Douglas Heller talks about early artists at his gallery and the name “Contemporary Glass Group.” Oral history interview with Douglas Heller, September 7, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:47.

Douglas Heller: We started to go around the country, going to street fairs and craft fairs. I mean there was a time, we went down to Florida when Mark Peiser was selling these exquisite little miniatures at a street fair, you know, and we would see people there. We would visit them in their studios and in their homes, and then we decided to put together this group of four that represented different styles. And that’s where the name came from Contemporary Art Glass Group. And it also somehow implied something greater than just the two of us. When Josh and I went down to the city to register the name and to create the business, we were told two people do not comprise a group and we couldn’t register the name, and we pulled out our dictionaries and said. ‘No, “group” according to this definition two people can be interpreted as a group,’ and they told us no. So Josh and I went back and we each took our middle name. We put it on the forms. And that was the third member of the group and that we then became the Contemporary Art Glass Group and that’s how we picked the people. So it was a combination of the work they were doing and the individuals, you know. We wanted people who felt it was compatibility with because this whole thing we wanted it to be cooperative and in the beginning we purchased every piece because we were unknown to everybody and the artists had very little money, not that we had a lot, but we had more than they did, and we felt that this again was about establishing credibility. So we would buy it we own it. We would then be committed and we would have to sell it.