Richard Yelle discusses how he and Joe Upham put on public glass demonstrations in New York City. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:37.

Richard Yelle: When I acclimated to New York City, I realized that there was no hot glass in all of New York City. The [laughs] largest city in the United States had no hot glass. I did find stained glass and architectural glass, and many of the artists that I met all worked for a company called Rambusch Studios [Rambusch Stained Glass Studio, New York, New York], and they were located on 13th street in Manhattan. And one of those artists was Erik Erickson. And I had taken a class at Parsons [Parsons School of Design, New York, New York] with him to learn how to make stained glass. And we got to talking about the idea of an artist organization for artists to work in glass of any media. So I called up my friend in Boston, Joe Upham—he and I had spent a couple of years building a glass studio at MassArt [Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts] with Dan Dailey. And Joe was a technical wiz, and he actually had a furnace that was so light that it could be put into a U-Haul trailer and driven around, and it ran on propane tanks. So I invited him to come down to New York City with his furnace. And the first thing that we did was a live demonstration for the New York State Craftsmen’s Organization at the Coliseum in Columbus Circle in New York City. The Coliseum is no longer there, it was replaced with the Javits Center, but we actually blew glass live in the Coliseum. It was a lot of fun. People loved it. The next project we did was the Channel 13 Arts and Antique auction. And we blew glass live on an old 20th Century Fox movie stage on the West side of Manhattan. And we met Mayor [John] Lindsay on the stage. That was fun. We also ran into a little trouble with the fire inspector who didn’t like the size of the propane tanks we were using, so Joe hooked up a series of 20 pound tanks and put an old movie set light on them so that they wouldn’t freeze. But we are able to finish our glassblowing, and we made some objects right there on stage.