Mary Shaffer talks about her connection with glass artists in the Czech Republic. Oral history interview with Mary Shaffer by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 21, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:44.

Mary Shaffer: I got a grant from Wellesley [in 1979] because I was teaching painting at Wellesley, and they gave me a grant and then I went to the Czech Republic and wrote an article about it for—do you know the name Rose Slivka? Yeah, well, she started a magazine—International Craft, I think it was called, or something very much like that. She was an editor for Craft Mag—for Craft Horizons, and then she went on to start her own magazine, and it was called International something or other. The fir—her first publication, I wrote an article for it about traveling to the Czech Republic and meeting all these different artists and stuff. And then I gave a lecture at The Corning Museum of Glass [Corning, New York] on the Czech artists. And I think that was a really important thing too. There were the Venetians teaching glassblowing techniques, and then the Czech artists, because they were subjugated by the Russians. Their work became abstract because through abstract art you can give ideas. You can share concepts in a different way than you can with a vessel. A vessel is a vessel. It’s either beautiful, or perfect or whatever, but abstract art has a way of being able to carry ideas and the Czech artists at that time, like Marian Karel and Dana Zámečníková, if that’s how you say her name, and [Václav] Cigler. They were making conceptual work and it was pretty fantastic, and so I think that was also a big influence.