Kate Vogel and John Littleton discuss Harvey Littleton as a “convener of people.” 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: 03:30.

Kate Vogel (KV): I also think Harvey was an amazing convener of people. So whether it was in his teaching capacity when he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—I mean, he got NEA grants to do a coldworking workshop and brought in engravers from Corning and from all over. And when it was printing, he would bring together printers—master printers to come and print at his print shop. Or he was—when we worked in Harvey’s studio, he was inviting people in from all over the world. So he had [Andries Dirk] Copier who is a master designer at Leerdam [outside of Amsterdam].

John Littleton (JL): In Holland.

KV: Come in—come and work at a studio or he had Erwin Eisch coming and working in his studio or Dale Chihuly came and—

JL: Raoul Goldoni came, yeah. 

KV: —and having those kinds of—bringing those kinds of people to the community—and when he had them, he didn’t just invite them in and like close the door and it was just himself and those, he would invite the other artists in the community to come and meet these people and spend time with them. Or he opened his studio to people like Billy and Katie Bernstein, or Rob Levin or Kenny Carder, or any of the people who work for him and said, ‘Oh, you need coldworking equipment? Come and use my cold working equipment. Come and do your coldworking here until you can afford your own equipment.’ So he created a place where people made connections with other people, and were able to really learn from it. And, you know, it was just an exchange of knowledge and also of just building relationships. So many of the people who met Erwin Eisch went and taught at Frauenau at Bild-werk. And I think that many of the people who might have met—so the Valkemas [Sybren and Vernonique] who would come and visit your mom and dad, who were really dear friends of theirs, they helped—because of John’s parents were friends with their children or their child, their one child and his wife. And that’s—

JL: [inaudible] Sybren also started a glass program at the Reitveld Academie in Amsterdam. 

KV: So I think that you have that sort of—being a convener, being a connector is part of what made his impact so strong, is that he was always pulling in other people. Like if you came to visit him [laughs], you had to go out to lunch with him, and he would basically hold court in a sense over lunch and any other artists or anybody who walked in, he would always like, ‘Oh, you should come join us for lunch at the restaurant. You should come join us.’ Because he really thrived on that. And I think when he quit blowing glass, part of the reason that he—besides the fact that he loved the idea that printing from glass plates with something that was cutting edge and somebody else wasn’t doing, he also thrived on the activity of having people come to the studio and produce additions with his master printer, cause he could come in and be involved in it. And it gave him that continued community that he could, in a sense, lecture to [laughs], but also just like share what they were excited about with what they were discovering and what they were learning. And his print studio was run very much the way he ran his teaching process in that it was considered to be collaborative. When you came in, the idea was you would bring your ideas, your techniques, and you would collaborate with the master printer and he—the, the studio kept the plates. They would be canceled when the addition was completed. It wasn’t to be printed from again, but he wanted those plates to stay there so that they could be used as a teaching tool so the next artist who came in, so that they could actually look at how the plate was created, and understand what they had learned from the last printer who was there.