Toots Zynsky talks about the contributing factors that enabled the studio glass movement to happen. Oral history interview with Toots Zynsky, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:28.

Toots Zynsky: I mean all those things were all the feeder threads that fed into, you know, this happening. It’s always like, ‘Oh, Harvey Littleton started the studio glass movement.’ And yes, that was like a seminal moment, but without, you know, vast development by aero—you know, aerospace industry, developing refract—new refractories, really really high-tech refractories, reflective shields, all kinds of materials that were suddenly, you know, readily available, that were being mass-produced. And industry was looking, I think, for new ideas too. They were kind of on a downturn and they started welcoming artists to come in. And most glass shops across the country existed by virtue of the fact that barrels and barrels of cullet were being donated by places like Blenko [Blenko Glass Company, Milton, West Virginia]. Because there was—glass shops were so extraordinarily [laughs] expensive to run, that I kind of doubt if schools in the very beginning would have been able to, you know, really [laughs] get on board with it if there hadn’t been a fabulous donation of materials; both refractory bricks to build furnaces and the glass itself. So those were all really important things and the ceramics people. They enabled glass shops to come in because there was already gas in the building, all the permits had already been gotten. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, we can’t [laughs] have all that gas.’ You know, it was already there for ceramics. And if you look at most glass programs across the country, they were right next to the ceramics and they, most of them, a lot of them started in ceramic storerooms that weren’t being used cause there was already maybe a gas line feeding in there. So those were really important things, plus the affluence of the country. I mean, the country was extremely affluent in those days. And all those things converged to enable the whole studio glass movement to happen. And I’ve always liked, you know, people always sort of question, ‘Why is it called studio glass? I mean, it’s like you don’t say studio painting [laughs] or studio clay,’ but I think it was just as a distinction to distinguish to the larger world that whatever was being made wasn’t made in an industrial setting, it wasn’t industrially produced, and it was to distinguish that. I mean, not that they didn’t already know that in Italy, not the way [laughs], but not in America, less so. And to distinguish it from, you know, Louis Comfort Tiffany, which was a—practically an industry at that time that he was, you know, running it and it had grown to be its own small industry. Or you know, Frederick Carder and Steuben [Steuben Glass, Corning, New York], where blowers were blowing the same things over and over and again and different things, but still, they were being produced. And I think it was just to distinguish it as individual artists in the studio.