Dale and Doug Anderson interview, Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Excerpts from the July 2005 interview by Tina Oldknow for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art:

"MRS. ANDERSON: No, as a matter of fact, talking about first collections, I think the first thing I ever started collecting were owls, which I haven't thought about in a million years, and they were ceramic. And people would just bring them to me from all over the place.

MS. OLDKNOW: And how old were you when you started that?

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, I was, I guess-well, an adult child. [They laugh.] And they were kind of interesting. And all of sudden it became about amassing something, and then having them look different. It was like really seeing them and saying, God, these are very interesting, and then thinking, what am I going to do with these? It was fun, I liked them. But then I realized that I liked things in series. Then I gave them away to friends who also collected owls, so all the owls went away. I remember looking at prints and paintings-that never did it for me.

I think the first thing I ever really collected, and I didn't realize I was doing it, was with Doug Heller, and Doug Heller was on Madison Avenue across the street from the beauty parlor I went to, which was Vidal Sassoon. And I would walk by this pretty little gallery and I'd kind of stick my head in, and Doug and I-I mean, I met Doug Heller before I met Doug Anderson, all right? [They laugh.] And there would be these little tchotchkes, basically. There were little perfume bottles, there were paperweights, there was little things, and I don't know, I'd buy a couple. I mean, they were very pretty and I really liked Doug Heller. I mean, he was really great. And so one day I realized, gee, I have a whole bunch of these things.

MS. OLDKNOW: Do you remember what some of those things were?

MRS. ANDERSON: I think one of the first things I bought was-what was it? No. Who was the one who did the moon bowls?

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, John Lewis.

MRS. ANDERSON: John Lewis. I bought a Moon bowl and a Moon paperweight.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, uh-huh. [Affirmative.]

MRS. ANDERSON: And one of them was in the '70s and the other one, I think, also was in the '70s. And it was like-that was like the most contemporary of anything that was there. The other stuff really looked like, sort of, knock-offs of other things. And I don't know, I'd go in every week-and also, by the way, Vidal Sassoon was down the block from where my mother lived, so that was, like, my weekly trek. So every week I would go in and they'd say, look at this, and I'd say, oh, look at that. And so it just became a collection of things.

MS. OLDKNOW: But something must have attracted you to the glass more than to something else.

MRS. ANDERSON: It was Doug Heller. [They laugh.]

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, it was Doug. So if he had been selling car parts, do you think you would have been buying those? [They laugh.]

MRS. ANDERSON: Maybe. [They laugh.] He became a friend, and it was fun. We'd sit down, we'd schmooze, we'd look, we'd talk, and then I would go-and then there was a store up here called The Glass Store [New York, NY], run by a guy-I think his name was Bob Fleischer.

MS. OLDKNOW: And was this in the mid-'70s that you were doing this, or the late '70s?

MRS. ANDERSON: Mid- to late '70s.

MS. OLDKNOW: Mid- to late, so '76, '77?

MRS. ANDERSON: '75, '76.

MS. OLDKNOW: Okay.

MRS. ANDERSON: And I remember walking in there and there were these two great guys, and they had this really decorative stuff, but yet there was all kinds of beautiful stuff, and I think that that was the first time I had ever seen anything, or even heard the name [Dale] Chihuly. And then-I guess I must have seen it in a magazine. Doug didn't have it and I don't know why they would know about it. They'd say, you know what? It's bought in a gallery named Charlie Cowles. And I said, a gallery? I mean, like I wasn't even thinking about galleries. These are gift shops.

MS. OLDKNOW: Right.

MRS. ANDERSON: And I went in to Charlie Cowles and I bought my first Chihuly, which was a beautiful green with silver, and three little pieces in it.

MS. OLDKNOW: A Seaform, or maybe it was prior to the Seaform, a basket?

MRS. ANDERSON: I don't know; it's kind of a combination of the two.

MS. OLDKNOW: From '78, '79?

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah. Maybe a little earlier.

MS. OLDKNOW: That was the baskets [Basket Set].

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah, I mean they were-

MS. OLDKNOW: Moving toward Seaform.

MRS. ANDERSON: They were thicker.

MS. OLDKNOW: Yeah, those are the baskets.

MRS. ANDERSON: Right. And they were beautiful. I bought that and I thought, gee, I like that. And then I remember seeing a poster and there was a-

MS. OLDKNOW: I think a lot of people discovered Chihuly through that poster.

