Flo Perkins talks about going to Pilchuck, Mass Art, and then UCLA with Dick Marquis. Oral history interview with Flo Perkins by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, August 20, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:10.

Flo Perkins: I went to Pilchuck. Again, I think it was five weeks for three hundred dollars or something like that. I have the original poster, which is cool. And I ended up staying in the area a little while longer than the program and got back to Massachusetts. Once you get into glassblowing you have to go where the facility is. So I went back to Massachusetts, where I grew up, but I had never lived in Boston. So I moved into the city and connected with Dan Dailey, who said, ‘Well, you have a bachelor’s degree, so why don’t you make some work and apply as my first graduate student?’ And so I did all that and he let me be the monitor in the studio at night, and work on the equipment, so that I was sort of the senior presence. And I opened and closed the studio and made some work and that would be the summer of seventy, and that would have been—so for the fall of ‘76. And unfortunately that fall they had a fire in the glass shop—it ruined the equipment in terms of the—there weren’t a lot of computers, but the instruments. And they closed the hot shop for the year, I think. So we all had to do cold glass. And I did do it, and I stayed, but it wasn’t my interest. So by the spring I had met the man I ended up marrying, Bill Agnew, and I left, and I just went, ‘I know there’s people on the west coast.’ Bill had been in New England for 12 years at school and stuff, doing different things, and he wanted to go back out west and I’m like, ‘Let’s go.’ And I knew that Marvin [Lipofsky] was out there and that’s the most I knew, but I figured there was other stuff. And I found Dick [Richard] Marquis at UCLA and I was like, ‘Sign me up.’ And so I—we, Bill and I first moved to Santa Barbara for one year, and then I found Dick at UCLA, so I got in, he accepted me the next year, and so I did three years of graduate school with Dick: 1978—9, ‘80, ‘81. So it must have been seventies. ‘78 to ‘81 or ’82.