Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses how a “Small Scale Sculpture” Weekend idea failed. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:22.

Gay LeCleire Taylor: What happened is the Paperweight Weekend, I don’t want to say, for us nearly died, but Debbie Tarsitano was involved in this, and our new director after my husband was long gone and then we had a new director—was really interested in—more in contemporary glass. So Debbie Tarsitano was pushing this small scale sculpture idea, so we tried the small scale sculpture weekend, which was a total flop. People refused to come, and that’s what these—I don’t know if Paul’s [Stankard] ever talked about what walls he kind of hit sometimes with paperweight collectors that didn’t want the botanicals, didn’t want his more sculptural things, and so he had to look more to the studio movement than the core paperweight collectors. And so after that failure, what we ended up doing to get back into doing Paperweight Weekends is WheatonArts paired with the Delaware Valley chapter of the Paperweight Collectors Association. They became our sort of co-sponsor for the event. So we went back to that core and said, ‘Look okay, we tried the small scale sculpture, it didn’t work. We want to get back to Paperweight Weekends.’