Debbie Tarsitano discusses Paul Stankard revealing his paperweight-making techniques. Oral history interview with Debbie Tarsitano by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, April 18, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:09.

Debbie Tarsitano: So paperweights—the secrecy of paperweights may have helped to develop versatility in paperweights. And little at a time it began to—what happened I guess when Paul started to teach, people were unhappy about that. They were like, ‘Oh, he’s showing people how to do this.’ And I didn’t really have any opinion at all, cause I was like, I didn’t care. You know, I come from the art world where I have teachers that show me how to paint, and do things. But a lot of people were like, “Oh, he’s showing them how to make this. This is bad.’ [laughs.] And yet people wanted to learn, and so he probably was the one that did start kind of showing the technique to others, but it went from the secrecy from the ancients, really. You know, you told somebody in Murano that they would kill you. I mean, you couldn’t get off that island. So it was like, it went from that and then slowly began to join contemporary glass. Contemporary glass, they would show you everything. I mean, ‘Come over, come on, yeah. Come and have lunch, and come in my studio. We’ll make something.’ So the spirit of contemporary glass, cause I think at the time, Paul—and I knew Paul, I’ve known Paul for many, many years, over 40 years probably. He went into the contemporary glass, and he met people, maybe because he was near Wheaton Village, which began to invite people for contemporary glass. So he began to see that world, and I’m not gonna say for sure that this is what happened, but I think if you see that world, that world teaches. The contemporary glass world will show you techniques and how you do things. So that was probably part of when he was in that, and we weren’t—he kind of went into that contemporary glass world, and we stayed with the paperweight world. You see there were two different—the paperweights are outside of contemporary glass, and still it’s a little bit hard today even today. But so I think that brought about, ‘Well, I’m seeing all these contemporary artists teaching, well, why shouldn’t I teach this?’ Which I think was probably the course of things.