Susie Silbert talks about the impetus for the New Glass Now exhibition. Oral history interview with Susie Silbert by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:09.

Susie Silbert: I’d love to say that I had the show—the idea for the show all by myself without any help from my friends, but actually the idea for the show comes from the history of the institution and the history of the field of contemporary glass itself. So The Corning Museum of Glass organized the first major survey of contemporary glass anywhere in the world in 1959. It was called Glass 1959, and the show is the show that gave the field its name. Like, it was the first time that designers and proto-studio glass makers from around the world really thought of themselves as part of something greater. And it is the exhibition that laid the groundwork—I think of it like laying a fertile soil for the explosion of studio glass just a couple of years later. In 1979 that museum reprised the exhibition in New Glass Worldwide Survey, which traveled across the country and traveled globally and brought the idea of artists working with the material to new audiences. And so, knowing that it was the fortieth anniversary and 2019, I wanted to do a show that would similarly catalyze new opportunities in the field of contemporary glass.