MRS. ANDERSON: Okay, but in that poster was a series of baskets-

MS. OLDKNOW: Yes, the Navajo Cylinders.

MRS. ANDERSON: Right. And then there was some individual pieces, but it was all done as an assemblage, and I remember saying to Doug Heller, God, Dougie, look at that; I want that piece. He said, well I don't think you can get that piece, because it's in this whole series of things. I said, you never know. If you ever see it, buy it for me. About two years later he called me, guess what? And I have it.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, do you still have it?

MRS. ANDERSON: Oh, yes. I love-

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, that's wonderful.

MRS. ANDERSON: It's gorgeous. It's lavender inside and it's-oh, and it's thin and it's uneven and it flops around, but it is so gorgeous. So that was the beginning, I guess, of real-

MS. OLDKNOW: And this is prior to your meeting Doug?

MRS. ANDERSON: No, I had met Doug at this point. But now Doug decided one day, God bless him-he went to this glass gallery, and he came home with this box and had this grin on his face.

MS. OLDKNOW: Okay, this is after you'd been going out for some time. Were you married?

MRS. ANDERSON: We married a year after. So I think we were probably married; maybe we weren't. I don't know, but we were married in '77.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, you were married in '77. Okay.

MRS. ANDERSON: And so he brought this box in and he said to me, this is going to change your life. I said, it is? And I opened it up, and it was a Dick Marquis teapot. And I said, you just changed my life. [They laugh.] That was it.

MS. OLDKNOW: One of the Patchworks?

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah, one of the Patchworks. And it was-I'd never seen anything like that. So all of a sudden there was something really going on there, you know. And Doug and I have very different jobs that we do. I'm the buyer of everything that we see here, anything-whether it's photography, ceramic, or with fiber; it's really what I see. And I was an American Indian art collector at this point, and had a fairly large Northwest Coast American Indian collection.

MS. OLDKNOW: Now, was this contemporary or older work?

MRS. ANDERSON: No, it was from, I'd say, the '40s and '50s on.

MS. OLDKNOW: Okay.

MRS. ANDERSON: I didn't-I'd originally had-when I took up collecting, I guess I was-I had started a Southwestern pottery collection many, many years ago, and I forgot. [They laugh.] And I really liked it, until all of sudden it became popular and everybody needed to know the name and the tribe and who sat next to who and whose thumbprint was in everything. And I really didn't like that. I didn't like the idea that the artists were now, because of their name, influencing the price, and the collecting, and how you work, because it was very pure. It was one of these very idealistic things, and these were just beautiful objects. And they were very traditional, because I like my traditional traditional.

MS. OLDKNOW: What does that mean?

MRS. ANDERSON: I don't like when all of a sudden they become abstract and they became very contemporary. I really like my primitive primitive-and I love primitive art. So we gave away 99 percent-as a matter of fact, we had-Doug Heller-Doug and I and Annie, who he was married to at one point-I had Doug Heller convinced that we had to have an American Indian show, so we went to Arizona-[laughs]-we definitely went to New Mexico, and I think-and Doug and I schlepped up and down mesas; we did all kinds of stuff. We found, I don't know, a frog lady. I mean, we went to places in a million years you'd never go. And we bought all this stuff and then he had a sale, and of course, nothing sold. [Laughs.] But we had such a good time doing it. I mean, it was really great.

But anyway, so that was the end of the Southwest stuff. We got rid of it.

MS. OLDKNOW: Did you sell it-or give it away?

MRS. ANDERSON: I think we gave it away. We gave it to friends, we gave it to whoever. Some of it maybe went-I don't even remember what happened, because Doug's job is the giving away.

MS. OLDKNOW: I see. So I'll ask Doug.

MRS. ANDERSON: Ask Doug, right.

And so then I missed my primitive art, and there is a woman who is a dealer in Portland, Oregon, whose name is Rose Quintana, and she sent me a mask. My sister had been there and had said, I bet you my sister would like something like this, and so she sent it to me. And I loved it. I mean, it was it was just this Eskimo, Northwest Coast, fabulous, ugly, powerful-

MS. OLDKNOW: Was it one of the animal masks, or was it one of those Eskimo masks that have a scary face on one side and nice face on the other? It was maybe an Eskimo mask?

