Susie Silbert discusses New Glass Now | Context, a show with The Rakow Library. Oral history interview with Susie Silbert by Catherine Whalen, February 25, 2020, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:47.

Susie Silbert: The exhibition New Glass Now | Context at the Rakow Research Library [Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York] that I curated with our archivist Colleen McFarland Rademaker is an exhibition that we approached really to talk about what these two shows meant for the field of contemporary glass, but also what they meant to the museum and to its formation. And the answer is that it really meant a lot. Glass 1959 was one of the first exhibitions the museum did of contemporary glass, it was certainly the largest, most comprehensive one, and it marked this turning point in the museum from its founding in 1951 looking at old glass—Renaissance, Venetian, early American—to thinking about itself as an actor in the field, and it allowed itself to stake a claim for the field because it coalesced the idea of contemporary glass as an area of practice. The 1979 show did the same thing, really put the museum at the vanguard in part because in forming that exhibition, the museum invited in the studio glass artist; many of them talk about how it is the first time they ever really felt invited by the museum to participate in the creation. So we were interested in this exhibition and looking at our own history, now that the museum is approaching its 75th anniversary, but also to think about the ways that this particular selection process which the museum has undertaken for the last now 41 years in the publication New Glass Review, which does what those exhibitions did in publication form each year. And this particular way of looking really informs how people see the field and what is—what is shown, and how people think about it, and I find it to be totally fascinating. And looking at the history of these exhibitions you see the way that that way of looking changed. So for 1959 where they were seeing the physical objects, to 1979 where they were seeing slides primarily, and then some of the physical objects, and now to mostly a digital process that becomes physical printouts later. And it changes what you choose and what gets seen. For instance, in the process in the 1979 show or today, looking at the dematerialized image of the things, we would never be able to choose 92 clear goblets, we simply wouldn’t be able to tell that they were different enough to choose. So that is also what that exhibition is about, it is about a way of seeing, this particular way of seeing that I call the ‘new glass method.’ And then how that way of seeing has informed and shaped the landscape for contemporary glass.