Yaffa Sikorsky-Todd discusses Paul Stankard suggesting she and Jeff Todd title their new series of works. Oral history interview with Yaffa Sikorsky-Todd by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, October 5, 2016, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:23.

Yaffa Sikorsky-Todd (YST): I wanted to add something on our glass—a part that Paul [Stankard] had in our glass—a series of our work. We were doing these paperweight vase forms. They were lampworked or torch worked imagery. And I didn’t know Paul at that time, but when he taught the class, I insisted he come to the studio and he had years before bought a piece of mine and given it to the museum in New Jersey, the Wheaton Museum [Museum of American Glass, Wheaton Village, now WheatonArts, Millville, New Jersey]. And when they told me that somebody had bought it I said, ‘Who are they?’ and they said, ‘Paul Stankard,’ and I didn’t know who he was then—but we went to Atlantic City one year and I went to visit him. So when he got to our studio, we had just started doing these solid pieces that were upright paperweights and they were our style. And he came over and he said he liked them, he said, ‘I love your botanicals.’ And I said to him, ‘They’re not botanicals.’

Barb Elam (BE): [laughs]

YST: ‘That’s what you do.’

BE: Right.

YT: ‘They’re not our botanicals.’

BE: Right.

YST: ‘Well then what are you going to call ‘em?’ So that’s when he pushed us, and he pushed me to come up with a name. So we called that whole series the Memory series.

BE: [laughs.]

YST: And so one side would say “memories,” and they were all memories of experiences, viewings, you know, sceneries from childhood, whatever. But that was his doing.