MRS. ANDERSON: It was a face. It had some weird stuff going on it. And I just loved it. It just appealed to me. It had the oldness to it; it had, you know, somebody's spirit in it. It just-it was fabulous. So that began that collection of Northwest Coast totem poles and masks and rattles basically-some kachinas, but different ones, some ivory, some soapstone, some bone.

MS. OLDKNOW: So when do you think that you began that collection?

MRS. ANDERSON: That had to be in the '80s.

MS. OLDKNOW: In the early '80s?

MRS. ANDERSON: Probably in the early '80s."

[...]

"MS. OLDKNOW: Do you think that your interest in craft is primarily the energy of the hand that's traveling through the object, or is it more the theoretical ideas that interest you? Because-and I'll ask you this again later because you have gone on a journey in your collecting from direct, expressive, tribal art and craft, you know, the handmade things, to much more conceptual work that is somewhat removed; it's very different. I mean, you're moving in a very different way. It would be interesting to hear you articulate a little bit about that journey, just talk about that a little bit.

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, Doug and I, when we started collecting glass, which we didn't really realize that we were collecting glass until there were some pieces that were there and somebody said, oh, you have a collection. We said, oh, we do? [They laugh.] And I think it was probably-we were at a dinner with Doug Heller and Dale Chihuly for the American Craft Museum [New York, NY; now the Museum of Arts and Design], and the four of us were sitting at a table, which you can imagine what that was like. It was Doug, Dale, Dale, Doug, you know. And George and Dorothy were there-Saxe. And George Saxe said, you really have to join the Collectors' Circle of the American Craft Museum. And we said to him, what is it? He said, it doesn't matter, you have to join it; it will be the most fabulous thing that you do in your life.

MS. OLDKNOW: Had you already known the Saxes?

MRS. ANDERSON: We had met the Saxes a couple of times, but only to have dinner with them and other people-we collected sort of side by side. The way I've always liked to collect is-it's very easy to buy a roomful of stuff, because in those days it really wasn't very expensive, but it was always the fun of agonizing. I liked the selection of one piece. I mean, that was the hardest thing to do, and it was the most significant. And they would buy a lot of pieces.

So there were times that-and there were other collectors who bought a lot of pieces, too, so there were times that if I wanted a particular artist or something, as I said, Doug Heller would call me up, and that's what he did with Ann Wolff. And he said to me, better come down immediately, because Jerry Frankel is here and he's going to buy the entire show. And I said, oh, dear. So I got in a cab and I ran myself down to Heller, and Jerry Frankel was standing there, and he said to me, oh, I bought-do you want to see everything I bought? I said, no. He said, what do you want to do? I said, I want to look around.

So I looked around and I looked around, and of course, there was kind of one piece I really loved. And he said to me, what do you think you want? And I said, I want that goddess. And he said to me, well, I bought it. I said, okay. He said, well, why don't you buy something else? I said, because I don't want anything else. He said, well, she'll make you something else. I said, I'm sure she will, but that's the piece I wanted and you have it, and congratulations, you picked a great piece; obviously I agree with you.

And I was about to leave and he said to me, well, I also bought this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one, and so if you want that, you can have that. I said, you know, that's really nice. Do you really mean that? And he said, yes. I said, fine, and I took it. And then he left, and then Ann-Ann had been there and she was watching this, and she said to me, oh, I'm so happy you got that piece; it was definitely meant for you. Now, it's going to travel for three years and you're not going to see it. [They laugh.] But that was the kind of stuff.

And so the difference between Doug and I basically is that I didn't have any need to ever meet the artist. It wasn't what it was about for me. It was really about the object.

MS. OLDKNOW: Is it still like that for you?

MRS. ANDERSON: No, because Doug changed that, because Doug really-it was important to him meeting the artist and about how the objects are made. I have not a technical bone in my body. It has never meant-it still doesn't-how something is made. But it's now meeting the artist is almost as important as the piece-not quite, because I still like that separation of what I do with it, and what it does with me. It has a different dialogue. And sometimes when an artist tells you about what they did and what it means-

MS. OLDKNOW: It means nothing to you.

MRS. ANDERSON: No.

MS. OLDKNOW: Okay.

I'm going to switch and go to some of the questions that were given to me, because I think that they're interesting.

