Douglas Heller talks about studio glass expanding through university programs and Heller Gallery’s decision to move to SoHo. Oral history interview with Douglas Heller, September 7, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:58.

Douglas Heller: …but in the interim, the field was changing, the artists were evolving dramatically, the work was changing. The focus from people like Mark Peiser and the earliest practitioners who, I think, saw themselves more in a kind of counterculture vein started to change to where the art schools now had established programs and it was becoming something much more mainstream. Harvey Littleton, who we had been representing, you know, was a great advocate and went out and barnstormed the country. By the time he was done, several universities and colleges had instituted glass programs, which proved to be enormously popular within the schools. So suddenly the type of work was changing. People were no longer just rediscovering the wheel, building their own furnace, making their own batch, you know. They were doing something that was far more sophisticated, and we felt challenged by that, and the gallery had to respond. And the message in New York, the area that was happening in, was in SoHo. That was the dynamic neighborhood where new things were happening, and the spaces were amazing in terms of scale compared to the uptown spaces. Uptown we always had to have a buzzer on the door, there was a certain elite Carriage Trade aspect to it, but now we went from the idea of,  ‘Okay, we are feeling more established. We’ve built some credibility.’ Pieces from the gallery have been going into museums, ranging from MoMA’s design department and Metropolitan Museum of Art, of course, the Corning Museum of Glass and other institutions, I mentioned Walter Chrysler earlier, you know, and we said we want to do something that’s younger, more responsive, and reflective of what’s going on.