Michael Glancy talks about Dale Chihuly and the crossover between RISD and Pilchuck. Oral history interview with Michael Glancy by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, October 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:49.

Michael Glancy: It kind of goes back to Chihuly and the Rhode Island School of Design and the remarkable number of people that were involved in that program and then went out into, literally, the world, with Toots Zynsky going to Amsterdam, with Bruce Chao being head of Ohio State’s program, and then that was replaced with Richard Harned. And there were West Coast kind of realities, but Pilchuck was created by Dale Chihuly while he was in his tenure at Rhode Island School of Design, and populated in great part by his friends, who were asked to be faculty, and his students, who were then given the opportunity to be teaching assistants. Like, 1977, you lived at Pilchuck in tents. It’s the Pacific Northwest, incredibly beautiful, but trees don’t grow unless it rains, and it rains all the time, and people there don’t talk about it because it’s so important. If it doesn’t rain, the trees don’t grow, and here Pilchuck is in the—is 50 square acres in the middle of a five-square-mile experimental tree farm, so, and so in ’77 it was wet and damp—and you’re in a platform tent, and you have to walk up the hill, and you had to lie on your sleeping bag for 30 minutes just to get enough body heat in it so you could separate it and get into it, this clammy sock, you know.