Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses how Flora Mace’s residency lead to establishment of the CGCA. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:42.

Gay LeCleire Taylor: But it really begins after, of course, Harvey Littleton’s workshop in 1962, where everybody sort of looks at glass very differently. And then how it translates to where I worked in Southern New Jersey, we knew about these small little colleges and colleges that were putting small little shops in their studios. Philadelphia College of Art had this small little one today, that’s the University of Arts [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania], and theirs was just a corrugated shed on the outside of the building where students blew glass, or Tyler [Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] had a glassblowing program. But once you got out of that program, what did you do? Where did you go? And it’s where artists were looking for places to do. And in 1977 an artist by the name of Flora Mace shows up on our doorstep and she’s just graduated and she wants to find a place, you know, to make glass. And WheatonArts [Millville, New Jersey] has a working glass studio on the grounds, a replica of the original Wheaton Factory from 1888, and we had paid staff glassblowers working there, but we found that glass artists were compatible working on the space. So we actually let her live above one of the buildings, made a shower for Flora Mace in our glass studio, and she really gave us the idea that we should start a program ourselves at our institution. So, in 1982, we started talking with people. In 1983, the Creative Glass Center of America was established where 300 artists now have gone through and live and make glass in South Jersey out of 26 countries around the world.