Susie Silbert talks about Habatat and Heller Galleries. Oral history interview with Susie Silbert by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:51.

Susie Silbert: It’s pretty interesting to have a market of contemporary glass that is in many ways dominated by two major galleries that have been there since the beginning, Heller and Habatat. And Habatat is interesting for a lot of different reasons, but even if you think about these two different—two different galleries, and the constraints put upon them. One, Heller Gallery in New York City with incredibly high rents and constrained space that that entails, and existing in a highly refined and variegated field of cultural production. Versus Habatat Gallery, which was founded in Michigan in—outside of Detroit, and maintains a very large footprint, and Habatat and over the years had spaces in Chicago, spaces in Massachusetts, and in Florida. It’s really sort of different, the kinds of approaches that enables, and the kinds of work that it can have. And I think Ferd—one of the things that Ferd and Habatat Gallery have done over the years is make glass very accessible to people, both in the way that they present the—they present glass, and the way that they talk about glass, and also in their forming, forming of glass as a social, as a really—as a social practice. So they have—they sponsor all kinds of different events. The Habatat Invitational, International Invitational, every year, now in its many—forty something year, and—or fiftieth, and they do a lot of international travel to introduce collectors to different regional markets. And I think that that packages glass in a way that makes it very approachable for very many people.