Kate Vogel and John Littleton discuss Harvey Littleton’s emphasis on  understanding materials and making your own equipment. 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: 01:16.

Kate Vogel: And I think, at the same time, one of the things that I think has also driven a lot of innovation and a lot of artist’s ability in glass to do some amazing things was building their own equipment, really understanding the materials, melting their own glass, because then you could build the equipment to make a very specific piece, or you could change your glass formula to get a certain quality, and Harvey did all of those things. So even though—and in the end he sort of like said, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ I don’t think he disregarded it, and I don’t think he would have created the work he did if he hadn’t have dug in so deep and done everything. And I think a piece of it was, it was a necessity though as well, because there wasn’t someplace he could go out and buy a furnace. There wasn’t some place that he could buy a lot of the equipment, so he made do or made his own. And I think he also was always very interested in innovation, so he had an electric furnace in his studio long before people thought that was the thing to do.

John Littleton: In the mid-seventies, yeah. Maybe even early seventies.