Andrew Page talks about Richard Yelle starting NYEGW’s New Work. Oral history interview with Andrew Page, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:20.

Andrew Page: In this current day and age, when all types of media are featured performance and found objects and video and any material you really want to work with is acceptable in pretty much any context, It’s hard to remember that at one point, it really wasn’t as open minded. And in terms of material, glass was always seen as sort of a decorative or often seen as a decorative or industrial material and making a bid for sculpture was a long and arduous process where people would start taking it seriously. And the founder of the New York Experimental Glass Workshop [New York, New York], Richard Yelle, always had a vision beyond providing a furnace for people to work at. Because he worked as the executive director of Clayworks [New York, New York], because he was in the New York ferment, he was always aware of what it takes to make an organization an arts organization and not simply a studio and he always had that as part of his ambition. So two years after he opened the New York Experimental Glass Workshop in 1977, he decided he needed to start a place where the discourse about glass as a medium for art could take place because it just simply wasn’t happening. All this great work was being produced and there wasn’t much conversation about it and its relevance. So we decided in the spirit of the times when you start your own nonprofit art association in New York, you also start your own publication. And in fact at the time, there were a lot of underground art publications on newsprint that were being published in SoHo and in the areas around New York like the East Village where there was concentrations of art. So he went and began his own publication called New Work. In fact, he didn’t mention new work in glass. Significantly the first issue is simply called New Work and it was an ambition to allocate glass in the fine art world and not only write about glass but its position in relation to other media. This periodical took a few years to get running really on a regular basis. There would be, like, issues 1, 2 and 3 as coming together in an individual publication, but it can—it was published continuously since 1979 to today and it was an important voice; it brought, you know, major thinkers, it brought artists into a dialogue about what was happening in this field that was new. But also what was happening in the New York realm as well.