Michael Glancy talks about giving Paul Hollister a ziggurat he carved from a pyramid made by James Carpenter. Oral history interview with Michael Glancy by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, October 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:58.

Michael Glancy: Paul Hollister was the predominant reviewer, and as a student you wanted to catch the attention of the curators, you know. Bill [William] Warmus was the curator at Corning in the eighties, I’m pretty sure. And being Chihuly’s student at Rhode Island School of Design, these people came to us as well as we going out to them. They would be invited to participate in crits, and give lectures. I’m not sure whether Paul actually did any of that, but I know that Warmus did. And so Jamie Carpenter was working with Dale, and Jamie had made a small pyramid, an elongated pyramid mold—steel mold—that he was testing different colors. He would make these colors with Kuglers and crystal, and then pour them into this little pyramid, and it would give you a piece of glass that was thick at the base and then going up to a thin area and he could gauge the color. So I asked Jamie if I could have one of these pyramids; it was a blue pyramid. And I made it into a ziggurat, you know, I carved it—a spiral pattern. And after some years of knowing Paul, and having him speak favorably in articles about me and my work, and I saw him, you know, I was going to see him, and so I brought this ziggurat. And I said, ‘Paul, I have something for you.’ And so I give him the box, he opens the box up, and he looked, and he really likes it, and he said, ‘Michael, you can’t give me this.’ You know, ‘That would be—that could be viewed as some sort of influence,’ and so he refused to take it. And I said, ‘Well, Paul,’ you know, ‘I’m giving this to you. If you can’t take it, then maybe you should give it to somebody else.’ And so he did keep it, and said—I think he gave it to Corning or to somebody. But it was just burning a hole in his pocket. He did really like it. It was really nice. And, you know, but he was so cute. I’ll never forget; he said, ‘Michael, you can’t, you can’t give me that.’ And I said, ‘Oh, sure I can,’ you know. [laughs] ‘Here. It’s yours.’ Yeah, I just wanted him to have it because it was a ziggurat, it could have been made in Persia. Easily. Yeah, there are other stories, but we all—you know, as students, he was pretty important.