Cybele Maylone discusses NYEGW’s founding and early days. Oral history interview with Cybele Maylone, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:01.

Cybele Maylone: So UrbanGlass was started in 1977 as the New York Experimental Glass Workshop [New York, New York] and it was started by three individuals: Eric Erickson, who was primarily a stained glass artist; Richard Yelle and Joe Upham, who were recent—I believe they had both gone to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design [Boston, Massachusetts] and then Richard Yelle had received an MFA from RISD [Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island]. And Richard moved to New York and met Eric in, I believe, a stained glass class at Parsons [Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, New York] and had this brilliant idea that artists like himself needed to have an opportunity to make work in glass in New York. And that even at that point in the late seventies, real estate was expensive and complicated and equipment, of course, was expensive and difficult to use. And so—he really saw this opportunity, a need to start an organization. And so Joe comes in because he has equipment in Boston, and so he drives equipment down; and by equipment, I mean—I believe he actually drove a furnace down from Boston. And they originally set up what was, at the time, the New York Experimental Glass Workshop in the back of Clayworks [Clayworks Studio Workshop, New York, New York], which was an organization that serves to do a very similar type—provide very similar services to the clay community, and it was located on Great Jones Street. So Experimental was in the back of Clayworks and a woman named Rose Slivka who was an important part of that organization and was one of the earliest board members of Experimental. She also started Craft Horizons. So when Experimental kind of comes about, it really is thanks, I think, in large part to Clayworks, and Richard Yelle eventually became executive director kind of of both organizations. And then in ‘81, I believe, Experimental needs more and more space and moves to Mulberry Street. And for its first time has its own space.