Susie Silbert compares the Corning ‘59, ‘79 and 2019 shows. Oral history interview with Susie Silbert by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:58.

Susie Silbert: 1959 is interesting because it was almost entirely work of design. It was work by designers from manufacturers in large part. Most of the objects were small and most of the selectors—which included the likes of Edgar Kaufmann Jr. formerly at MOMA, Gio Ponti the Italian designer, and others—were really thinking about household objects, good design for the home, and they chose things that highlighted elements of good design. They chose some enormous number, maybe ninety-two, clear glass goblets. At the same time, the museum recognized—the museum in the guise of assistant director Paul Perot and director Tom Buechner, recognized that there was a lot of interesting sculptural work coming out of the Czech Republic, and they added sixty pieces of Czech glass and that created new opportunities for the medium. That same kind of thread, this idea of artistic work in glass, was picked up in the exhibition New Glass Worldwide Survey in 1979. That show had almost no design, just a little bit from Japan and from a few other places, maybe some Massimo Vignelli baking dishes, but by and large, it was work by artists in, in their own studios, or craftsmen in their own studios. Today, the 2019 show, one of the things that I think is most exciting, at least for me, is that that exhibition brings together both the design impulse of the 1959 show, that craft or the artist author work of ‘79, and then a range of other approaches. So contemporary artists that don’t work with the materials themselves, designers that don’t work with the materials themselves, designers that do work with the materials themselves. So I think that the 2019 show New Glass Now really sums up these earlier approaches in one package.