Ken Carder discusses the importance of the Penland School of Craft as an “environmental utopia.” Oral history interview with Ken Carder by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 6, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:55.

Ken Carder: Oh, it’s just, you know, you could go on for hours about why Penland’s important. Especially its involvement of Bill and Jane Brown in the early sixties and things it coincided with the resurrection of traditional craft materials coupled with the whole sixties idea of a certain type of independent thinking and what was happening in art schools around the country and what was happening with a younger population around the world essentially. You know, and Penland was this very idealistic place in the mountains of North Carolina where the surroundings were absolutely beautiful. And then you have an environment that’s basically a creative utopia. You know, where you got people working in all these different materials, and building equipment to work with these materials and the technology was being developed from the ground up, you know [laughs] literally from the dirt up, and it was a very inspiring environment, because when you get that many different creative minds in a very small location, things really bubble up and sparks fly and and it’s just amazing things that can happen, and that, you know, started in the sixties. So by the time I got there in the early eighties, it was a creative force to be reckoned with, you know, there was so much things going on in ceramics and metalworking and iron working and glass, and there was, you know, people that were working in photography and it was just a super creative environment.