John Littleton and Kate Vogel discuss the scarcity of equipment to early studio glass artists. Oral history interview with Kate Vogel and John Littleton by Barb Elam and Caleb Weintraub-Weissman, conducted via telephone, December 12, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:09.

John Littleton (JL): In the early years, there weren’t readily available equipment suppliers, so part of the development of the complexity and advances in the artwork that was produced was also tied in with—as better equipment became known, how to build it, where to get the materials, the controls—

Kate Vogel (KV): [Inaudible]

JL: —for the ovens. The first annealing was done in vermiculite. You just put that hot piece of glass in a bucket and covered it. 

KV: [Inaudible] 

JL: And as you got to making thicker and thicker pieces, that just didn’t work. You had to have controlled annealing and you had to know the theory of it, and all of that developed along with the idea of glass as an art material. So a better furnace, you could get better glass, you’d have more clarity. More knowledge about refraction and reflection in the glass, how to get a bright looking piece of glass instead of that green color [laughs] that the marbles had.