Douglas Heller talks about building his gallery’s reputation and marketing studio glass. Oral history interview with Douglas Heller, September 7, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:26.

Douglas Heller: …the truth was we were meeting experienced collectors who had the eye and the experience to recognize really good work, even though it didn’t have the cachet of being established yet. So the question often was, ‘What is that?’ You know, they’d look at the artists we were representing, and the four people we decided to focus on were Mark Peiser, James Lundberg, Rolin Jahn and John Nygren. Each with a distinctly different style. The objects were small. They ranged from Jim Lundberg doing Neo-Nouveau work that was very reminiscent of Tiffany—of the blown glass, the iridescent glass, Tiffany and Loetz—and to Mark Peiser, who is still working today and of the four I think is the only one still working today. But, so the first question would come from people is well, ‘What is that, who made that? I’ve never seen that before.’ Then after we’d explain a bit about the work, then they would turn to us and go, ‘And who are you?’ you know, so it was establishing credibility and we found that by doing the shows that we got this widespread exposure, but it also let us appear and disappear for a while and then reappear, and people had the sense after they would see us two, three, perhaps four times that we knew what we were talking about and we were credible.