How has the market for glass, or other crafts, changed while you've been collecting? What is the biggest surprise, and what is what you expected? For example-go ahead.

MRS. ANDERSON: No, no.

MS. OLDKNOW: Do you think that the market grew larger than you thought it would? Has your overall view of craft as a field changed since you began collecting in the early '80s or late '70s?

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, I have to say I can tell you more about it in glass, although I'm sure it's done it in other areas, too, is that obviously if there is a movement, and this was a movement, there will be-as it is, I guess, in every art movement-a group of artists that raises to the top, and those artists; it may take a few years for everybody to figure out who they are, but they do. And an artist has to continue to grow; the work has to get better, it has to become more accepted, and then obviously the price goes up. And so, I think what happened is that group happened quickly. So it is Tom [Thomas] Patti, and it is Bill [William] Morris, and it is [Dale] Chihuly, and it is-you know, there are a whole group of them. And those were the artists that really became-I don't want to say "masters," because that's a little bit much to say, but those became the important artists in this group.

And then there were an entire group beneath them that were working to find their own voices, and not be so influenced by the greater ones, and I think it's become a real art movement. But I think that as they got more sophisticated, as people began to see it more as contemporary art, people began to respect it more, and all of a sudden you'll go into a home and you'll see a piece of maybe one or two or three of these artists, but in places you'd never expect to see it. That was the beginning, for me.

MS. OLDKNOW: Were you surprised by that, or did you think that this was a natural development? You said something interesting earlier; you said: "Someone told me to go to Charlie Cowles's gallery, and you thought, gallery? I hadn't even been thinking about a gallery; I was thinking about a gift shop."

MRS. ANDERSON: Right.

MS. OLDKNOW: And so I guess what you're saying now is that you began to find things in places you didn't expect them. Is this part of the transition of the things from gift shop to gallery? Would you say that?

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah, and there still is to some degree. There was very much East Coast art and West Coast art, and when we started-and, again, George Saxe was the one who started us on that. He said, you must go out to Pilchuck [Glass School, Stanwood, WA]. We didn't know what Pilchuck was. And so we made a date with Alice Rooney [director of Pilchuck]-

MS. OLDKNOW: Okay, so that was the mid-'80s or late '80s?

MRS. ANDERSON: Mid-'80s. We went out there and she was sitting in her cabin, and Narcissus Quagliata was out there, and I think Flora [Mace] and Joey [Kirkpatrick] were out there. I mean, they were all there. And we had begun to look at this stuff seriously, and then all of a sudden it was like, oh my God, the East Coast art is cold and it's glassy and it's crystal and it's very precise, and then you go out there and it's all this color and softness and shape and, sort of, sensuousness, and we realized, or at least I realized, I said, ooh, this is for me. I mean, I really like that; I really responded to that.

When I began collecting glass more seriously, I said to Doug Heller, all right, Doug, show me everything that I want to see, let's look at all the stuff, and he did. And then after I had been in Seattle for a while, my whole eye, my whole reference changed totally. So whereas I would have been a major Michael Glancy collector here, which I loved, I got a lot funkier out there. And that appealed much more to who I am.

MS. OLDKNOW: Now, I know you have a very close relationship with Doug Heller, obviously. Have you worked with other dealers closely?

MRS. ANDERSON: Oh, yeah. I think there are some great dealers, fabulous dealers.

MS. OLDKNOW: And can you name some of the people that you think have made a difference in the field?

MRS. ANDERSON: Oh, I think Imago [Imago Galleries, Palm Desert, CA]-I think Imago is an incredible-that's about good taste and good relationships. We had been at Bill's studio, the Barn, a couple of years ago and-

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, Bill Morris's studio.

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah, Bill Morris.

And there was work on five different tables. And apparently what people do is they select for their shows, and there was one table that was really extraordinary, and I said, whose is that, and they said, Imago. And I think that they're incredibly good dealers, because they see, at least glass, in the context of painting, photography, sculpture, drawing. And so it makes the connection, because I believe that that's the way it should be, too.

So I think they're great. I think Bill Traver is an incredibly good dealer [William Traver Gallery, Seattle, WA]. I think his vision-I mean, he started with Gregory Grenon. I think Gregory Grenon is to die for. He just has it-there's a style about him that he's got. I think Lani McGregor is a terrific dealer [Bullseye Connection Gallery, Portland, OR]. I think she nurtures her artists. I think she has great vision. She allows them to create things. She's great.

