Susie Silbert talks about the experience of working for Mark Peiser and Richard Ritter at Penland. Oral history interview with Susie Silbert by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:21.

Susie Silbert: Working with Mark Peiser was—continues to be—one of the most satisfying and fulfilling things of my career, of my life. I can safely say that there’s no one that’s informed my approach to glass more than Mark, and I feel very grateful for having gotten to work with him—work with somebody like Mark, who understands the material at a chemical level and whose approach has never been constrained by any histories or cultures of glass, who was somebody that was making glass seemingly without cultural constraint and without technologic constraint. Or—who used the technologic constraints to create whole worlds. Which I guess is a flowery way of saying I’m really thankful to work with somebody that was right at the beginning of studio glass. I started working with him in 2005 almost by accident. He—I met him finally after going to the Penland School of Crafts [Penland School of Craft, Bakersville, North Carolina] for four years, and I went to a studio visit while he was working on a series called the Cold Stream Cast Baskets and I’d never seen anybody form glass like that before. So I asked a lot of questions and later he said in his characteristic way, ‘I think I have some work. I’m sure you wouldn’t like to do it at all, it’s paperwork.’ [laughs] And I said, ‘Well, you know, I might be interested.’ I’d also been talking with another first generation artist, Richard Ritter, for a long time about going to work with him, so I said, ‘Why don’t you two get together and make me an offer of full time work?’ And they did. And I moved down 11 days later, to Penland from Chicago, and started working mostly for Richard and half a day for Mark, and within a year I only worked for Mark. My first job working for him was to find a decommissioned NASA nose cone [laughs] that he wanted to use as a mold. I didn’t find that, but I appreciated the—kind of expansiveness of the approach and the way that he invests in the people that he, that work for him, and the way that he creates—even unintentionally creates opportunity. So, that’s a little bit about how I work with Mark.