Sydney Cash talks about his early glass slumping experiments. Oral history interview with Sydney Cash, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:16.

Sydney Cash: I ended up being involved with Bloomingdale’s—stores around the city. And I started selling wholesale, I was selling wholesale in and around the country. Soon after, I had a shop in Greenwich Village. I was making mirrors, I was casting these frames and embedding the mirror into it. So it—the mirror was there, I didn’t have to frame it into it or glue it in, it was already into it. And at one point when I went to Europe to look for stuff to buy to replicate, I bought a fancy frame that had a convex mirror. And I fell in love with the mirror, and I fell in love with reflected imagery that wasn’t just straight. So I ended up [clears throat] going to all these—looking for everything I could that was curved. Found a guy in SoHo, an old Italian glazier, who could mirror anything for me. I would go to these glass-bending places and buy their rejects that were sitting around. There were actually glass-bending facilities in Manhattan, in Chelsea at that time. And I started showing that stuff in the—that store that I had. And [clears throat] I got a lot of attention from it. Bloomingdale’s where I’d been selling these things as well as accessories, loved the mirrors. I got—I did a lot of work for them. And at one point I said, ‘Oh I need to start bending the glass myself.’ So I contacted the American Craft Museum [Now Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York] who connected me with Paul—not Paul, Maurice Heaton. And he was an Englishman, fifth-generation, bending glass to make plates or lighting fixtures. And he lived up in Westchester; I went and visited him. He told me how to make a kiln and sent me on my way, and I made a kiln and all of a sudden I’m bending glass in Tribeca.