MS. OLDKNOW: So Imago, Traver, Heller, Lani, those are the people that you feel are guiding the field. What do you feel about people like Ferd [Ferdinand] Hampson, for example [Habatat Galleries, Royal Oak, MI]?

MRS. ANDERSON: I think that Ferd and Linda [Linda Boone, Habatat Galleries, Boca Raton, FL] were incredibly important in the beginning of this, and I think that Linda has really been a very good dealer. I really do think she has. I have a problem with what Ferd does now; I have a problem with the fact that the trips that he takes people on, he takes them on shopping orgies; there is no differentiation between what's really great and what's really crap. And it's just about buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, and I have a problem with that, because I think if you do that and you bring a group of collectors, you're supposed to be educating them and you're supposed to be showing them-it's not only about buy, buy, buy, or if it's going to be, then buy, buy, buy from the really good ones. And I don't like that; I have a problem with that.

MS. OLDKNOW: Do you find that when you go on collector trips and there is buying, that you educate others? Do people come to you and ask you questions, or do you offer advice to collectors? Do you find that a lot of people approach you?

MRS. ANDERSON: Yes. Always-but I'm very honest and if somebody says to me, what do you think, and if I don't know them well, I'll say, you don't really want to ask me because if you really want to hear what I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you, but if you only want to hear yes or good things, don't ask me.

So we were just at palmbeach3 [West Palm Beach, FL] in Florida, and a couple came over to me, and they were glass collectors; they wanted to look at a piece of glass. And I have to tell you, it was a Steve Weinberg golf ball-type thing. Now, I think Steve Weinberg, particularly his old work, is extraordinary. But I thought this golf ball thing was just ridiculous. And it was very expensive. And this is a collector who really would like to upgrade. And I said to her, if you do this, I'll break your arm. I just won't let you buy this thing. You can't buy it.

So the next day she came up and she said, we've never bought a piece of ceramic, but I see something that I think is great; would you come and look at it? So I said, sure. And it was a Viola Frey, and it was the most fabulous-it was a family-Donna Schneier was selling it.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, I saw that. It was fabulous.

MRS. ANDERSON: Oh, was it-they bought it. So, yeah, I get a lot of questions, from a lot of people, about a lot of things.

MS. OLDKNOW: Donna Schneier sells a lot of secondary market items, and I like her for that.

MRS. ANDERSON: Me too.

MS. OLDKNOW: What do you think about that, the secondary market? Do you think it's popular among collectors?

MRS. ANDERSON: I think it's getting to be popular amongst collectors, but I would really like Sotheby's and Christie's to really be able to do it again, because it needs that type of form, and the problem is that they don't know how to handle the material. And Sotheby's had a lock on it and it just didn't work. They didn't do it right. But I think the secondary market is imperative.

MS. OLDKNOW: Yeah, I do, too.

There's a question on this list that's interesting and I'm not quite sure what it means, but maybe you do. Is there a community that has been important to your development as a collector?

MRS. ANDERSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. Let me go back to the beginning a little bit. When most of us started collecting about 25 years ago, 20 years ago, whenever it was, the American Craft Museum was the place. And as George Saxe said, you join the Collectors' Circle. Well, everybody joined the Collectors' Circle and everybody traveled all over the country and you would go to galleries, you would go to homes, you would go visit the artists. And what it did is it not only educated everybody, it formed relationships that we still have to this day, tremendous relationships all over the country.

And so, in those days you would see everything. Everybody sort of hung out together and you'd look at everything, and then people would go off and buy-they'd form their collections, but it was based on what they saw, a lot of it, when we would all travel together.

And then for years people would still travel together; but they would really specifically join the glass group, or they would join the wood group, or they would join the fiber group, or the clay group, or whatever it was. And it changed the way the American Craft Museum Collectors' Circle worked, because we'd already seen it all, and now we were off doing our own thing. Everybody was off collecting in their own areas, although the relationships that we made together were all there.

And so we would, of course, all be together and we would-you know, we've now all graduated to another level of collecting, and so, somebody would say, well, the museum-of-whatever is coming into town; could they come and see your collection of glass? Or we were going on a trip someplace with another group and we would say that-let's say Linda Schlenger-Linda, who is a ceramic collector, Linda, can I bring the group to come and see your ceramics? And that's how that began happening.

