paperweight universe. That would be my guess. But they certainly, you know, they were always cordial to each other in public. But they certainly would dig their nails in in private over each other.
Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses the origins of the paperweight and the history of the Paperweight Weekend. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:57.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: Well, the form of a paperweight is from about 1845. In Italy, it first starts with millefiori canes and cane design work inside. The French pick it up, Baccarat, Saint Louis, become the main companies for making paperweights and this—people are learning to read and write—they’re using sealing wax, their desks are becoming almost decorated with these types of forms where the pen nibs and something and the paperweight holds the things so they were functional objects sold to stationary stores and they’re—spreads to England, the American companies see the Crystal Palace exhibition. They see the French paperweights and the New England Glass Company and the Boston and Sandwich glass companies start making paperweights in America as sold to stationery stores. And then in the town of Millville, where my museum was, in the 1880s workers on their own time and their lunch time or at the end of the day develop their own style of paperweight, which was totally for gifts, totally as an artistic design that they could do and make a little money also and sell. So if you saw any book on paperweights, there would still be a chapter on Millville, New Jersey besides, you know, Baccarat, Saint Louis or the French companies. And so, out of that came this sort of idea of these lampwork flamework artists that were starting out to make paperweights, and making small little design in the weights, and a way to support them was to have a weekend because there were collectors out there collecting the French weights, and there was an organization called the Paperweight Collectors Association, which still exists today. I’m on the review committee for their publication, they do a scholarly publication every year, and they would have conventions but focus on French weights and we were more interested in American weights and encouraging young artists like a young Paul Stankard in the early seventies or other artists that were working at that time and encourage their work. So we started a weekend that was geared more toward American paperweights and the young artists, not to the French weights that were being talked about. And so it evolved to every other year, we would have a paperweight weekend and then the other main organization would have theirs on the other times and Paul Hollister who’d written one of the main early books on paperweights, really the one—the encyclopedia, he would come down, authors would come down. We would learn about weights and talk about weights and now we’re going on to—the first one was in 1975 and then we’re still having one this year, you know, so it keeps on going.
Paperweight artists Bob Banford (left) and Ray Banford (right) with Paul Hollister at the Museum of American Glass at Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center) during the 1978 Paperweight Weekend (then called Collectors Weekend), Millville, New Jersey. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
Gay LeCleire Taylor in an undated photo from the time of her tenure as director and curator of the Museum of American Glass at Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
A Festival of Names
Wheaton’s Paperweight Weekend has undergone a number of name changes since itsinception in 1975. It has been called “Collectors Weekend,” “Paperweight Collectors Weekend,” and is now known as “Paperweight Fest.” In 2004, the event was given the title “Small Scale Works,” which caused some controversy. Conceived by established paperweight artist Debbie Tarsitano, who sought to push the fairly traditional forms of paperweights into the territory of contemporary glass, the new moniker failed, and “Paperweight” was reinstated in the name at the following convention. Today, as “Paperweight Fest,” the weekend gathering continues to draw a core group of well-known makers, such as Paul Stankard and Gordon Smith, as well as young people, often artists with a background in glass who are trying something new.
“Small Scale Works” brochure, Wheaton Village, 2004. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
Glass Historian Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses how a “Small Scale Sculpture” Weekend idea failed.
Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses how a “Small Scale Sculpture” Weekend idea failed. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:22.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: What happened is the Paperweight Weekend, I don’t want to say, for us nearly died, but Debbie Tarsitano was involved in this, and our new director after my husband was long gone and then we had a new director—was really interested in—more in contemporary glass. So Debbie Tarsitano was pushing this small scale sculpture idea, so we tried the small scale sculpture weekend, which was a total flop. People refused to come, and that’s what these—I don’t know if Paul’s [Stankard] ever talked about what walls he kind of hit sometimes with paperweight collectors that didn’t want the botanicals, didn’t want his more sculptural things, and so he had to look more to the studio movement than the core paperweight collectors. And so after that failure, what we ended up doing to get back into doing Paperweight Weekends is WheatonArts paired with the Delaware Valley chapter of the Paperweight Collectors Association. They became our sort of co-sponsor for the event. So we went back to that core and said, ‘Look okay, we tried the small scale sculpture, it didn’t work. We want to get back to Paperweight Weekends.’
“WheatonArts paired with the Delaware Valley chapter of the Paperweight Collectors Association. They became our sort of co-sponsor for the event, and so when you see a paperweight brochure, we have WheatonArts at the top and then it says, ‘Presented in association with the Delaware Valley Paperweight Collectors Association.’ So we went back to that core and said, ‘Look, okay, we tried the Small Scale Sculpture, it didn’t work. We want to get back to Paperweight Weekends.’ And so what happens is members of the Delaware Valley Paperweight Collectors Association help with the program and getting speakers and those kinds of things.”
Gay LeCleire Taylor
Debbie Tarsitano speaks about her pushing the idea of “encasement.”
Debbie Tarsitano speaks about her pushing the idea of encasement. Oral history interview with Debbie Tarsitano by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, April 18, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:49.
Debbie Tarsitano: Well, paperweights was evolving. I was one of the people that was hoping to evolve paperweights to join the contemporary art glass that—I’m talking about modern paperweights—to join the contemporary art glass scene. And I actually didn’t feel there was any reason why the modern artists today, the younger artists, who—that came around, shouldn’t be kind of pursuing the form differently, and to be looking at what’s being made by the contemporary artists in glass and other contemporary artworks, and try to find a way to take that idea of encasement and bring it into something else. And so I started to foster that idea in kind of a very forceful way, which didn’t go over very well with a lot of people because paperweights are relatively a traditional art form. And even when there’s cubes or, it’s not that far from what was made in the historical record. Cause there were plaques and things, and cut square things made in the historical record. So it’s like I wanted to bring it like, to the next place. And I worked very hard prior to like, 2009. I wrote articles about it, too, to try to say, ‘Hey, let’s, think of it as encasement.’ You’re encasing—flamework. Encased flamework—I like to think. And so we can take that flamework, and it doesn’t have to be flowers and things. It could be anything; we can open it up. It could be anything. And it could be flowers, but we need to think of like, how could it be a format for like, the times we live in. And so I pushed that a lot, and I started making a lot of forms, I made like bird forms, and abstract forms with encasement in it, and I painted the outside and sandblasted. And I did everything to a paperweight or a form that you could possibly think of.
Paperweight Fest attendees at Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey, 2018. All those pictured are paperweight makers unless identified otherwise. Front row, from left: Clinton Smith, Paul Stankard, Alison Ruzsa, Cathy Richardson, Ken Rosenfeld, Mayauel Ward, Charles Kaziun III, Kanako Matsuura (visiting artist from Japan), David Graeber; back row: Craig Deacons, Joe Mattson (Wheaton staff) Hank Murta Adams (Wheaton staff), Andrew Najarian, Damon MacNaught, Gordon Taylor, Eric Hansen. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
Rick Ayotte and Paul Stankard at Paperweight Fest, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, 2018, Millville, New Jersey, 2018. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
Kristin Qualls talks about Wheaton’s Paperweight Weekend today.
Kristin Qualls talks about Wheaton’s Paperweight Weekends. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 01:12.
Kristin Qualls: I can only say what’s happening more recently with the Paperweight Fest and how that’s developed, but definitely the Delaware Valley Paperweight Collectors Association, part of the Paperweight Collectors Association, has—have always been actively involved. I’m not sure if that was the exact format of the partnership then or if those are all the same names of the organizations, but the paperweight collectors and artists have always been extremely involved in developing this programming. And so, again, I was at the meeting for next year’s Paperweight Fest on Tuesday. So it’s fresh in my mind. But again the idea of who are the people that the community wants to hear from, that are recognized experts, that we want to talk to; and again, it runs the gamut from just private club hobbyists to put a name to it, people who do it on their own free time, to people who are like curators that are paid to work with paperweights, to the artists who are working with them, to the dealers. So it really has to do with whom people in the community want to hear from and who’s a good speaker and engaging speaker to put on the Paperweight Fest. So it’s always been—the community’s been—the paperweight community has been very involved with creating the fests with us.
At the Paperweight Collectors Weekend held in May 1986, Dwight Lanmon, then director of The Corning Museum of Glass, was a guest speaker, and Paul Hollister a speaker and participant in a panel discussion on paperweight collecting with well-known dealers Arthur Greenblatt, Alan Kaplan, and Larry Selman. Lanmon and Hollister had co-curated the Corning Museum’s much-celebrated 1978 exhibition The Great Paperweight Show, and Hollister had written the accompanying catalogue, Paperweights: “Flowers Which Clothe the Meadows”. Hollister later wrote about how, at that same 1986 Paperweight Collectors Weekend, glass artist Paul Stankard “broke lampworking tradition by producing a paperweight before a large audience.”1 That demonstration was a precursor to the groundbreaking lampworking workshop Stankard would conduct a few months later at the Penland School of Craft, in North Carolina.
1Paul Hollister, “Natural Wonders: The Lampwork of Paul J. Stankard,” American Craft, February/March 1987, p. 42.
Paul Hollister Interview Transcript
Paul Hollister and Dwight Lanmon Lectures, May 17, 1986.
Paul Hollister and Dwight Lanmon give lectures on paperweights for Wheaton Village (later Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center).
(Rakow title: Wheaton [sound recording] / Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 167926)
Kristin Qualls discusses the Paperweight Weekend with Barb Elam. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 00:35.
Barb Elam: And also something I noticed is that it was a pretty big deal; I mean a big curated event.
Kristin Qualls: Yes.
BE: It wasn’t just sort of like a weekend picnic.
KQ: No.
BE: This was a really—this was a dinner—
KQ: Yes.
BE: You know, there were speakers—
KQ: Correct. And It continues to be.
BE: Yeah, yeah.
KQ: It continues to be a multiple day event that brings together paperweight artists, paperweight collectors, curators who work with paperweights, galleries and dealers who work with paperweights on a multiple day event here on campus with demos, speakers, lectures, ‘lunch and learns,’ ‘make your owns’ with an artist, demonstrations, and a dinner banquet.
Cover, Wheaton Village Paperweight Collectors Weekend brochure, 1986. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
Wheaton Village Paperweight Collectors Weekend brochure, 1986, lists a panel discussion with Paul Hollister and a presentation by Dwight Lanmon. Collection of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
Paperweights: “Flowers Which Clothe the Meadows,” exhibition catalogue for The Great Paperweight Show, The Corning Museum of Glass, April 29–October 21, 1978. Image courtesy of The Rakow Library, The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York. (CMGL 20097).
Paperweight Collectors Weekend attendees, 1986, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey. Bard Graduate Center Paul Hollister Slide Collection. Photo attributed to Paul Hollister.
Debbie Tarsitano discusses her involvement in Paperweight Weekend and its history, being a woman glassmaker, and how she and her father learned to make paperweights.
Playing06:15Transcript
Debbie Tarsitano
Debbie Tarsitano discusses her involvement in Paperweight Weekend and its history, being a woman glassmaker, and how she and her father learned to make paperweights.Oral history interview with Debbie Tarsitano by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, April 18, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 06:15.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Debbie Tarsitano discusses the history of Wheaton’s Paperweight Weekend. Clip length: 01:59.
