Fred Kahl discusses being a New York University student and studying glass at NYEGW. Oral history interview with Fred Kahl by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 25, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:55.

Fred Kahl: So just in a nutshell—so when I was in school I studied a weird mix, I did a lot of, I was doing photography and then I was doing glass work, and at NYU there was a really pretty amazing photo department with a lot of really—sort of like these Postmodern kind of photographers. I did a class with Richard Prince—and Louise Lawler is another artist I studied with. Louise taught Intro to Photography freshman year of college was my—that was like my intro to photo teacher, and then—because NYU had the program with International Center of Photography, all these amazing artists like Richard Prince were teaching at NYU and it was mostly the grad students, but I got to like go into all these classes so I was kind of like getting this really heady sort of like art world stuff and then—at the same time was studying—they started this glass program with New York Experimental and not—that was Jim Harmon, and then later Jane Bruce came in to teach that as well, so it was kind of like this weird split between very sort of like thinking art and very crafty art, and that was always this sort of like weird dilemma—you know, or just this push pull, in terms of my influences. So around the time this was done I guess I was still really into glass, but slowly started kind of pulling away, just, you know, looking at, I guess, there was this sort of like this movement away from glass, which was so elitist, like you—only a handful of people come out to see the shows, and it was really sort of like catering to sort of like the one percent sort of audience, and I was doing work that was about illusion and magic and kind of like all started street performing and was kind of interested in just making work that was more sort of like democratic and approachable to more sort of like the common people, so—it sort of segued into this performative work that I was doing out in Coney Island and just moved away from work that was about sort of like showing in a gallery where like maybe a hundred—a couple hundred people are going to see the stuff, and really looking at creating more sort of populist work.