And then maybe eight to 10 years ago, I don't even remember, the Collectors' Circle was really falling apart, and so they asked if I would bring it together again, and I did, and I called all the old friends and they all joined again, and we all started traveling again, but we'd all grown up. So now we were looking at new artists. But then again, I became much more of a voyeur, and I wanted to see more contemporary collections, I wanted to see more homes, and I wanted to see photography. And so we moved it another notch.

MS. OLDKNOW: Did you find that the other collectors in your group, your original group, also wanted to do that?

MRS. ANDERSON: Yes.

MS. OLDKNOW: So do you feel that, through collecting glass and clay, you were brought into contemporary art, or were you always somewhat there?

MRS. ANDERSON: No, I think that what happened, at least for me, there is a journey. And the journey leads you to want to know more, and so you can't live in this isolated little world of only glass or only ceramic; you all of a sudden become exposed to people who are collecting in other areas, and particularly if you have a really good collection of something, they want to see it. You want to see their collections, so therefore you learn, and that's how you broaden your horizons.

And so, the collecting group that we're all friendly with has become even a larger group, because now it's got more dealers in it; it's got more artists. There are artists who, I have to say, are up there with the dearest friends I have."

[...]

"

MS. OLDKNOW: I'm going to go back to some of these other questions that are more objective questions that I'm interested in getting your viewpoint on. Where do you think American glass ranks internationally, and do you see that the field is moving in any specific direction?

MRS. ANDERSON: I think American glass is getting more international, or international is getting more American.

MS. OLDKNOW: And what do you mean by that? The American spirit, or the focus on sculptural glass, or-

MRS. ANDERSON: I think Pilchuck is the answer to it, because I think basically everyone has been through that program.

And I think that because of that there are so many techniques that have been shown to one another, and the sense of collaboration is so important, that I think that the division of international and American glass has become a little bit more blurred.

[Audio break.]

MS. OLDKNOW: Do you think that in glass-do you see a migration of sculptural work going over into contemporary art-

MRS. ANDERSON: Yes.

MS. OLDKNOW: And more vessel-based work going into design? Do you see that kind of movement?

MRS. ANDERSON: I see more of the sculptural work becoming-it's sculpture; they're trying.

MS. OLDKNOW: Yes.

MRS. ANDERSON: I think what's happening is that there are artists who never used the material-and it's a very hard material to use-who would like to be able to use it or incorporate it in their work, and I think you're seeing more of that; I think that's important.

MS. OLDKNOW: People like Kiki Smith or Robert Rauschenberg-

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah, but then there are these younger artists. I mean, there's one, her name is Carmen Lozar-I love her work. I think she's great.

MS. OLDKNOW: I love her work, too.

MRS. ANDERSON: And then there's Dafna Kaffeman-

MS. OLDKNOW: Yes.

MRS. ANDERSON: Who is phenomenal.

MS. OLDKNOW: I love her work, too.

MRS. ANDERSON: I'm looking around here to see what I have that's in this house as opposed to Florida. Then you look at Karen LaMonte, who does this very Czech but American, and then she does those screens, which are just incredible. And then you look at somebody like Joyce Scott. I don't know what category you'd put her in, but she does glass beading. And look at that green thing over there.

MS. OLDKNOW: It's totally sculptural.

MRS. ANDERSON: Sculptural.

MS. OLDKNOW: What did you think when you went into MoMA [Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY] and saw some artists in the design galleries and someone like Josiah McElheny in the contemporary art gallery?

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, I'm embarrassed to tell you we haven't been to MoMA yet. [Refers to the re-opening of the MoMA in 2004, after closing for major renovations.]

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh. [They laugh.]

MRS. ANDERSON: But Josiah McElheny-I don't consider him-the word "glass artist" sort of makes me a little-

MS. OLDKNOW: Nervous?

MRS. ANDERSON: I don't like the word. He's an artist.

MS. OLDKNOW: Yeah.

MRS. ANDERSON: He's an artist and he uses glass-I mean, he's a "painting artist"?

MS. OLDKNOW: Right.

MRS. ANDERSON: I mean, what is he-he's an artist. And he's a contemporary, conceptual, fabulous artist, and he just happens to use that material. He's divine. I mean, Tom Patti-

MS. OLDKNOW: Yeah.