Debbie Tarsitano: This is not the first one that I attended. Wheaton Village would have it one year, and then the opposite year would be the Paperweight Collectors Association convention. And I started to go to this event from Wheaton Village, it started as the—and I could be wrong—but this is what I recall. It started as the American Paperweight Association. And they had it first I believe in a hotel around the Pennsylvania–New Jersey area. And then from that it grew into the Wheaton Village Paperweight Weekend. And I think they kind of dropped the idea of the American Paperweight Association because the Paperweight Collectors Association was everyone. It was people from the United States. It was our foreign colleagues in France and all over Europe that made paperweights. You know, encompassed everything. And then from that grew this idea, well, what about American paperweight artists and having their own association, and that, like I say, took place in the late seventies probably. And then from that Gay Taylor and the people at Wheaton Village made it into the Wheaton Paperweight Weekend. And at first it had as you can see all these American artists, but at some point it really just did open up to everybody. It did. They couldn’t just like, keep it just for the American artists. There were people from Scotland, Perthshire paperweights, Saint-Louis, the people from Saint-Louis and Baccarat and other European factories. But it was kind of like the early days of putting together, you know, associations that could gather people together that enjoyed paperweights and have the artists come, which is, I feel, a great—one of the great things that these associations did. They had the artists attend. So people could actually meet the people that made the work.
Time stamp: 02:02 Clip 2: Debbie Tarsitano discusses attending the Paperweight Collectors Association conventions with her father, Delmo. Clip length: 02:10.
Debbie Tarsitano: When I first started, I didn’t know anybody. And my dad attended a paperweight convention in Washington, D.C., and the date on that I’m not sure, but it was probably sometime in the late seventies. And when he went to the Paperweight Collectors convention in Washington, D.C. he heard about that there were these conventions and things, and gatherings. And he didn’t even sign in. He just went, he and my mom went. They didn’t know he had to like, sign in, and pay. And Mr. Paul Jokelson, when he met my father, he realized he was kind of a stowaway at the convention, and he invited him to stay. And that’s where my dad met a lot of people from paperweights and realized that there was this big group of people, and, you know, we should meet them and get to know them. And from that we began to get to know some of the people that made paperweights. There was a New England—we heard of a New England paperweight chapter, even though we lived in Long Island, and we decided, well, let’s go there. We took our little paperweights that we had just been making, and we brought them there. And we met everyone there, and saw that there was a big group of people that got together. They hadn’t had I don’t believe, like a New York chapter at the time. And that was the closest to us, even though it was a long, it’s a long ride from Long Island, we went. And so that’s when we met more people that collected paperweights and some of the dealers and things, too. So we became aware that there was this whole group of people interested. And then we started going to the auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s that had paperweights. They had—they actually had paperweight auctions. They were pretty extensive. I mean, they had their own catalog, which doesn’t exist today. And we started going to those auctions and then meeting also a lot of people there. but also L.H. Selman was very influential to us because my dad met him early on and was buying antique paperweights from him as a collector. And that’s how we also learned about the whole connection to these dealers that dealt in paperweights.
Time stamp: 04:14 Clip 3: Debbie Tarsitano discusses being a woman paperweight maker. Clip length: 00:37.
Debbie Tarsitano: That’s why I wanted to be better. Cause they were making really great work, and I know—now I realize maybe women would think because you’re a woman, you have to do better. But at the time I just wanted to be better, and kind of make something extraordinary that competes, and it was very competitive. I mean, we were really competing against each other. It wasn’t like, ‘I made something. Isn’t that nice?’ It’s like, ‘Well, you made something, now I’m gonna make this.’ And then they made something and said, ‘Oh, you made that. I’m gonna make this now.’ So it was fun, and it was very, very inspiring. It was a great time. Really a great time.
Time stamp: 04:50 Clip 4: Debbie Tarsitano discusses how she and her father, Delmo, learned paperweight making. Clip length: 01:24.
Debbie Tarsitano: Well, we studied the antique paperweights. We studied—got Paul Hollister’s book—I mean, and Mr. [Paul] Jokelson’s book. And then we were able to go to the auctions and handle paperweights, actually hold them in your hand and look at them. And we were fascinated to look at how they were made. We would look at them, and ‘How do you think they did that?’ And my father, until what, I think in about way in the seventies before we made paperweights, he took a glassblowing class, down in Queens [New York]. It was Milropa Studios. And he had a store—my father had an appliance store, and this glassblowing studio opened up, and he took a glassblowing class there. So he learned a little bit about hot glass. And I didn’t take the class, but I went with him. And then we met this young man at a fair that made those fun glass animals and things. And my father actually took a couple classes with him and made little bears and swans and things like that. And then he came home, and he said he wanted to make a torch in our—we have a little kind of outbuilding on our property. And so he put a little torch on a card table out there, and I started to play. He would learn how to make these little elephants and things and then—they were tiny, like one inch—and then I would play, too. And I could do it. I mean, he would show me, and then I would do it.
Bob Banford discusses the Paperweight Collectors Weekend and its history and making paperweights with his father, Ray.
Playing03:48Transcript
Bob Banford
Bob Banford discusses the Paperweight Collectors Weekend and its history and making paperweights with his father, Ray. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:47.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Bob Banford discusses his history with the Paperweight Collectors Weekends. Clip length: 01:09.
Bob Banford: This was well into my career actually. I started in glass with paperweights in 1973. I don’t remember—but the first convention, well, we had a Paperweight Collectors Association, and they had biannual conventions on the odd years, and then later on Wheaton Village started having their paperweight symposiums on the opposite year from the Paperweight Collectors Association. I’m not exactly sure when the Wheaton Village one started, but I would guess it was in the late seventies. And it was basically to give American artists some recognition because the Paperweight Collectors Association run by Paul Jokelson was more involved in promoting the French paperweights that he was the exclusive distributor to the United States for Baccarat and Saint-Louis. So he was actually, he started the thing to help push his products that he was importing.
Time stamp: 01:13 Clip 2: Bob Banford discusses getting together with fellow paperweight makers at the Paperweight Collectors Weekends. Clip length: 00:28.
Bob Banford: Well, it was always good to get together. You know, we didn’t get together with many of our fellow artists. These were the only opportunities at these conventions, and it was good to see a grouping of your fellow paperweight artists. I was involved. I was one of the early people—started back in the seventies. So the group grew quite a bit.
Time stamp: 01:43 Clip 3: Bob Banford describes how he and his father began making paperweights. Clip length: 01:07.
Bob Banford: Well, my father [Ray Banford] was actually involved with buying and selling glass and paperweights and bought glass and paperweights from some of the contemporaries at the time around the South Jersey area. And we decided that we were going to try and make our own. So for graduation present from high school, he bought me the very first torch that both he and I started learning by trial and error how to make paperweights. There was no classes, no, most everything was a secret from the artists. They wouldn’t tell you anything. So you learn more or less by trial and error and looking at other people’s work and trying to figure out how they did different techniques. And also we studied the antique French paperweights that were made in the 1840s and 1850s. And that’s what I based my work off of. I love the techniques and their use of color and things like that. So my work always had a strong influence from the antique French paperweights.
Time stamp: 02:53 Clip 4: Bob Banford discusses the appeal of paperweights to him. Clip length: 00:54.
Bob Banford: Well, it’s just so fascinating and it’s a little world inside of a dome if you really look at it and just trying to create the things that went inside. The glass paperweights were always, they epitomize the finest things back in the antique French factories was the best glass, the best colors, and the best craftsmen and the best people to do the cold work, the grinding and polish after, they were the epitome of all the best departments put together in from the glass, from the French glass factories into a final product, and it was just fascinating that, you know, all this talent was rolled into one piece. It was later that the Americans started doing it and we did it more or less on our own instead of a factory setting. So that made us more artists than production craftsmen.
Bob Banford, Victor Trabucco, and Gordon Smith discuss modern paperweight founder Charles Kaziun, and his son, focusing on the elder Kaziun’s secrecy. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Victor Trabucco by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 16, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 07:45.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Bob Banford talks about Charles Kaziun using a torch in paperweight making. Clip length: 00:26.
Bob Banford: Charlie, as I said, was the first one to make our style paperweights where we did the entire process over a torch rather than having a glory hole and a tank of glass, we did the whole process over a torch, that later changing to some of the lampwork artists using a glory hole for a heat source, but still they bought glass already manufactured and used that to make their product.
Time stamp: 00:28 Clip 2: Bob Banford discusses Charles Kaziun. Clip length: 01:02.
Bob Banford: Well, I had the greatest respect for Charles Kaziun, the first man who made paperweights, that started the whole movement—the way—his use of color and design, very similar to the antique French. He also made crimped roses, which—crimped roses are a South Jersey, more or less a staple, the Millville Rose. It’s a crimp paperweight where they take a metal crimp and push it into the glass and push the color glass up into the paperweight—add leaves and things, and it’s a world famous paperweight, the Millville Rose, and he used to come to South Jersey to talk to fellows who made Millville Roses back, probably back in the thirties and stuff, but he came later in the fifties and sixties and some of these guys were still around. And it’s just, his work was always, oh, a favorite of mine because it was similar to the antique French work and that’s what I like.
Time stamp: 01:32 Clip 3: Bob Banford discusses Charles Kaziun III. Clip length: 00:19.
Bob Banford: Charles Kaziun, Junior [Charles Kaziun III] used to come to South Jersey and talk to some of the old glassblowers and learn different techniques, and he used to watch just anybody who was blowing glass, he’d be interested in watching.
Time stamp: 01:55 Clip 4: Victor Trabucco reminisces about his relationship with Charles Kaziun. Clip length: 01:45.
Victor Trabucco: Yes, I actually, I got to be quite friendly with Charles [Kaziun]. Most guys didn’t really—he was very secretive, so most of the artists really didn’t talk with him. But I said I made a point to, to sit down with him and get to know him. And in fact when I first got Jean Melvin’s book [American Glass Paperweights and Their Makers…]. I remember calling him up and just talking to him about making a living with—making, doing art glass. And he just—he was encouraging. He just said, ‘Do your work, and work hard to get your techniques down, and your style.’ And so it was just a short conversation. But I was always very impressed with him. And so the first convention I went to was the Boston convention in, I think, ‘77. And that’s where I met him, and—but over the years, as I started to get involved in it, I would sit with him and talk. And he told me how he first got started. He was watching—and I had a very similar story—he was watching one of these lampworkers at the fair, and they started noticing him watching every day. And so they would turn the torch off as soon as they spotted him. So he still wanted to learn, and what he did is he got a job with—at the park there with somebody else that was directly across from them [laughs]. So he was there all day, so they had to turn their torch on eventually, and that’s how he used to watch them working. And I had exactly the same experience with one of these guys at the mall. He kind of noticed me. I had these sunglasses on, and I’d be watching him, and after a while he started noticing me coming back every day. And then he did the same thing. He would turn the torch off when I came around. So we had that in common, and we laughed about that.
Time stamp: 03:43 Clip 5: Victor Trabucco discusses Charles Kaziun’s secrecy. Clip length: 00:54.
Victor Trabucco: He [Charles Kaziun] was still very secretive, and he didn’t want to talk about what kind of glass he had, or torches or any of that stuff. But over the years he got to know me, and he would—I remember the first time he called me, and he started asking me questions, where could he get some different colored glasses? And I was very open with him, anything he asked me, I would tell him. And in fact, I even sold him some glass when he first wanted to try our glass from Schott Optical [Schott Optical, Duryea, Pennsylvania, now Schott Advanced Optics, a subsidiary of Schott AG, headquartered in Mainz, Germany]. And I sold him some of that. So I got to be pretty friendly with him, and that’s where it stood. So you could never ask him a question about what he—[laughs] I remember, I think I—one time I asked him what kind of torch he used, and he wouldn’t even talk [inaudible] and that’s almost like, you know, like asking a writer what kind of typewriter to use. I mean, it’s so generic [laughs] it didn’t really mean much, but he didn’t even want to answer that question. So I got a laugh out of that.
