Andrew Page talks about Pilchuck and the differences between West Coast and East Coast glass. Oral history interview with Andrew Page, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:32.

Andrew Page: I mean, I think to speak broadly—and you know, not wanting to paint with too broad of a brush on this, but on the West Coast if there is a difference between the West Coast glass scene as it’s centered in the Northwest, and the New York or East Coast glass scene, one of the big differences I think is, well, Pilchuck [Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington] brought all types of international figures to bring European ideas, European technologies, European techniques to share with the American scene, which was incredibly important. The West Coast really grabbed on to some of the traditional techniques from Venice. Lino Tagliapietra, one of the first artists to really openly share the historic techniques from Venice, came to Pilchuck for the first time in 1979, and he found such an eager audience to learn the traditional methods which were quite different than the more experimental, asymmetrical outcomes of a lot of sort of early glass artists who prized that crudeness. There was a thirst for the refined, you know, symmetrical, ordered patterns of cane work and they found a real dedicated group of artists who spent the time, who were young enough to develop the hand techniques to achieve incredibly fine results of blown glass. And some say that, you know, it’s almost a decorative approach, it’s traditional, it’s decorative. They’ve taken it to new heights of scale, unconventional colors and interesting shapes, but it’s within a certain framework that one might consider more decorative in focus. And I think you might generalize and say on the East Coast with all that influence certainly at New York Experimental of fine art galleries and artists coming in and dabbling in glass and Louise Bourgeois, Lynda Benglis, Matthew Barney, others who spent time and crossed paths with New York Experimental, there was I think more of a dialogue with contemporary art and you see that in some of the work that was produced at, for example, UrbanGlass versus maybe at Pilchuck. Although it’s really hard to generalize, I mean, I don’t want in any way to diminish the impact of Pilchuck as a crossroads for information, for technique and also for ideas about art. I mean, they’ve had a great visiting artist program. They brought some of the top names in visual arts to Pilchuck: Maya Lin, Eric Fischl, these people have all done important exchanges at Pilchuck. Jim Dine, many others. So they were able to bring through their artistic directors great figures of contemporary art who had great influence on the glass scene on the West Coast, but what lasted and what really coalesced on the West Coast one could generalize and say had a bit of a more decorative focus.