MRS. ANDERSON: You know, so he's doing all these architectural commissions. Is he a glass artist? What is he, you know? Or Jamie [James] Carpenter.

MS. OLDKNOW: They've all come out of the studio glass movement, and have gone way beyond.

MRS. ANDERSON: Absolutely. And some of them are-if you look at Tom, he's like this mathematical genius, and he creates in such a strange way-and by the way, he never finishes his pieces. He'll go back 10 years later, he's adding, he's finishing, he's doing. We did a commission with him-I did a commission for Doug's 50th birthday. They're these balls, these-whatever he calls them. They're more elegant than that. I think you've seen them; they've been in a lot of shows.

MS. OLDKNOW: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.]

MRS. ANDERSON: And I said to Tom, I'd like you to make him something for his birthday. He said, what? I said, you're the artist.

MS. OLDKNOW: Right.

MRS. ANDERSON: He said, no, I need guidance. I said: I'm not giving you guidance. You know Doug, and Doug knows you. We've been friends for 20 years, for God's sake; you figure it out. And he's working and he's agonizing and calling me: what do you think; do you want to see it? I said, nope, I don't want to see it, I don't want to know anything; I want you to bring it the day of his birthday and I want you to be done with it. And he absolutely went berserk doing it, but they are these five perfect spheres that have layers in them, and all the layers have to do with 50-five-

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, so different spheres with layers-

MRS. ANDERSON: And these veils and all these things in them.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, yes, I saw those at the Norton show.

MRS. ANDERSON: You've seen that, right? And so Tom is very square, very rigid-

MS. OLDKNOW: Right.

MRS. ANDERSON: And that's the outside, but Tom, for Doug, was all the mushy inside, all that round-it's a successful commission in an area that he works in, but it moved him to another place because he had to get in touch with something else.

MS. OLDKNOW: Of course that is the ideal situation for commissions, to allow artists to go in a different direction.

MRS. ANDERSON: I love commissioning.

MS. OLDKNOW: I know that you and Doug have been involved with Pilchuck, and also with other educational programs like the curators' program, but what do you think is the place of the university system in the importance of glass? Do you think that glass would be where it is now if it had just been through summer programs like Pilchuck?

MRS. ANDERSON: No.

[Audio break.]

MS. OLDKNOW: Okay, we were talking about universities. Have you supported the University of Washington [Seattle] ceramics program?

MRS. ANDERSON: Yes.

MS. OLDKNOW: I did not know that.

MRS. ANDERSON: Yes.

MS. OLDKNOW: Why did you choose that program? Why did you decide to go there as opposed to Pilchuck or Haystack or another place?

MRS. ANDERSON: Because I was running a trip for the American Craft Museum to Seattle, and because it was a museum trip, it had to include ceramic, jewelry, glass, architecture, homes, all of that. So I knew Akio Takamori was out there, and I love Akio. So I asked Traver-Bill Traver-if he would help me determine where I wanted to go, and he said that he would arrange for us to go to these artists-he would arrange for us to go and have Jamie Walker, and Akio, and Doug Jeck take us through, discuss, everything. Patti Warashina was there. We had everybody, and we just were so impressed with them. They were just great.

And I think we made a contribution-maybe we gave them $500 or whatever it was. And then for some reason we learned that they didn't have the money for their graduate program that they should have-I think they could afford one scholarship for a graduate student, but they couldn't afford the other ones, and it was a whole money issue. And Doug and I looked at each other, and then we got a phone call from the development department, actually; they came and they wanted to talk to us, and I had this thought; I said, well, why can't you do a raffle and do a commitment of five years, and each year look at your staff, look at the people who teach there.

So every year one of the artists gave us a piece, and then you charge however many hundreds of dollars for these tickets, and you'll make thousands of dollars. And they all thought this was a brilliant idea. I mean, now it's been done. And then it turned out that the university raises huge amounts of money, but they didn't give any of it to this program. So by the time they-I mean, Doug would have all the details, but I really wouldn't. By the time we were done with it, they did the raffle, they made, I don't know, 60, 80, $70,000. The university now gave them more money, and their graduate program is fine. But that's-we loved it. I mean, terrific artists, and I guess we're activists.

MS. OLDKNOW: So you not only gave them money but helped them learn how to make it for themselves.

MRS. ANDERSON: Sure.