Time stamp: 04:42 Clip 6: Victor Trabucco relays a story about Charles Kaziun being interested in a lizard paperweight he made. Clip length: 01:19.
Victor Trabucco: But I can remember—I’ll tell you a story about Charlie Kaziun that was interested when I made that lizard. He really wanted to look at it, cause he was really blown away when I made that piece, and his son was always with him. And so, the one dealer told me, he said, ‘When you left, Charlie’s son came in—Charlie Jr., the third [III] he actually is—and he was taking all kinds of pictures of your lizard weight.’ So I heard about it, and I had one in my room, and I saw Charles Kaziun walking by my room. I said, ‘Charles, come in, come in here.’ And I put it right in his hands. And he was so uncomfortable, because he really wanted to look at it, but he didn’t want me to watch him looking at it so intensely. [laughs] He was so secretive, it was really funny. And it was the same thing with this morning glory weight that I made. Roger Jacobsen said, ‘You know, he was really looking at your work when you left.’ And then Charlie was—he came in, and he said to me, he said, ‘You’re—that morning glory you made is genius.’ [laughs] So that meant an awful lot to me—to a young glass artist, I’ll tell you.
Time stamp: 06:05 Clip 7: Gordon Smith talks about Charles Kaziun’s secrecy in paperweight making. Clip length: 01:40.
Gordon Smith: I can tell you a story. Charlie Kaziun Senior and Jim and Nontas Kontes, the guys that were my mentors were very good friends, they were about the same age, and they were well into their sixties when I met ‘em. And even though they were best of friends, Charlie would never tell them anything. And Jim and Nontas, vice versa decided, well, we’re not going to share anything with Charlie either, and Jim and Nontas I remember them telling me a funny story that they were on the phone with Charlie once, cause Charlie lived up in New England and the Kontes Brothers lived in South Jersey. And Nontas told me, he said, ‘We talked to Charlie for about an hour and a half one day, and after we hung up the phone, Jim and I realized that he did nothing but ask us questions and we told him everything. We answered every question and he never told us a thing.’ It was kind of how Charlie was. Charlie had a way of being very secretive, yet you couldn’t help but like him. I loved the guy. I met him, in fact, when I gave my first talk ever, it happened to be in New England, and I met Charlie and his son. And in fact he complimented me. He came up to me and he said, ‘I don’t know how you get anything done that you do and keep a shop looking so clean.’ Cause I had photos of my studio, and he said, ‘It looks like you never work in there.’ And I just said, you know, I was a young kid. I said, ‘I thought you had to keep things nice, neat and clean or for, you know, your work would be dirty.’ And he said, ‘You’re right.’ He said, ‘You’re doing the right thing.’
Gay LeCleire Taylor, Debbie Tarsitano, and Gordon Smith discuss the generosity of Bob Banford and his father, Ray, and the Banfords’ history of selling and then making weights. Oral history interview with Gay Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Debbie Tarsitano by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, April 18, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:49.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Gay LeCleire Taylor talks about Bob Banford. Clip length: 00:30.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: Bob Banford is my age, so he’s in his late sixties, and he’s retired to Florida. He’s living in Florida, actually Big Pine Key. His house survived this hurricane. And then his father, who really got him started and gave him his torch, is really the impetus of getting all their weights done is Ray, there, and Ray has since, long since passed away also.
Time stamp: 00:33 Clip 2: Debbie Tarsitano discusses her and her father’s history with paperweights. Clip length: 01:19.
Debbie Tarsitano: At some point we were buying paperweights from—we were selling paperweights at some point; this is another story, but we actually were dealers in paperweights at—before we made paperweights. Cause my father [Delmo] was a collector, we collected, and then we were dealing in them a little bit—and antique shows like that, and we met Bob Banford, Bob and Ray Banford. And my father was buying some paperweights from them, and I went to the house in New Jersey, Hamilton, New Jersey, to meet Bob and Ray with my dad. And they took me into their studio, and they showed me, and I said, ‘Wow. This is like, we can have a little torch,’ and then Bob Banford was very kindly towards me, and he said, ‘Oh, you can get something better than that.’ And then Bob Banford actually brought me to Carlisle [Carlisle Machine Works], which is in New Jersey; it’s in Millville, and he helped me to pick out a torch that would be better, which was very, very nice of him. So I was like, ‘Oh boy, now I have a torch like a real artist.’ Yeah, and then we came home, and we had glass from here and there that we picked up. We were using junk glass pretty much. And from there we started really experimenting, and we were completely self-taught. Completely. Completely self-taught. I mean, Bob handed me a torch, and that was the extent of it, which was enough.
Time stamp: 01:55 Clip 3: Gordon Smith discusses Bob Banford. Clip length: 00:16.
Gordon Smith: He was right in—you know, he and his father—cause his father [Ray Banford] sold paperweights as an antique dealer before they ever made them, and then they got into it as makers because they saw that, you know, these were such a neat object and people wanted ‘em. So they decided to learn how to make ‘em.
Time stamp: 02:14 Clip 4: Gordon Smith discusses Bob and Ray Banford. Clip length: 00:35.
Gordon Smith: Also the Banfords, Bob Banford in particular; his work was flawless and perfect. It was done in the classic French style. I mean, it was—you’d swear that it was machine made. It was so well done. And the balance, the perfection of each individual flower he made—the colors that he used. He just really was another one that set the bar for just how good a paperweight can be made.
Gay LeCleire Taylor, Bob Banford, Gordon Smith, Kristin Qualls
Gay LeCleire Taylor, Bob Banford, Gordon Smith, and Kristin Qualls discuss James and Nontas Kontes, their scientific glass company, personal style, and their influence on other paperweight makers. Oral history interview with Gay Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted, July 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:17.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Gay LeCleire Taylor talks about James and Nontas Kontes. Clip length: 01:09.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: James Kontes and Nontas Kontes—okay, they owned their own flameworking, scientific glassblowing company—and Owens-Illinois bought Kontes Brothers after World War II, Jim was in Iwo Jima, Nontas was in the Navy. But so James and Nontas are probably even the oldest ones in this shot. Though Ray Banford might have been close to them in age. And so they then had a business out in Illinois which they moved to Vineland and kept operating that business, but when they became really successful, and they were friends with Kaziun, they were friends with all these people, they didn’t start making weights till very late, till the 1970s after their company was really successful enough. They’re multimillionaires and they dressed sometimes the same and everything else, and I think Jim died at 99 and Nontas is still alive, but not well at all, and he’s well into his nineties.
Time stamp: 01:12 Clip 2: Bob Banford speaks about the Kontes Brothers. Clip length: 00:17.
Bob Banford: The Konteses [James and Nontas] I guess had just started also, but they had been involved in the, they had a glass, a scientific glass factory that they were involved with and got into the paperweights actually by meeting Charles Kaziun back in the sixties and seeing his work.
Time stamp: 01:32 Clip 3: Bob Banford discusses the Kontes Brothers. Clip length: 00:35.
Bob Banford: The Konteses [James and Nontas] they made, they did it more or less as a hobby. They never did it to try and make a living. They did it for their own enjoyment, basically, is the reason they did it. And they were philanthropists and helped out with the donations and things for Wheaton Village to help keep the place going and just they were cheerleaders to the rest of us, more or less too, they were friendly with me and I know they were friendly with Charlie [Charles Kaziun]. And they were, they just gave a lot of encouragement. And that means a lot when you’re starting out.
Time stamp: 02:11 Clip 4: Gordon Smith discusses James and Nontas Kontes. Clip length: 00:22.
Gordon Smith: The Kontes Brothers, who I was working for—they’re kind of my mentors. Their work was so classic in the French style, but also extremely unique. It didn’t remind you of anybody else. They had a great gift for color and design. It was so unique to themselves.
Time stamp: 02:35 Clip 5: Kristin Qualls talks about Gordon Smith observing the Kontes Brothers making paperweights. Clip length: 00:41.
Barb Elam: Yeah.
Kristin Qualls: Gordon Smith tells a good story about working with the Kontes brothers [James and Nontas Kontes] and them not teaching him how to do the lampwork paperweights, but letting him watch. And then slowly but surely, when he sort of proved he was watching and picking things up and waiting to try it, then they would kind of bring him a little bit more into the fold. So it was an interesting—like again, it was around everywhere. So if you put yourself in a position where you could see it like Gordon was interested in—he had a scientific lampworking degree. He was working in scientific glassware, the Konteses were there after hours doing paperweights, and so Gordon took it upon himself to stick around and become interested. So it was there if you sought it out.
Alan Kaplan, Bob Banford, and Gordon Smith talk about Delmo and Debbie Tarsitano, discussing their evolution and creativity as paperweight makers. Oral history interview with Alan Kaplan by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, April 25, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:44.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Dealer Alan Kaplan discusses Debbie Tarsitano’s paperweights. Clip length: 00:43.
Alan Kaplan: Same thing early Debbie. And Debbie really started—I mean, the first time I met her was in Boston in ’77, well, but I knew her from the store, but she used to come in, but the first weights she made were in Boston. She had three weights, and that was May of ’77, and by The Great American Paperweight Show at Corning Flowers that [which] Clothe the Meadow[s]—which Paul Hollister and Dwight Lanmon did the book on—she had a roomful of weights for sale like 15 months later. It was unbelievable. I remember she sold Ambassador [Amory] Houghton who was the owner of Corning [Corning Glass Works, later Corning, Inc]. I think a 24-flower bouquet, which was really impressive, in a fairly short period of time, to be—and it wasn’t a huge weight, but to get that much lampwork encased was really—it was fun to watch her, evolve that fast—in that short a period of time.
Time stamp: 00:46 Clip 2: Bob Banford speaks about the Tarsitanos watching him and his father, Ray, make paperweights. Clip length: 00:22.
Bob Banford: Tarsitanos [Delmo and Debbie] actually came down, and I didn’t teach them how to make paperweights, but they watched my father and I work, and that was a big thing to help them get started on how they learned. Because as I said, there’s no schools or anywhere you can go, go learn. And at that point, everything was a big secret.
Time stamp: 01:10 Clip 3: Gordon Smith discusses Delmo and Debbie Tarsitano. Clip length: 00:33.
Gordon Smith: Del Tarsitano and Debbie Tarsitano. Debbie was so creative and so different. Her color palette, her choice of how to go about creating flameworked flowers and designs was very unique. And Del Tarsitano, he and I had very similar interests. I think we both liked lizards and snakes and bugs and spiders and all that sort of thing. He did a lot of very earthy motifs in his paperweights, which I have done throughout my entire career.
Bob Banford and Gay LeCleire Taylor talk about Paul Stankard, discussing his history-making paperweights, his imitation of nature, and the evolution of his work. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:00.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Bob Banford discusses Paul Stankard’s career as a paperweight artist in relation to his own. Clip length: 00:13.
Bob Banford: Paul Stankard had a couple of year headstart on me in South Jersey. He lived, I don’t know, 30, maybe 30 miles away from where I lived. And I’ve known him almost since he’s, he started as well.
Time stamp: 00:16 Clip 2: Bob Banford discusses Paul Stankard and the Blaschka Brothers’ glass flowers. Clip length: 00:22.
Bob Banford: Paul Stankard tried to copy nature. That was his thing. So he copied nature and tried to make things that way and he was, I think, influenced by the Harvard flowers, the glass flowers that were made by the Blaschka Brothers—that are on display at Harvard. He was influenced by them.
Time stamp: 00:40 Clip 3: Gay LeCleire Taylor talks about Paul Stankard. Clip length: 00:19.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: Paul was really working on compound things, much earlier than other people were doing, when he was doing those two layers, or root people or whatever, those multiple layers of things that he was trying to do and break through on that, in his Botanicals especially.
