Susie Silbert discusses New Glass Now engaging queer glass. Oral history interview with Susie Silbert by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:15.

Susie Silbert: One of the works in New Glass Now, although directly dealt with LGBTQIA issues, it was a video and an object by Hungarian artist Tamash Abel who is very young. And he made a reflective pride flag mirror using traditional Hungarian glass laminating techniques which he then took to the National Monument in Budapest and to the Washington Monument in DC and reflected the pride flag right onto those monuments. I think are really like delicate, subtle, and beautiful statement of presence for the queer communities in both those spaces. And that piece is a very overt—embrace, I think, of the queer community. There are other pieces in the show that are more nuanced in that queerness of their work. But it was only in putting this exhibition together that I realized that—as far as I know, and I don’t know everything—I can’t think of another time in the history of glass and a major exhibition setting where there had been a discussion of queerness or queer glass, and I thought that that was like, crazy, you know, given that in ceramics and textiles and jewelry, queering the material has been part of that process since the sixties, and then again in the 2000s and late nineties. So I am super happy to have provided a space where those conversations can begin to happen, and it’s nice to see that some of that has been embraced in other parts of the glass community. And my hope is that this exhibition and subsequent exhibitions and subsequent displays can make a more inclusive space in glass for queer folk and for all different kinds of—all different kinds of expressions and all different kinds of people. What I wanted with that exhibition and what I think I was successful with, was to create a place where there was room for everyone, not just all different kinds of makers, but also all different kinds of viewers, and I hope that that carries forward too.