Richard Yelle talks about NYEGW’s first visiting glass artist, Patsy Norvell, and first student, Bill Gudenrath. Oral history interview with Richard Yelle by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 17, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:31.

Richard Yelle: So I stayed in touch with Rose, and Rose became the first board member of the New York Experimental Glass Workshop. And then Dan Dailey was the second board member. So we ran a joint operation for a couple of years. We had a endless stream of clay visiting artists. My favorite, of course, was Jun Kaneko, who I had known at RISD. He lived in Great Jones Street for a year, making his work. And, there, there were many others, including Hannah Wilke. But I remember—this, this is important. I remember our first glass visiting artist and her name was Patsy Norvell, and she made gazebos. And the first project that we did was she sandblasted some glass panes for a gazebo to exhibit at a gallery called A.I.R. Gallery [New York, New York], which is kind of a famous gallery. It was the first woman’s cooperative gallery in New York City. So anyways, from Patsy Norvell on, we’ve been bringing in visiting artists of one type or another [laughs] for 40 years now. And I, I just still remember that. So we, we had a lot of excitement at Great Jones Street because we started an education program, and one of our first students was a musician named Bill Gudenrath. And he was a clavichord player from Julliard [The Julliard School, New York, New York]. And, of course, he’s a well-known glass person now and runs the Corning [The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York] studio. But the education program took off really quickly and people just started showing up. And it was a little tricky cause we were having trouble paying our gas bill, so we had to keep the doors locked. And so we were letting in students and artists and having openings, but always watching out for Con Edison [laughs]. One, once in a while they would get in though and shut off our gas. But we always got it back on.