Gordon Smith speaks about discovering paperweights through the Kontes Brothers and being part of a tiny population of makers
Playing01:39Transcript
Gordon Smith
Gordon Smith speaks about discovering paperweights through the Kontes Brothers and being part of a tiny population of makers. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:39.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Gordon Smith relays how he discovered paperweights. Clip length: 01:11.
Gordon Smith: Well, I started being formally trained as a scientific glassblower as many of the other—you know, Paul Stankard was, I think Rick Ayotte did it as well. Charlie [Charles] Kaziun did that. There were a number of us that that was our background, our formal training. And from doing that, I found myself working at the Kontes Glass Company in Vineland in 1980. And I had no idea that the Kontes Brothers, Jim and Nontas Kontes, two of the three brothers that own the business, I had no idea that they were paperweight makers. It was something they did as a hobby. But I saw one of their paperweights one day while working there as a laboratory glassblower, and it just kind of—I had this moment where I just went, ‘Holy smokes. What the heck is this?’ You know, I had never seen anything like it, it just became—and from that moment on, I became obsessed with wanting to learn about it. And just learn more and more. And that’s how it started.
Time stamp: 01:13 Clip 2: Gordon Smith talks about how small the paperweight maker community was when he started. Clip length: 00:25.
Gordon Smith: First of all, when I became the newest paperweight maker in 1982, there were—including me at the time—I think I represented the eleventh or twelfth person in the world that did that. So that’s a really, really small group of people. You became among the—a very elite group if you were able to accomplish that.
Bob Banford and Kristin Qualls discuss Gordon Smith and talk about his relationship with the Kontes Brothers. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 02:18.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Bob Banford talks about Gordon Smith. Clip length: 00:16.
Bob Banford: Gordon, Gordon Smith. I used to make a joke when Gordon was starting. He had more dinners at my house than I did. I lived there with my parents and he used to come over and talk to my dad, and I’d be going out and doing something, and he’d have more dinners at my house than I did.
Time stamp: 00:18 Clip 2: Kristin Qualls talks about Gordon Smith and the Kontes Brothers. Clip length: 01:38.
Kristin Qualls: There’s always been this connection between Gordon Smith as I mentioned and the Kontes brothers [James and Nontas Kontes] and the Kontes brothers representing that, what I see is that continuum of the American glass tradition that starts in the factories and is based out of the factory work, because the—you know, the Kontes, they worked in a scientific glassblowing factory. I think they ended up owning it. And then I know it was sold off when they retired. But again, that continuum of they didn’t go to art school to learn this stuff. It was coming from this tradition of the guys working in the factory getting that end of day time to use the equipment and the glass in the furnaces to create their own works and that the Kontes represent that lineage that then Gordon came in on, again, having studied scientific glassblowing and then working at a scientific glassblowing company, and then sort of taking the skill set that they had developed and this incredible knowledge of the medium that they had from working with it every day and making these [laughs] crazy scientific apparatus and then say, ‘Oh, I can use this knowledge and the skill to express myself in a different way and create these paperweights and these little beautiful worlds.’ And so that to me is sort ofis, again, that lineage going from that factory system. Because that was where you could get the glass in the past before as all technology got cheaper, more efficient, and smaller, and then you could move it into a fine art studio, but again, that factory lineage of more like apprenticing the skills and then transferring it in your own time into a piece of art.
Time stamp: 01:59 Clip 3: Kristin Qualls discusses Gordon Smith’s interest in paperweights. Clip length: 00:19.
Kristin Qualls: And he’s another one that has a great story about coming here as a kid and seeing them make the paperweight, seeing Tony DePalma make a paperweight; and being like, ‘That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. How do I do that?’ And again, like getting involved with the glass and then working with the Kontes brothers [James and Nontas Kontest] and being like, ‘This is paperweights again,’ so that exposure from being in this area where it’s just all over.
Gay LeCleire Taylor, Gordon Smith, and Bob Banford talk about Johne Parsley. They discuss Parsley’s personal history, his fascination with paperweights, and his eventual collaboration with Gordon Smith.
Playing03:43Transcript
Gay LeCleire Taylor, Gordon Smith, Bob Banford
Gay LeCleire Taylor, Gordon Smith, and Bob Banford talk about Johne Parsley. They discuss Parsley’s personal history, his fascination with paperweights, and his eventual collaboration with Gordon Smith. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:43.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Gay LeCleire Taylor speaks about Johne Parsley. Clip length: 01:10.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: Okay, next to Paul Stankard, and then Gordon Smith in between, is a gentleman by the name of Johne Parsley. He was fascinating. He developed a Woolite kind of a soap, but he’d gone to the 1938 World’s Fair in New York. Is that 38? And he saw the people that Charles Kaziun worked for that were demonstrating flameworking and he set up a little torch down in his basement and until he took a trip and came to visit Wheaton Village, did he ever see paperweights. And he and Gordon next to him almost became partners. The two of them worked really, really closely together and made paperweights, but Johne lived in Reading, Pennsylvania and we were in South Jersey, in Millville, South Jersey, and he was a pilot and had his own private plane. So he would fly from Reading to Millville’s airport. Somebody would pick him up. He would volunteer the full day in our crafts building, demonstrating to our visitors and everything, and then fly home at night.
Time stamp: 01:13 Clip 2: Gordon Smith discusses how he and Johne Parsley met. Clip length: 01:52.
Gordon Smith: I had been a paperweight maker since—like I said, since I started in 1981. And then I was a full time paperweight maker at the time Johne and I met—I was also volunteering at Wheaton Village working in their craft building—demonstrating flameworking on a very small scale, making miniatures and kind of button-size and pendant-sized items to sell in the gift shop there. And one day, Johne Parsley and his wife, Anne, came through Wheaton Village and he came over to the craft building with his wife and they were walking through, and I had some of my paperweights sitting there up on the counter next to where I work, and he was just like a little kid in a candy store. And he introduced himself and he said, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything quite like that.’ He told me a little bit about his background and some of his glass experience—more geared in the blown glass world, little miniature figurines that he would blow out of tubing in a laboratory. He was a chemical engineer by profession, and he had been retired—sold his company, and—but he had a background in glass going back a number of years. So that’s how we met—just one, you know, just one day at Wheaton Village, and then we just became inseparable from that day on. He came back a few days later; he lived in Redding, Pennsylvania, which was about two and a half, three hours away. And he would drive down. There in the beginning, he drove down a couple of times a week to get together, and he wanted to learn everything he could from me and learn how to make paperweights.
Time stamp: 03:08 Clip 3: Bob Banford discusses Johne Parsley’s enthusiasm for glass. Clip length: 00:35.
Bob Banford: Johne Parsley was a glass enthusiastic, did it as a hobby and got into paperweight making, Geez, he must’ve been in his sixties when he got involved in trying to make his first paperweights, but he was always a glass enthusiast, learning different techniques and, oh, I think he worked at one of the World’s Fairs in New York or somewhere, and he used to, he was a big fan, you know, if he heard of any glassblowers or anybody doing anything, he would run and go, you know, go watch them or learn whatever he could from them.
Victor Trabucco discusses the Paperweight Weekend, working with glass for the first time, and his personal innovations.
Playing03:23Transcript
Victor Trabucco
Victor Trabucco discusses the Paperweight Weekend, working with glass for the first time, and his personal innovations. Oral history interview with Victor Trabucco by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 16, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:23.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Victor Trabucco talks about the Paperweight Weekend. Clip length: 00:31.
Victor Trabucco: Yeah, it [Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center] was certainly a very comfortable place to go. It’s very homey, and everybody was very friendly, and I thought the facility was wonderful for having a convention. And I always enjoyed the camaraderie there, but there was always a lot of artists that attended, so we always had good conversation, and a lot of great collectors. So I really did enjoy it. I always looked forward to it. I never—I don’t believe in the early days, I missed any of those.
Time stamp: 00:35 Clip 2: Victor Trabucco discusses working with glass for the first time. Clip length: 01:32.
Victor Trabucco: Yeah, that’s how I finally—I actually was working—I was an ironworker, I worked with my father. And I was working during the winter and I got laid off, and that’s when I first got interested in the glass, that would—like I said, those guys who were at the mall during Christmastime. And actually, my wife—this would have been, like, ’74? And there was a piece of one of these little punch bowls that was made out of, you know, that lacework that they do. And my wife wanted one, and it was like eight dollars. And I said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna spend eight dollars on that. I think I could make that.’ [laughs] So I went home and I had a torch, because I was an ironworker, I had a torch at home, and I broke a pop bottle up and I stretched the glass out. And then I met this glass artist at another mall, and his name was Al Verrier, I’m still in contact with him. And he told me where I could get a torch, he told me about didymium glasses, the right glasses to wear, where I could get borosilicate glass. And he made one little piece for me and from there on, I just went—when I went home, I started experimenting, and that’s how I learned. I was all self-taught. Then over the years, like I said, I was always impressed with this: I used to go to the Steuben Glass [Steuben Glass Works, Corning, New York] and watch them work, and I said, ‘Someday, I would love to go through their shop.’ And then years later here, I was actually teaching them my techniques. So that was pretty rewarding.
Time stamp: 02:10 Clip 3: Victor Trabucco talks about being the first paperweight artist to use a glory hole in a lampwork shop. Clip length: 01:13.
Victor Trabucco: So I was the first one to actually use a glory hole in the lampwork shop. And that was something that I guarded for a long time. I’d have showings at—people come to my studio, and I had actually a wall that I would build around my whole glory hole system and everything. So I was the first one to combine the glory hole with the lampworking process. It gives you the advantage to work a lot larger. At some of these—and I even see some of these lampworkers today, they’ve got aluminum shields on, like a pie plate on their face with little holes so they can see through it, and then they’ve got these aluminum suits on, or reflective suits and everything, to keep the heat away—because as you get bigger, so—I’ve made weights that are like six inches in diameter, and that takes so much heat. And if you think about it, you can only get your arm’s length away from that torch. So there’s so much heat in your face, and then your arms and everything, that it’s really very uncomfortable, and it kind of limits your process. So, that’s why I always made such—I was just credited with making such large pieces that hadn’t been done before, and so that was my—kind of my edge.
Gay LaCleire Taylor and Bob Banford talk about Victor Trabucco. his innovations, and his sharing of crystal glass with Bob Banford. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:53.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Glass historian Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses Victor Trabucco’s removal of the seam in paperweights. Clip length: 01:23.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: All of these paperweight collectors would spend thousands and thousands of dollars—ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand dollars—on an antique weight and accept bubbles in it, but they wouldn’t accept it from the contemporary artists. The contemporary artist’s work had to be totally clean of everything. So it really, really challenged them into overcoming those kinds of problems. And that Victor Trabucco, he was one of the ones that—he made, makes big weights, I mean big weights, and he’s the one that does the buffalo for the Buffalo Bills—he then figured out when he was doing these two huge compound layers that if he got the seam, when—you know, sometimes in Paul’s work you can see this little high layer, this little layer where the two facets come together, he figured if he curved the edge on the outside where that seam kind of joins, so it sort of folds itself over it—you lose it. And he was the one that really got rid of the line, this tiny, little mirror-y like line, by curving the edges down and he’s the one that perfected that. So once one person really made that breakthrough, the others sort of incorporated some of that in their work.
Time stamp: 01:26 Clip 2: Bob Banford discusses buying crystal with Victor Trabucco. Clip length: 00:26.
Bob Banford: Let’s see. Victor Trabucco, I’ve been friends with him since he first started getting involved in paperweights. We had a couple business deals we used to buy crystal glass together, we’d buy a whole melt of crystal to make our paperweights out of. And he was my, my partner when we, when we, when we did that.
