Tina Yelle talks about why her brother, Richard Yelle, wanted to start a glass facility in New York. Oral history interview with Tina Yelle by Catherine Whalen, conducted via telephone, April 30, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:05.

Tina Yelle: But he was an artist, he wanted to move to New York, and I think the key thing that Richard was aware of and that was very central to my thinking, is that glass is not a, a medium that allows an artist—a young artist—to pursue it in and experiment once they’re out of school because it’s too expensive. You get into the goblet trap. For hot glass in particular, but also cold glass, neon, casting, all sorts of glass media, it’s very expensive to rent a studio space; the utilities, the materials, the upkeep are extremely expensive, and so an artist who tries to pursue their own work on their own gets faced with the economics of needing to make saleable items to keep the furnace lit. And so the Experimental was, philosophically—I think it just had the right attitude at the right time.