Tina Yelle, Geoff Isles, James Harmon, Jane Bruce and Fred Kahl discuss NYEGW’s transition from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Oral history interview with Tina Yelle by Catherine Whalen, conducted via telephone, April 30, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Geoff Isles by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, February 6, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Jim Harmon by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, February 8, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Jane Bruce by Barb Elam and Mike Satalof, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Fred Kahl by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, January 25, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 08:48.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Tina Yelle talks about NYEGW’s lease being up on their Mulberry Street location. Clip length: 00:22.

Tina Yelle: I, I think that—for us, it was—at least for me, in my perspective, it was a gradual process. And I don’t think that we actually started out with a vision of, ‘Oh, we want to be a world-class organization.’ It was more like, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do? Our lease is up, where are we going to go?’

Time stamp: 00:25
Clip 2: Tina Yelle talks about fundraising and NYEGW’s transition from Mulberry Street to Brooklyn. Clip length: 01:37.

Tina Yelle: That’s more how I remember it, and things happened that were a part of the group like the Christie’s Auction [Christie’s Auction & Private Sales, New York, New York.]. We went from that little Xerox glass glug letter on Xerox paper that I sent out my first fundraising effort, to Cynthia Manocherian joined our board of directors, and I forget who recruited her, but she’s a glass collector. And somebody on a different—more of a New York society level, and just the—again, a fantastic person who has been with the workshop as a board member for years and years, and she and Doug Heller and other people were instrumental in putting together a benefit auction for us at Christie’s. And we raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and it was, you know, one of those stunning events that was just a huge success. So that was a big transition from the little things that we had done on Mulberry Street. And so, that transition from Mulberry Street to Brooklyn and sort of a bigger stage—to me, it was happening gradually over all of those years.

Time stamp: 01:41
Clip 3: Geoff Isles discusses New York Experimental Glass Workshop’s move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Clip length: 01:48.

Geoff Isles: And there was a lot of financial uncertainty back then. We had a lot of loans out, we still owed money to a lot of vendors, and it was a very risky point. You know, we brought over enough people for a 3,000 square-foot studio, not a 17,000 square-foot studio, so we had to over time figure out how to fill in the gaps and bring more people in and start new programs and change a lot of things, and in many ways make the studio more professional. I remember the old studio, every single artist had a key for that studio and you could go and work there 24 hours a day, and there was usually people in there late at night and early in the mornings. And in this place, for obvious reasons we couldn’t do that, and so right off the bat we had to limit the time and shut down at 9 o’clock at night and open at 8 o’clock in the morning the next day. And we had to get more professional with our staff in the studio. Back in the old studio, all the different artists sort of did this volunteer barter system in order to keep the place going, and there was a studio manager but there was no technicians or anything like that, so people would volunteer to stay late in the day to throw the raw glass into the furnace and charge the furnace at night, or if there was a piece of equipment that needed to be rebuilt or stuff, people volunteered. And it was kind of chaotic over there, but that all had to change and the place had to become more professional. And we were kind of amateurish at it at first, but over time things got better.

Time stamp: 03:33
Clip 4: Jim Harmon speaks about NYEGW’s transition from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Clip length: 01:31.

Jim Harmon: Yeah, this was—we’d just gone through some growing pains, and when we had to move, it was a three-year project. I was actually the head of the artists’ planning committee for the whole move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. And I met with the team of—I don’t know, about six to eight people depending on who needed to be there, almost every week for a couple of years before we even moved in there. Just figuring out how much space we needed, what space was gonna be allocated for flow, traffic flow, and then I worked with Jeff Beers, the architect, quite a bit on designing spaces. And it was scary. Everybody was scared [laughs] cause it was so much bigger than what we had had. And we knew we were going to go into debt. Carl Pforzheimer was the treasurer I think at the time, but he figured it all out for us and we got loans and everything. But I remember there was a little bit of tension because we needed to start charging for regulars or people who were in the studio, using the studio a lot—even if they weren’t actually blowing glass or using an annealer. If they had locker space they had to have a membership and stuff like that, and it was just growing pains.

Time stamp: 05:06
Clip 5: Jane Bruce discusses changes at NYEGW when it transitioned to Brooklyn. Clip length: 01:03

Jane Bruce: To run a 18,000 square foot facility is a lot different from running a 5,000 square feet facility. So it became more—as staff, we had to be more—in a way, more serious, I guess—in a funny sort of way. There was still the sense of community, and also, there was a slight—through the early ‘90s there started to be a slight, in a way, a slight generation shift, because I left in ‘94, Chris Cosma had gone, Tina not long after that. Tina Aufiero not long after that went out to the West Coast. So there also started to be people leaving that had been very much part of Mulberry Street. Jim Harmon had moved to Philadelphia. So it was also a shift in the community of artists using it. And I didn’t come back for—you know, I didn’t really come back for ten years. So that’s also what different was—the personalities started changing. People started changing.

Time stamp: 06:12
Clip 6: Fred Kahl discusses adjusting to NYEGW’s Brooklyn building. Clip length: 02:35.

Fred Kahl: And then they put this resin coating stuff on the floor—and it was a major deal I remember Lino [Tagliapietra] just being so like hating on it because any time you spilled a—you cut a piece of glass and fell on the floor there was like this toxic fumes—coming off this—it was like a resin-base. They had to somehow seal the concrete so it wouldn’t leak. That was like a contractual thing, and it just caused such terrible problems with stuff cause it just was, just this nasty toxic fumes any time glass was spilled on the floor. And it was just like a chronic problem with this place, and that was like one of the things that they actually dealt with, I guess, finally with the new renovation that happened up there. But that was like a huge plague, and then I remember all of the outlets in this place were, it was like an aesthetic thing, the architect wanted them sideways—but really like the way plugs are designed they want to go the traditional vertical way so that you know the plug doesn’t fall out of the wall. It was like this aesthetic decision they had done—drove me crazy cause you plug in the extension cord and get across the room and it would fall out. So there was a—you know they had all these grandiose visions of a heat reclamation system, and then in theory they’d be able to run air conditioning or heating with all the waste heat from the furnaces and they went to great lengths to build this elaborate duct system and then it never really built the heat reclamation system so, that was like, sort of like the phase two thing that never got gotten to. So yeah, there was just a lot of weird stuff like that—but in general it was such an improvement over Mulberry Street, and then it was all new facilities, but then it was also sorely lacking in terms of storage and stuff, so this was definitely the sort of breaking in period, and—when it first happened.