Bob Banford talks about Robert Hansen and his father, Ron, a well-known paperweight pioneer.
Playing01:07Transcript
Bob Banford
Bob Banford talks about Robert Hansen and his father, Ron, a well-known paperweight pioneer. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:07.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Bob Banford discusses Robert Hansen and his father, Ron. Clip length: 00:46.
Bob Banford: Yeah. Bobby Hansen. He, I knew his father Ron, and became friendly with him and Ron had passed away at this point and Bobby was going to try and make paperweights himself. Was kind of out of it because Ron and Bobby had never made a paperweight using what we called glass slugs, that was the crystal that we got from the Schott Optical Company, and we used—they’re almost like double thick hockey pucks. They were just slugs with glass that we would preheat and use that to make our paperweights out of. But he learned on glass rod that was made by the Conlon Glass Company in Hicksville, Long Island.
Time stamp: 00:48 Clip 2: Bob Banford talks about Robert Hansen. Clip length: 00:18.
Bob Banford: Yeah, Bobby just started, I would say, oh, that was Bobby’s maybe first convention or maybe second convention. He might’ve came to one—came to with his father beforehand. But he hadn’t been involved very long and I don’t think he stuck with it a long time either afterwards.
Gay LeCleire Taylor and Bob Banford talk about Doug Merritt and Barry Sautner of Vandermark Merritt, discussing topics such as Vandermark’s production style and Sautner’s eventual independent work.
Playing01:14Transcript
Gay LeCleire Taylor, Bob Banford
Gay LeCleire Taylor and Bob Banford talk about Doug Merritt and Barry Sautner of Vandermark Merritt, discussing topics such as Vandermark’s production style and Sautner’s eventual independent work. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:14.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Glass Historian Gay LeCleire Taylor talks about Doug Merritt and Barry Sautner. Clip length: 00:48.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: Doug Merritt’s family had this place called Liberty Village in Flemington, New Jersey which had a glassblowing facility and then Doug Merritt’s business changed its name to Vandermark Merritt. Vandermark Merritt. And I don’t think anything’s being blown anymore, but they made a lot of Art Nouveau Tiffany-style glass but also did early reproductions of lily pad pitchers and early American-style glass for the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York] in their shop, and so they did early American glass and Tiffany-style glass. And Barry Sautner worked for Doug and then sort of branched out on his own doing these incredible carved, sandblasted, carved pieces. Just incredible work Barry Sautner ended up doing, and he’s gone too.
Time stamp: 00:51 Clip 2: Bob Banford discusses Doug Merritt and Barry Sautner of Vandermark Merritt. Clip length: 00:22.
Bob Banford: On the end there, you have, the guys from Vandermark Merritt, Doug Merritt and Barry Sautner who started out with Doug doing glassblowing and then got into cold work and left Vandermark Merritt and went on to have—a career in a cameo-type engraving.
Gay LeCleire Taylor speaks about Ken Rosenfeld and his working in relative isolation out West.
Playing00:33Transcript
Gay LeCleire Taylor
Gay LeCleire Taylor speaks about Ken Rosenfeld and his working in relative isolation out West. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:33.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Glass Historian Gay LeCleire Taylor speaks about Ken Rosenfeld. Clip length: 00:12.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: Ken Rosenfeld, that was Ken Rosenfeld’s first Paperweight Weekend. He’s from Oregon, so he really was out on his own, nobody else, really around, doing anything.
Time stamp: 00:15 Clip 2: Gay LeCleire Taylor talks about Ken Rosenfeld living in Oregon. Clip length: 00:18.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: Ken Rosenfeld is out there in Oregon, a very self-contained—I really admire him. He’s this quiet—he’d lecture on his studio and his equipment and what he’s built for him and he just quietly lives out there and works. Real interesting guy.
Although makers from the 1980s continued to emulate the French antique paperweights admired and coveted by collectors, many were also branching out. Charles Kaziun had set the stage by lampworking (flameworking) and encasing his paperweights outside the furnace, allowing for greater detail and less distortion. Paul Hollister encouraged makers to move beyond “the round ball” into something more sculptural. Paul Stankard began his Cloistered Botanical Series (named by Hollister): upright, rectangular structures that bear little resemblance to traditional paperweights. As Victor Trabucco started working larger and more dimensionally, he created a number of advances, including eliminating the visible seam in the glass that fused an encasement. Realism and even hyperrealism were explored as technologies advanced and torches improved. Dealer Alan Kaplan, observing that Delmo Tarsitano was “the first to do a spider web,” remarked: “As our mother said, she and my sister got the willies looking at [Delmo’s] weights . . . they were ready to take a newspaper and smash the spiders. They were that good.”1 Kaplan said of Stankard’s Environmental Series, “It’s like he took a shovel to the ground, and he encased it.”2
1Alan Kaplan, telephone conversation with Barb Elam, April 23, 2019.
2Ibid.
Victor Trabucco talks about his Nature and Ice Series of paperweights, which departed from the traditional round shape of a weight.
Victor Trabucco talks about his Nature in IceSeries of paperweights, which departed from the traditional round shape of a weight. Oral history interview with Victor Trabucco by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 16, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:00.
Victor Trabucco: Well, in the, yeah in the late—in the eighties, I took—Paul Stankard and I, we both came out in the same year with a—we departed from the traditional round shape of the paperweight, and mine was the Nature and Ice series. And then also these inclusions, where I did grinding and polishing of—and put some parts of the paperweight together with slabs of crystal. And I can send you some images of that, it’s called my Inclusion series. So we were the first ones that kind of depart from the traditional paperweight shape, and at that time Paul Jokelson, who was the president of the Paperweight Association, [Paperweight Collectors Association, Inc] was quite disturbed with our [laughs] our transition. But that was interesting because maybe a year or two later when he wrote a book, he put one of my Nature and Ice weights on the cover of his book. [laughs] So he finally accepted the idea.
Victor Trabucco talks about eliminating the seam in paperweights. Oral history interview with Victor Trabucco by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 16, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:19.
Victor Trabucco: Well, one of the first innovations was—lampwork weights, when they’re put together, there’s a top and a bottom, and I was the first one to eliminate—there’s a definite seam, or a line, that you’ll see in a lot of lampwork weights, where you can see the division line. That was something that I eliminated.
Gordon Smith discusses Paul Stankard and talks about paperweights becoming fine art objects. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:23.
Gordon Smith: I think the level of the work, it—I think to say that I’m a—there’s something about—and it’s, it’s kind of bothered me for a number of years, and it actually—this conversation’s come up recently, even among collectors. You know, we’re having a hard time with this word paperweight—because they’re really fine art objects and they’ve evolved from the sixties and the seventies from being a very craft-type object to a fine art object. And really, in the early 1980s, that distinction was made—I don’t know by who and where, but it was in reference to the work Paul Stankard was doing because it was so refined and it was such a step above what you see in craft stores and being done by kind of the weekend warriors that have a hot tank of glass making tank paperweights and selling them at craft fairs and craft shows. These were fine art objects. And then a few of us came along right after that and brought the level of the work itself to such a high level that that’s what defined it as being fine art versus a craft.
Paul Stankard in his Mantua, New Jersey, studio, with an example of one of his Botanicals, 1986. Bard Graduate Center Paul Hollister Slide Collection. Photo attributed to Paul Hollister.
Paul Stankard paperweights, 1986. Bard Graduate Center Paul Hollister Slide Collection. Photo attributed to Paul Hollister.
Along with Paul Stankard’s lampworking demonstration, which led to his first-ever flameworking workshop at the Penland School of Craft, several other paperweight-making demonstrations took place at the Paperweight Weekend in 1986. For example, young artist Gordon Smith and retired chemist Johne Parsley conducted a session on shaping and encasing a paperweight with a tank furnace, a simple furnace suitable for individual use in a studio.
Even though the art of paperweight creation was traditionally very secretive, small-scale demos at the Paperweight Weekend and PCA conventions were not uncommon. Bob Banford, who attended most of the Weekends, made a detailed video recording of himself making paperweights for the PCA Boston convention in 1977. While many American artists found the secret-keeping frustrating when it came to learning to make a weight, most did not share openly, and flameworking itself was particularly guarded. Charles Kaziun, the so-called dean of modern paperweight makers, was reputed to be the most secretive maker in the American group. In a 1987 lecture on studio glass before 1962, Paul Hollister called Kaziun “the greatest question dodger that I know.”1
1Paul Hollister lecture on “Glass America 1987,”January 11, 1987. (Rakow title: Talk on Studio [sound recording] / with Paul M. Hollister, BIB ID: 168493).
Bob Banforddiscusses sharing his paperweight-making methods in an early video.
Bob Banford discusses sharing his paperweight-making methods with an early video. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:14.
Bob Banford: Well, as I said when I started, nobody would give you any information at all. Later on, I was the first one, now, I’m not sure what year it was. My memory’s a little fuzzy on this. I know it was before we had a paperweight convention in Boston, and I don’t remember what year it was, but home video had just—was in its infancy and you could actually get video equipment you could use in the home. And I shot a black and white video of the making of a lampwork paperweight from start to finish, where you would learn the different techniques to make the rods, to make the parts for the flower, to make the flower, to put the flower together. And then to encase it. And I made a video that was probably condensed, but probably about 40/45 minutes long that showed all the different steps. And I showed it to people. Vic [Victor] Trabucco was just starting to make paperweights and he came to the Boston convention. He watched the video, a lot of, a lot. I showed it basically to anybody that wanted to watch it.
Wheaton Village Paperweight Collectors Weekend brochure of 1986 listing demonstrations by Paul Stankard (“Making a Lampwork Paperweight”) and Gordon Smith and Johne Parsley (“Encasing a Lampwork Set-up at a Tank”). Collection of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
Gordon Smith and Johne Parsley’s demonstration “Encasing a Lampwork Set-up at a Tank,” Wheaton Village’s Paperweight Collectors Weekend, 1986. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
“Anyone involved and passionate about paperweights [would attend]: the makers, the collectors, the dealers who would be connecting the artists to the people who wanted to collect their work as well as curators who work with paperweight collections in their own institutions.”
Kristin Qualls
“We always do try and be open to the general public for anyone who is interested to come in, and again, the Studio is ‘open access studio.’”
Kristin Qualls
Gordon Smith speaks about live demos at Wheaton and criticism from other paperweight artists.
Gordon Smith speaks about live demonstrations at Wheaton and criticism from other paperweight artists. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:48.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Gordon Smith talks about the criteria for being chosen to give a demo at Wheaton. Clip length: 00:35.
Gordon Smith: They had asked me to do a demonstration in the factory. They normally do—they’ll ask any of the artists that might—you know, just to see if any have an interest leading up to those conventions. For instance, I already know now that I’m giving a demonstration at the next one. So they usually plan out about a year in advance and they ask a few artists, ‘Are you interested in giving a talk or giving a live demonstration?’ And they approached me. And Johne [Parsley] and I had been doing things together, so they thought we could come up with something interesting to do.
Time stamp: 00:37 Clip 2: Gordon Smith explains that the Paperweight Weekend demos are open to the public. Clip length: 00:48.
Gordon Smith: I can tell you that every convention at Wheaton Village is not only paperweight collectors and dealers that fly in for the weekend from all over the world, but also, since Wheaton Village is a facility that’s open to the public, when those live demonstrations are going on in the factory, the public is also welcome to come in and look at them going on, since that’s just a daily happening at the village, it’s pretty much every day of the year. So they get the benefit, just by chance, if they happen to come through Wheaton Village on the weekend of a convention, whether they know it or not, they get the benefit of seeing some of the top paperweight makers in the world doing demonstrations and showing techniques and what we do.
