Kate Vogel and John Littleton discuss Bill Brown’s development of a glass community in North Carolina’s Southeast. Oral History Interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:42.

John Littleton (JL): Bill Brown had gone to the World Craft Council meeting in New York in 1964, I believe it was, and Dad [Harvey Littleton] had a furnace there. Bill saw it and said, ‘I’d like to get that for Penland,’ and Dad had promised the furnace to Haystack, [Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine] I believe.

Kate Vogel (KV): I think Bill also wasn’t ready for it yet that summer. I think he said, ‘I can’t do it this year, but I’d like to next year.’

JL: And so Dad helped get a studio built at Penland in ‘65, and that was fairly early on in the teaching glass to artists-craftsmen. It was a good start for the Southeast to have someone teaching glass.

KV: And I think it really built a glass community in the Southeast, probably; I mean, I say it, I don’t know that that’s absolutely true, but I really think that the Southeast and the area around the Penland was the first place in the country to have a studio glass, not like a factory glass or individuals, but actually a studio glass community that was working, and it was all about Penland. Penland also has gone through a number of changes up there. They’ve had three studios since their first studio, was basically—I don’t know if you know what homasote is, but it’s sort of like a composite board, that if you punched it or kicked it hard, you could put your hand through it. It’s usually like about an inch thick. The [inaudible] building had homasote walls and plastic over spaces that would be windows. It was pretty crude. It had a dirt floor in it. And then, at some point when they started teaching classes on a more regular basis that were focused on glass, we built a new place. And that was—wasn’t that the Bonnie Ford glass studio?

JL: I think so. Yeah.

KV: And that would have been—maybe in the seventies, sometime? And then in 1995 they built the present studio that they have and it actually opened during the Glass Art Society conference that was at Penland and Asheville. And I think another thing that’s really spectacular, Penland was the place that the Glass Art Society was founded and started. And I think that one of the things that Bill Brown really brought to Penland School was an openness to invite people in to do all sorts of different things. And if somebody had a crazy idea, he wouldn’t go, ‘Oh, no, that’s a bad idea. Don’t do it.’ He was much more open and would be like, ‘Yeah, figure it out, and then come back and tell me what you’re thinking.’ You know, he didn’t close the door on people. And so I think that there was a tremendous amount of creative activity that occurred up there that might’ve been either just not allowed someplace else or just never would have happened cause people wouldn’t have felt so comfortable and free to do whatever they thought was [laughs] interesting at the moment.