Douglas Heller talks about Habatat Gallery. Oral history interview with Douglas Heller, September 7, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:46.

Douglas Heller: we started independent of each other. Very different cities, very different places, and, I think, very different intents. I’ve always admired what they accomplished. Ferd Hampson was the founder along with Tom Boone, his brother-in-law at the time, and now his son Corey Hampson, who I must talk to every two weeks and we sometimes transact business together and I see them all the time. So it’s, it’s as different as—I’m Manhattan born and bred, you know, I’m a product of New York City, pure product of New York City. They’re from a very different environment, you know. We’ve both found the same thing, but I think in different ways, and they’re after 45, 46 years, they’re in business and we’re in business. A lot of other people have come and go. So they’re the other great experts in it, but, you know, as people as in what and how we do it, I think we’ve gone in different directions. And one of the things that they’ve like to do and it’s in most of their advertising, it’s always the biggest glass show in the world. And we were doing some of that for a long time when we had the Glass America shows—first one called Contemporary Art Glass 1976, then it morphed into a title called Glass America—that show would have 60 people or so. And we did that for a number of years and the idea was it was a crash course introductory survey in studio glass and you would be immersed in all the possibilities. But then at a certain point we said we’ve done that and now we want to zero in on certain channels, threads, trends that we find interesting, and our pursuit is what is interesting to us, not what can we sell—although, we have to sell to stay in business and if we can’t sell this work, these people can’t maintain their practice either—but we’ve taken a different approach. We represent far, far fewer—we see lists of—gallery lists of artists they represent. Sometimes we are befuddled by how many names there are compared to what we know it takes to represent somebody, you know, to understand the work, have a dialogue with the person, find the type of audiences, create the relationship I was talking about earlier, you know, seeking out proper venues for the work. But Habatat is, I think, flourishing and that is a great achievement in itself and its second generation.