Time stamp: 01:28 Clip 3: Gordon Smith discusses public perceptions of paperweight demos. Clip length: 00:42.
Gordon Smith: To be honest, anybody that was just a lay person coming through there, I don’t think they had any idea at the value of what they were seeing being done. Not only the rarity of the fact that pretty much every top flamework paperweight maker in the country, and in some cases the world—cause even at some of those conventions, some of the makers from Europe would fly over as well. But I don’t think the lay person had any idea that they were seeing such a rare group of people doing such a rare art form, and showing such rare techniques. I don’t think they had any idea.
Time stamp: 02:13 Clip 4: Gordon Smith discusses being criticized by other paperweight artists for giving demonstrations early in his career. Clip length: 00:35.
Gordon Smith: I can remember taking a little bit of heat from other paperweight makers because I came in and I just was the new guy and I didn’t understand just how much these guys liked to keep a stranglehold on what we did. And I set up all my stuff to demonstrate, and some of them—I don’t think they liked it. They didn’t like seeing the fact that I was pretty much just exposing all these secrets to the public, and it bothered them. And I remember hearing it from a couple of them.
Kristin Qualls talks about Wheaton’s open studio. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls conducted by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 00:34.
Kristin Qualls: We’ve always had demonstrations, that’s always been part of Wheaton. And how we share this wealth of knowledge we have with us is to have that open studio that the public can go watch artists work, that it’s not a theater set. It’s not a scripted demonstration. It’s not—you can go in there and watch actual production happening, whether we’re making pumpkins, or goblets or whatever, or whether it’s an artist—could be a paperweight artist, any fellow who’s here—an Emanation artist, throughout our time working right there in the studio.
Charles Kaziun. Perfume Bottle with Rose Stopper, c. 1950. Overall H: 11.6 cm, Diam (max): 5.7 cm. Collection of The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York. Gift of The Honorable and Mrs. Amory Houghton. (78.4.61).
“In the early days, the American weights, before Paul [Stankard], the big name was Charles Kaziun from Brockton, Mass[achusetts].”
Alan Kaplan
Bob Banford. Red Flower, 1980. Glass paperweight. Diam: 2.94 in (7.5 cm). Signed on interior with signature initial “B” cane of Banford and his father, Ray. Collection of The Art Institute of Chicago. Bequest of Arthur Rubloff. (1988.541.846).
“But we always signed our work internally because we had seen Tiffany pieces and different art glass pieces that were signed on the exterior only to have them changed, or contemporary pieces misrepresented as Tiffany or Steuben or whatever, just because they were marked easily on the outside. So we wanted to make a mark on the inside. I put the initial cane inside, which is something we learned actually from Charles Kaziun. He always had an initial cane in his work.”
Bob Banford
Paul Hollister converses with Bob Banford about his and his father, Ray’s, work at a 1977 Habatat Galleries paperweight exhibition.
Paul Hollister converses with Bob Banford about his and his father Ray Banford’s work at a 1977 paperweight exhibition at Habatat Gallery. Paul Hollister Recording, October 12, 1977. (Rakow title: Habatat Galleries fall show interviews [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168383). Clip length: 01:55. [note: October 12 date stated by Paul Hollister at beginning of recording]
Paul Hollister (PH): You’ve got, what? How many of you got all together?
Bob Banford (BB): Of mine?
PH: This is Bob Banford. Yeah, of yours and your father’s [Ray Banford’s] got about six or eight—11. Gee, you’ve come quite a long way since the last things I see you’re doing—
BB: These are all my dad’s here on this side and mine over on the other side here—
PH: I see.
BB: —Distinguishable by the red, white and blue initial cane inside.
Geraldine Casper (GC): Well, you do that too. [music playing in the background] I’ve noticed several of them will have their little—
BB: Yeah, we put our initial inside.
GC: Yes. Yes.
BB: So they can be identified.
[indistinguishable voices respond in background]
BB: The new design here, the snake with the tree stump, and another thing we’re working on—
PH: Yes, this is a—
GC: That one attracts me—
PH: —sort of a piece of driftwood on a, on a yellow pebble ground where the snake—with at least three coils and the head turned around and your signature cane and the vase done in the Egyptian fifth, sixth century BC style where the combing is that actually combed—
BB: Yeah, it’s combed on the outside—
PH: With the vase of flowers?
BB: Yes. And on the base itself , you have to really look at it, but there is a gold butterfly on the base. It’s kind of hard to see in the case—the angle.
PH: This is on a pale, blue ground with three Baccarat-like tiny, but very beautiful flowers in a vase that is combed in Egyptian style and there you’ve got to “B” on your old—
BB: Yeah.
PH: —that’s the old style model “B,” last year year’s “B”.
“As far as the teaching was concerned and the secrecy, it was completely secret. I mean, I was surprised and really lucky that Bob [Banford] let me even walk into his studio. That was extremely generous of him at the time because nobody let you do that.”
Debbie Tarsitano on secrecy in paperweight making
Paul Stankard talks about Paul Hollister lamenting that Charles Kaziun was not making modern examples of weights.
Paul Stankard talks about Paul Hollister lamenting that Charles Kaziun was not making modern examples of weights. Oral history interview with Paul Stankard by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, April 28, 2016, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:26.
Paul Stankard: So Paul is introduced to the paperweights as a young man, and his interest translated into this Encyclopedia of Glass Paperweights. And that was a contribution to the collectors, and especially the collectors of the antique French paperweights. So Paul was interested in the contemporary work, and he went to visit Charles Kaziun, who was the most respected contemporary paperweight maker. And he visited Kaziun at his studio. And I read his critique of Kaziun’s career in The Encyclopedia of Glass Paperweights, and he lamented that—I was amazed, he lamented the fact that Kaziun wasn’t doing modern examples; he was re-creating what had been done by the French. And that really made a big impression on me, because I didn’t have an art background at all. I came out of a vocational school and worked in industry, worked as a scientific glassblower, and wanted to make paperweights and these expectations—Paul Hollister really introduced me to creative expectations, or expectations that would allow me to grow and mature as a maker.
Charles Kaziun in an undated photo by Harold E. Davis. From Jean Sutherland Melvin, American Glass Paperweights and Their Makers (New York: Thomas Nelson Inc., 1970), p. 184.
“In the forties and fifties, Charlie Kaziun worked very secretively, too. I think it became a tradition. If you told anybody, you were violating something, but if you were in the circle, if somehow you could reach the circle, you would find out maybe some little tidbit here and there. Someone’s not gonna say, ‘Hey, come into my studio and I’m gonna show you how do it.’ So you had to dig and figure out and read anything you can and study antique paperweights and look at them, and just say, ‘How do you think they did that? How do you think they attached that petal?’ And then go in your studio and figure it out, your way. Everyone that made weights at the time, made work that was different. My way of making a petal was different from Paul [Stankard] or Bob [Banford] or somebody else.”
Debbie Tarsitano
Victor Trabucco talks about the staged nature of the photo of Charles Kaziun standing in front of a furnace [above], and of Kaziun separating himself from the glass community.
Victor Trabucco talks about the staged nature of the photo of Charles Kaziun standing in front of a furnace, and of Kaziun separating himself from the glass community. Oral history interview with Victor Trabucco by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 16, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:45.
Time stamp: 00:00 Clip 1: Victor Trabucco talks about the staged nature of the photo of Charles Kaziun in front of a furnace, from Jean Melvin’s book American Glass Paperweights and Their Makers. Clip length: 00:44.
Victor Trabucco: Well he [Charles Kaziun] was really the first lampworker to really make fine paperweights with a torch. He really did. I know the picture—they show him, he’s standing there with a punty rod and standing in front of a furnace and everything in the Jean Melvin book. [laughs] That was staged. He never made his weights that way. I think even at that point he was trying to mislead. [laughs] He didn’t want artists or anybody to know what he did. He was extremely secretive. He was so secretive that he really lost touch where common things were made, like he didn’t know where to get—like I said, Kugler glass and all the German Zimmerman glass, and all that, which was very well known, and so I just told him all about that.
Time stamp: 00:45 Clip 2: Victor Trabucco discusses Charles Kaziun being removed from the glass community. Clip length: 00:59.
Victor Trabucco: He just removed himself so much from the glass community that some of the common knowledge, after a while—the German colors were so well-known. I mean, there’s dealers all across the country that sold Kugler glass, imported it and that was one of the common glasses we used: Kugler, Zimmerman, and then the Italian glass. And all those things were very available at this point, but he got his glass from a company called Conlon [Conlon Glass, Hicksville, New York]. And, in fact, they’re out of business. They were somewhere here in New York. But they used to make his clear rod. And he would always—he would have to sort through it to find stuff that was good enough for him to use, and I even had—I got some glass from a glassblower that had died and I bought all his glass and everything that he had left, and some of them had strings around it and they had Kaziun’s name on it. So they were setting it aside for Charlie. [laughs]
Debbie Tarsitano, Bob Banford, Gordon Smith, Victor Trabucco
Debbie Tarsitano, Bob Banford, Gordon Smith, and Victor Trabucco discuss the tradition of secrecy in paperweight making and their own sharing of techniques. Oral history interview with Debbie Tarsitano by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, April 18, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Gordon Smith by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, November 26, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Victor Trabucco by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 16, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 07:51.
Debbie Tarsitano: But how they felt about it. I think cause it was such a small group—remember, there maybe was in that picture, that was it—except for the people from Europe, which were mostly factories, but that’s it. I mean, and there were at the time that picture was taken, there were probably hundreds of glassblowers. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand or more—glassblowers. So you got this little tiny group of people that can do this. So they were very protective of it. I don’t think it was—they were bad or anything. I think it was because they just—it was precious.
Time stamp: 00:33 Clip 2: Bob Banford talks about the history of secrecy in paperweight making. Clip length: 00:23.
Bob Banford: That was always, and that was always in the very beginning and back in the seventies this information wasn’t shared, so you had to root out all these places on your own. It was much harder. Now you can take classes, you can see videos, you can do all kinds of things to learn the craft that back then it was just passed on from person to person, or you learned it on your own.
Time stamp: 00:59 Clip 3: Gordon Smith talks about the Kontes Brothers and secrecy in paperweight making. Clip length: 01:16.
Gordon Smith: Yeah, that was still the days that, which goes back to some of the secrecy thing. Back then, no one would teach you anything. For whatever reason, I could never understand it. It was never really explained to me other than that, now when I look back, it’s always been a big secret. The glassblowing tradition, even going back to the Island of Murano, there are really closely kept secrets that just stay secret, or it’s just something about glassblowing and that art form, secrecy is a big thing. But back in 1980—‘80 and ‘81 and ‘82, it was still like that, very much so in the paperweight world, and especially in the flameworking world. So although the Kontes Brothers were great encouragement and they had a way of just kinda cheerleading me on, they never showed me anything. But they definitely encouraged me when I went home and started to experiment and just try to figure it out on my own. I’d bring ‘em in my latest and greatest experiment and they’d say, ‘Okay, this looks good. Why don’t you try working on this part a little bit.’ That’s kind of how they encouraged me.
Time stamp: 02:18 Clip 4: Gordon Smith talks about secrecy versus sharing in paperweight making. Clip length: 00:54.
Gordon Smith: As far as us working together—that’s a big deal compared to 1982; paperweight makers, we would get together at these conventions and we were all handshaking friends, but after that, we all went back to our studios and we didn’t want to talk a whole lot about what we were doing with each other and how we were doing it. Today there’s a lot more camaraderie there, and we get together and we share ideas and share some of our thoughts about what we’re working on or if we have a problem or something, you know, just something is an issue. I’m not afraid to say something to another paperweight maker and another paperweight maker’s not afraid to approach me and say, ‘Hey, you know, what do you think about this? I tried it. It didn’t work. What do you think?’ So that kind of thing, you know, it’s evolved that way. A lot more openness.
Time stamp: 03:15 Clip 5: Gordon Smith discusses his openness in sharing paperweight making techniques. Clip length: 01:19.
Gordon Smith: I swore that because of what I went through as a new paperweight maker—I made a promise that I was not going to be like that. Some of my own personal techniques for how I create a specific look or a color combination for my personal work, that’s mine. But as far as the techniques on how to make a flameworked paperweight—to me, just because I struggled so much and I didn’t know what the big deal was, I swore I was not gonna do that same thing to anybody else. So I showed up with my vacuum pump and all my equipment, and I just set it up because if I was going to do a demonstration in front of people, I wanted to do it showing them exactly how we do what we do. I felt like they deserved that. I felt that collectors come to these conventions, they pay good money to get there, they pay good money to buy the work that we create, and I’m not going to sit there and show them some false example of exactly how we make what we make. Because I just felt like—that it just wasn’t being honest with them. So I showed them whatever I did.
Time stamp: 04:38 Clip 6: Victor Trabucco discusses doing public paperweight-making demonstrations. Clip length: 00:53.
Victor Trabucco: But I would do demonstrations. People would come, and I had a torch set up, and I had a little screen, you know, of glass—plastic screens around me so that nobody, you know, would get hit by any of the glass flying—you know, if any particles fell or flew off or anything like that. But I did that for about a year, and a demonstration would be anywhere from 15 to, you know, half an hour depending on what the, you know, what the piece was. It was just to get people to come to you, and I had everything set up, and my wife was there too, and so we would sell some of the finished work. I used to—when I finished a piece, I—even in those days, I annealed the work, although some of the guys would make smaller pieces not even anneal them to sell them, but I always annealed all my work. So anything I demonstrated went home, and then I annealed it and brought it back the next day.
Time stamp: 05:41 Clip 7: Victor Trabucco talks about his own tendency to be secretive as a paperweight maker. Clip length: 02:09.
Victor Trabucco: I’ve always been really, probably more secretive than a lot of them. But because the way I make weights is a lot different than the approach that a lot of them do, and it’s some of the tooling and some of the equipment that I’ve designed. And I’ve never really shown anybody, other than my sons, exactly how we encase. There’s never been anybody in our shop to see that. So—and I understand. To me, I think being secretive somewhat helped. It, you know, keeps the industry healthy because you keep your prices up as the information gets so disseminated, and so many people are doing it, it just keeps reducing the prices and the value of the work. And I felt as though—I remember telling this young man when I was up at RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York], he said, ‘Why are you so secretive?’ And I think I said, ‘I’ll tell you a story about, like, Nick Labino.’ When he first entered the field and everything, I talked to him a number of times on the phone, and things like that, but he had that Veil glass, where he’d fume the glass and everything, and that was kind of highly regarded. But then that got exposed, and it got so thrown around that all the production studios were using it, and it wasn’t even regarded as much of—you know, ‘Eh—it’s just fuming the glass. No big deal.’ Well, that’s what happened because before anybody knew what the chemistry was and how he did it, it was a huge mystery. But once the mystery was gone, it just got devalued. It just got produced as just something of a throwaway technique. And that’s the way I always felt and so, even when I teach my class, and I’ve been credited with really teaching a lot, and how the technique is done and everything. But, say I’m going to teach you a lot about how to use the flame, how to make your shut ups and everything, and how to develop your technique, but I only take them so far, and it’s up to them to find and solve the final questions of how do you encase them, and keep them so clean, and keep the distortion away and all that. And that only comes through practice.
Artists’ Residencies and the Creative Glass Center of America
Wheaton created the first formalized fellowship program for glass artists in the United States in direct response to its experience with the needs of young makers.In 1977, artist Flora Mace, then a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana,, came to Wheaton Village and asked to use the Glass Studio for an extended period. This encounter, which resulted in Wheaton building a small living space for Mace, revealed that artists graduating from university glass programs and embarking on careers in studio glassmaking needed access to working studio space. In 1983, Wheaton established its Creative Glass Center of America (CGCA)—later called the Creative Glass Fellowship Program—to foster emerging and mid-career glass artists while introducing the public to contemporary glass: fellows give glassworking demonstrations for Wheaton visitors. A number of young artists that Paul Hollister was writing about in the 1980s and 1990s spent time as CGCA fellows, including Michael Aschenbrenner, Carol Cohen, and Mary Van Cline, among others.
Paul Hollister Interview Transcript
Carol Cohen Lecture, 1988.
Carol Cohen discusses her work in a 1988 slide lecture for the Heller Gallery.
(Rakow title: Carol Cohen interview [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 167958)
“I really credit that in 1977 Flora Mace shows up at our doorstep, and she had just graduated from [the University of] Illinois [Champaign-Urbana] and was looking for a place to really settle to try and make glass, and she was going around the country…. We actually had her live at the gallery—made a little bedroom for her up there and put a shower in the Glass Studio so she had a place to shower. She really sort of set the stage. Artists needed a place to work when they came from college programs.”
Gay LeCleire Taylor
Artist Flora Mace at Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), first artist’s residency, Millville, New Jersey, 1977. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
Flora Mace at Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), first artist’s residency, Millville, New Jersey, 1977. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
“Flora [Mace] went down there and needed—it goes back to Maurice Marinot—I mean, you need access. Up to the point of Dale [Chihuly] and Harvey [Littleton], it wasn’t individualized, it was industrial. So individual artists had to go into a factory to get access. When Flora went in there, it was sort of the same thing repeating: she’s out of school, there’s no access, she went down there, everybody’s looking for access. And so she went there and she’s doing some work there, and a relationship was started. Frank [Wheaton] liked her—Paul Stankard, Doug Heller, a few other people got together, and there was a positivity between Frank and Flora, and so they petitioned for Frank if he would host a residency program. And that’s how the residency program—well the first, I believe, in the country was born. Frank was very positive. He says, ‘Yeah, I’ll buy you a house, and then I’ll give you access, but that’s it, you guys have to figure it out.’ So that’s how the CGCA—Creative Glass Center of America, was born. A separate board was born to support the stipends and the fundraising for that residency program.”
Former Wheaton Studio Creative Director Hank Murta Adams
“So she was [part of] a group of artists that came when we opened—again, they see the source of glass, they’re going to be attracted to it and ask if they can start working with it. So yeah, it wasn’t a formal fellowship, but it was more of her as an artist noticing we had glass, wanting to work with us, and us saying, ‘Okay, let’s see what happens.’ And then because of the positive experience, that helped open up the idea of having a formalized art fellowship.”
Kristin Qualls
Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses how the CGCA fellowship filled a pocket need for studio glass artists.
Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses how the CGCA fellowship filled a pocket need for studio glass artists. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 00:37.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: Well, actually we give them a stipend, we give them a house to live in, so it has no charge to them—all they have to do is find their way once they’re juried in. And we really sustain them, so they have a body of work when they’re finished to go out. So that was sort of a pocket need in the studio movement that we saw that wasn’t available before. And now there’s so many other teaching situations around where you can go and get a fellowship or get a paid way to go, but back then, in 1983, there wasn’t anything like that.
Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses how Flora Mace’s residency lead to establishment of the CGCA. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:42.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: But it really begins after, of course, Harvey Littleton’s workshop in 1962, where everybody sort of looks at glass very differently. And then how it translates to where I worked in Southern New Jersey, we knew about these small little colleges and colleges that were putting small little shops in their studios. Philadelphia College of Art had this small little one today, that’s the University of Arts [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania], and theirs was just a corrugated shed on the outside of the building where students blew glass, or Tyler [Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] had a glassblowing program. But once you got out of that program, what did you do? Where did you go? And it’s where artists were looking for places to do. And in 1977 an artist by the name of Flora Mace shows up on our doorstep and she’s just graduated and she wants to find a place, you know, to make glass. And WheatonArts [Millville, New Jersey] has a working glass studio on the grounds, a replica of the original Wheaton Factory from 1888, and we had paid staff glassblowers working there, but we found that glass artists were compatible working on the space. So we actually let her live above one of the buildings, made a shower for Flora Mace in our glass studio, and she really gave us the idea that we should start a program ourselves at our institution. So, in 1982, we started talking with people. In 1983, the Creative Glass Center of America was established where 300 artists now have gone through and live and make glass in South Jersey out of 26 countries around the world.
First CGCA Fellows, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1983. From left: James Harmon, Leon Applebaum, Mary Van Cline, Steve Tobin, Susan Anton, Don Friel, and Amy Roberts. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
James Harmon during his CGCA Fellowship, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1983. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
Mary Van Cline, First CGCA Fellowship, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1983. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
Gay LeCleire Taylor talks about Frank Wheaton coming up with their fellowship program.
Gay LeCleire Taylor talks about Frank Wheaton coming up with their fellowship program. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor, March 23, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:00.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: Yes, and we all went down the river in Mr. [Frank] Wheaton’s yacht [laughter] and talked about the idea of coming up with a fellowship program which was established in 1983. We bought a little house around the corner and juried artists, and the first group was six artists which included Mary Van Kline and Steve Tobin and Jim Harmon—realized six didn’t work, that four was better, and that it then became three sessions a year for three months, a stipend was given, a house was given for you to live so everything was paid for so a young artist coming out of a college program would have a place to build a small body of work. It eventually moved on to being much more than that—of over these 300 artists, and the facility grew and new equipment was built and so it was always a stimulating situation.
Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses the Wheaton fellowship and its development. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:43.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: I feel like it was sort of a real community back then. Where we were located, we were really rural. You had to find your way to get to Millville. But Philadelphia had Tyler [Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]—had a really good glass blowing program, Philadelphia College of Art had a small one with Roland Yan as the professor, and so there was glassblowing in our immediate area, and so tapping it into those kinds of things—and at first it was our board, or Mr. [Frank] Wheaton and those people, only wanted American artists to be given a fellowship, but we opened that up, and Hiroshi Yamano was sort of the first Japanese artist that came in. And it was learning from each other, really exposing things. We would have these evenings where the artist would talk and they would be sort of explaining their background and how they came into their work and how they chose to work and all of that. And, I don’t want to say we felt young, but it felt like, especially in the 1980s, that things were really happening and colleges were putting glass blowing into programs, and people were visiting and traveling around and doing all of that, and the Glass Arts Society was beginning and having meetings and having lectures and exhibits were happening.
Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses Wheaton’s first CGCA fellowship. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:42.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: But it really begins after, of course, Harvey Littleton’s workshop in 1962, where everybody sort of looks at glass very differently. And then how it translates to where I worked in Southern New Jersey, we knew about these small little colleges and colleges that were putting small little shops in their studios. Philadelphia College of Art had this small little one today, that’s the University of Arts [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania], and theirs was just a corrugated shed on the outside of the building where students blew glass, or Tyler [Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] had a glassblowing program. But once you got out of that program, what did you do? Where did you go? And it’s where artists were looking for places to do. And in 1977 an artist by the name of Flora Mace shows up on our doorstep and she’s just graduated and she wants to find a place, you know, to make glass. And WheatonArts [Millville, New Jersey] has a working glass studio on the grounds, a replica of the original Wheaton Factory from 1888, and we had paid staff glassblowers working there, but we found that glass artists were compatible working on the space. So we actually let her live above one of the buildings, made a shower for Flora Mace in our glass studio, and she really gave us the idea that we should start a program ourselves at our institution. So, in 1982, we started talking with people. In 1983, the Creative Glass Center of America was established where 300 artists now have gone through and live and make glass in South Jersey out of 26 countries around the world.
Kristin Qualls speaks about Wheaton’s open studios during artists’ residencies. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls conducted by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 01:23.
Kristin Qualls: And it is a difficult balance. And one thing that I think is somewhat unique about what you’re seeing happen at Wheaton is that it is an open artist studio. So, for example, if you go to Corning and you go to their demos, that’s a stage set, that’s a scripted—that’s a studio just for demonstrations for your general audience. Whereas for us, no, that’s our working studio. That’s where it all happens. We don’t have another studio in a building behind the museum or behind all this where the artists are actually working. So it is always a balance to make sure it doesn’t become a dog and pony show, to make sure those artists that are there feel respected and not like we’re using them to gain an audience. And I think that’s part of what I mentioned to you the other day, the studio’s open longer than just the public hours, and within any given set of fellows or visiting artists we might have, there are going to be some who love hammin’ it up in front of the audience and really get into it, and get really excited about kids being engaged with the art and that being a connection and that’s part of their practice. And there’s other artists that are going to not want that at all, but then they can work in the studio after five, or on Mondays when we’re closed. So we do work hard to try and strike that balance between making them an exhibit and honoring them as artists and giving them the sanctuary they need to get their work done.
To support the Creative Glass Center of America fellowship program, Wheaton instituted a fundraiser called Glass Lovers Weekend (eventually renamed Glass Weekend and then GlassWeekend). The event took place every other year between 1983 and 2017, alternating years with the Paperweight Weekends. It included studio demonstrations by established names in glass, lectures, and gallerists selling work to collectors. Wheaton subsequently replaced GlassWeekend with a similar program, Wheaton Gather.
Glass Historian Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses Wheaton’s Glass Weekends. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:29.
Gay LeCleire Taylor: So in the opposite year of paperweight weekend [inaudible] our fellowship project got going, 1983. Once that got going, on the odd years we would have a thing called Glass Weekend. And that would be a total fundraiser to fund the fellowships through two years or help to fund the fellowships; and galleries, you know, we started out small, on the line of the way a paperweight weekend would be, and once we got Heller to agree and Habatat to agree back then and I think this Riley Hawk, we had the lectures in the center of the rooms in the galleries, with their contemporary glass set up around our meeting room, around the perimeter, which moved into this huge weekend where we would have incredible glass artists be the demonstrating artists for the weekend and collectors would come and buy from all these galleries from around the world that were set up in our building and all of that. One year, you know, was Lino and Dale Chihuly were the premiere people demonstrating for the weekend and they were pretty amazing. I mean, Chihuly’s there with all his pencils doing drawings on things or decorating people’s shoes. All kinds of people have shoes and Chihuly painted as you walked by or whatever. It was an event, let me tell you.
Kristin Qualls discusses scheduling of demos and events at Wheaton’s Glass Weekends. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 01:23.
Kristin Qualls: In general for the Glass Weekends, for example, it’s a multiple day event, and then usually there’s slots when the glass studio is doing demonstrations, so it might be, say, Saturday afternoon demonstrations in the glass studio. And then that sort of split out since we have multiple benches, they try the best they can to organize it, so while one artist is just doing the setup, another artist is in the really high-intensity part of their piece, and then another artist is maybe breaking it off in his put it in the anneal—like you’re trying to set it up so that you’re not, you don’t want to eclipse each other, but you want to keep the action going, because it gets boring to sit there and watch someone set up the perfect bubble for half an hour, so you have that happening to balance it out. So that’s a lot on the studio manager to bring all these artists together at once and see how they can work together in the same studio in front of an audience, and make their pieces. So it would usually be specific demo times during these long weekends, or again more recently we had Studio Wide Open, which would be an open late evening that we’ve now merged with Wheaton Wednesdays, that again would be more of a local—folks to come in just for the evening, and get studio tours with the fellows. Or again, it’s an open studio, so we’re open to the public 10 to five; at any given moment you’re walking in and an artist is making something.
In the early years of the program, the Creative Glass Center of America (CGCA) invited some of the big names in the studio glass movement to participate in Masterwork Fellowships at Wheaton Village. Dan Dailey and Lino Tagliapietra shared a residency in 1989. Dailey was then a professor at Massachusetts College of Art, having founded the glass program there in 1973; Tagliapietra was a Venetian glassblower whose exceptional skills drew crowds whenever he demonstrated blowing techniques. Hollister’s photographs show Dailey and Tagliapietra working as a team. Two works resulting from their joint sessions—part of the artists’ renowned Dailey/Tagliapietra Series—entered the collection of Wheaton’s American Museum of Glass. Hollister likely shot these images during Wheaton’s Glass Lovers Weekend of May 1989. The following year Hollister published a two-part article in Neues Glas on American artists’ explorations of Venetian glass techniques.
Detail of “The Journal” [Wheaton Village newsletter] Vol. 12, no. 2, 1989, announcing Masterwork Fellowship awards recipients Dan Dailey and Lino Tagliapietra and Glass Lovers Weekend ’89, featuring demonstrations by Dailey and Tagliapietra. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey.
Mary Shaffer talks about being a Wheaton fellow at the same time as Lino Tagliapietra. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:23.
Mary Shaffer: Okay. Wheaton Village was really important. It was important to me because I’d had a fire in my house, so I didn’t have a place to work and they invited me to be a visiting artist. And Jane Bruce was there, I think she’s the one that either taught me—I think she taught me how to polish glass, which was amazing. And Lino [Tagliapietra] was there. I mean that was a very important time for, I think all of us that were there. Lino was just starting out here, and I think Wheaton Village continues to be that, because they have these residencies where artists can go and work and have free materials and a free place to live. So—I mean that was a very important kind of center for people.
Dan Dailey discusses his collaboration with Lino Tagliapietra at their 1989 Creative Glass Center of America (CGCA) Joint Masterwork Fellowship at Wheaton. Throughout the images, Dailey and Tagliapietra are assisted by John Childs, Tom Farbanish, and Kellmis Fernandez. Additional speakers include Gay LeCleire Taylor, Karen Chambers, and Jane Bruce.
Lino Tagliapietra at the bench. Dan Dailey and Lino Tagliapietra Joint Masterwork CGCA Fellowship Workshop, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1989. Bard Graduate Center, Paul Hollister Slide Collection. Photo attributed to Paul Hollister.
“People were always thrilled to watch [Lino] blow glass, so he would get invited all over the place to come and give a demo.”
Dan Dailey
Dan Dailey (far left) and Lino Tagliapietra (at the bench) with Tom Farbanish (right). Dan Dailey and Lino Tagliapietra Joint Masterwork CGCA Fellowship Workshop, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1989. Bard Graduate Center, Paul Hollister Slide Collection. Photo attributed to Paul Hollister.
Lino Tagliapietra (right) with Tom Farbanish (left, at the bench). Dan Dailey and Lino Tagliapietra Joint Masterwork CGCA Fellowship Workshop, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1989. Bard Graduate Center, Paul Hollister Slide Collection. Photo attributed to Paul Hollister.
Lino Tagliapietra reheating piece (with Dan Dailey drawing on heat shield). Dan Dailey and Lino Tagliapietra Joint Masterwork CGCA Fellowship Workshop, Wheaton Village (now Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center), Millville, New Jersey, 1989. Bard Graduate Center, Paul Hollister Slide Collection. Photo attributed to Paul Hollister.
“I believe that working with Dan Dailey is easy, in a way, because he makes very precise designs—very well done, really—that [are] easy to carry out, to understand what he wants. That is very important.”
—Lino Tagliapietra on Dan Dailey [translated from Italian]
“But [Lino] really taught people. Yes, he was the master. Well, he’s still the master people flock to when he’s going to be demonstrating.”
Gay LeCleire Taylor
“The only requirement of the fellowship was to donate one piece to the program to document the artists’ work during their residency. These pieces became part of the CGCA collection at the Museum of American Glass.”
Gay LeCleire Taylor
Collona, 1989. Work by Dan Dailey and Lino Tagliapietra from their CGCA Fellowship given to Wheaton’s Museum of American Glass. H: 19 in . Collection of the Museum of American Glass, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey (89.019.013). Photo: Al Weinerman.
Kristin Qualls discusses CGCA fellows’ obligation to donate a finished work to the Museum of American Glass.
Kristin Qualls discusses CGCA fellows’ obligation to donate a finished work to the Museum of American Glass. Oral history interview with Kristin Qualls by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, July 26, 2019, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center. Clip length: 01:56.
Kristin Qualls: Yeah, an excellent way to develop a contemporary art collection is to have these contemporary art fellows that come in as part of the fellowship. They’re asked to donate a piece to the museum that represents their time here. So we have, over the years, from ‘83 to now, amassed what I find to be a particularly amazing collection, if not necessarily—I mean, there obviously are some wonderful highlight pieces, but I also think as a whole the collection really speaks to trends that are happening in the studio glass movement, so you can kind of see what colors were popular, what techniques were popular at different times as you go through it, as well as you can see some experimentation, which, as a museum leaves us with these sort of interesting concepts of—we have pieces that no longer hold what I would consider the artist’s vision because, for example, the ‘archival’ adhesive they used has yellowed, so it’s in—from a museum point of view, in terms of putting on display, it doesn’t really follow the artist’s original vision. But I also find it a very interesting piece to maintain in a collection because then it speaks to people working with the medium, new techniques that were being developed, like what kind of adhesives, what kind of silicones, what did you do before Hxtal was around? As they’re exploring this medium and where they can push it and where they can take it, so while a piece like that might never go on display I think it’s good from a research point of view, again, to show these kind of trends, or to show what kind of materials were being combined with the glass at different times. And also what worked and what didn’t work. So now we know that that adhesive turns yellow. So, if you don’t want it to turn yellow, maybe you shouldn’t use it. But if you do, here’s this interesting adhesive that can change the color of your piece over time.
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)
Wheaton Village was renamed Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center in 2006, a change that reflected the development of the organization from its founding as a living history museum to an institution exploring artistic creativity past and present. In addition to glassmaking, visitors have been able to watch pottery demonstrations and engage with a wide range of visual and performing arts from diverse cultural traditions. At the same time, WheatonArts has continued to strengthen its commitment to contemporary glass through initiatives such as Emanation, a biennial residency and exhibition project launched by Hank Murta Adams in 2015, when he was the Studio’s creative director. Emanation artists are invited to spend a year exploring Wheaton’s collection of historic glass objects, molds, and equipment and to make new work in glass—utilizing WheatonArts’ glass studio facilities and expert glassworkers—that responds to the site itself. The resultant pieces are showcased in an exhibition at WheatonArts’ Museum of American Glass.
“I started to talk with the current director about the possibilities for the place and changing the name, and making the artists and making creativity a much stronger case for the mission and the purpose of the institution.”
Former Wheaton Studio Creative Director Hank Murta Adams
Jocelyne Prince (left) creating work for Emanation exhibition using custom “roller” machine she built, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey, 2015. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
Jocelyne Prince’s Vindauga Glaciare (detail) during installation for Emanation exhibition at Museum of American Glass, Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville, New Jersey, 2015. Image courtesy of Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center.
“It’s incredible to have a collection and then have a studio right next door. Again, if I have any questions about how something is made, I have a whole studio of experts in how you make stuff with glass. I think it adds also a different twist from the more art historical or decorative art history view, both of which are very important, but the idea that we can sort of mesh them a little more, I think, is really great.”