MS. OLDKNOW: And it seems to me that you do a lot of that with different institutions, by giving them ideas, or doing your trips. It's very powerful, I think, to share that knowledge with people and to share your ideas with people.

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, I think it can't hurt. [Laughs.] I think the more accessible you make things, and the clearer you can make it-and also focus people's attention on something. And I think that the universities are important; I think they're all teaching art at this point, this kind of art. I'm not quite sure where it all goes. It amazes me when you see some of these children come out of whatever programs they come out of, and they now have decided that they're sculptors, and they can command $3,000 for a piece of glass that is literally something that was dropped on the ground. But, you know, eventually they'll figure it out."

[...]

"

MS. OLDKNOW: I don't know Tip Tolland.

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah, she's quite fabulous. Look at these. This is Lily Peron's stuff. This is a woman who goes in the desert, the Judean desert, and picks up things that are growing there, or that have died, and she uses-happens to use-a shoe, but she, again, used the tape and the dirt and the dust on those masks, and then wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls on those shoes.

MS. OLDKNOW: I know; that's beautiful.

MRS. ANDERSON: That's sculpture, that's ideas, that's-

MS. OLDKNOW: Well, it's true then, idea does come across in craft-associated media.

MRS. ANDERSON: You can have ideas, but it's not normally-it's about-I think with most glass, it's about a technique in producing something that's an idea. You don't see the amount; you don't see the progression of idea the same way. It just isn't. I think it takes a long time to work out the process of doing something, and I think that it has to be worked through, and then if you're lucky, and it's a really good artist, they'll figure out something else they want to say, and then they'll have to work that out."

[...]

"

MR. ANDERSON: And she told me that right across the street from her beauty parlor there was this tiny little gallery that they had, and they were showing things that were made out of glass, and they were kind of interesting.

Coincidentally, on Madison Avenue and 89th Street there was a store called The Glass Store, run by Larry and Bob-it was Bob, actually. And Bob had been a buyer at Macy's, I think, and he was very interested in stuff made of glass. And so I was stuck for a birthday present for Dale one year-it had to be in the late '70s, maybe the very early '80s-and I walked in and Bob sold me a piece of glass to bring home to Dale, and it was a teapot by a guy named Richard Marquis, which I kept pronouncing "Mar-kwis."

MS. OLDKNOW: Actually, he pronounces it Marquis [Mar-kwis].

MR. ANDERSON: Well, then I was right and now I'm wrong. [They laugh.]

[Audio break.]

And it cost $500. And I just could not believe that I was doing this, that I was spending that much money on a piece of glass. But the more I looked at that teapot, it was-like, I was kind of wondering how the hell did he do that?

MS. OLDKNOW: Was it a Patchwork?

MR. ANDERSON: It was a Patchwork Teapot. And it was that big. We still have it.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, okay.

MR. ANDERSON: And it kind of begat a whole change of attitude for Dale, who decided that she liked that a lot. And it was very resolved.

MS. OLDKNOW: She said that you said-when you got the package home-"this is going to change your life."

MR. ANDERSON: If she said that, I did.

MS. OLDKNOW: [Laughs.] What did she mean by that?

MR. ANDERSON: Probably her collecting life. Or not even her collecting life or her days of stopping into Heller and not doing much about it. Because there were a lot of $75 things that did not come home, that she would come home and tell me about. And I never went there. I was never in Doug Heller's gallery, which-talk about unfair. I'm talking about Doug Heller's gallery, and it's Doug and Michael Heller's, and it has always been Doug and Michael Heller's gallery, and I always call it, and everyone always calls it, Doug Heller's gallery.

But I never went into their gallery until it was the one on Madison Avenue-the bigger one that was a fairly good-size gallery.

MS. OLDKNOW: I think it was next to Christie's, wasn't it? Or near there-it was in the 80s or 79th and Madison, or something like that.

MR. ANDERSON: Sort of around there in that area. And then Dale started to bring things home every day that were made by guys who were working in glass. And they were-what was interesting was that it was, like, every day Doug would discover something from somebody who had learned how to do something. And it wasn't about the fact that this was art particularly; it was about the fact that they could actually do that.

And I remember once when she came home with something that Toots had made and just kind of marveled at it. Like, wow. Then there were-the guys who were doing things that were recognizable and you might even be able to have traced them back to an earlier time when people did that routinely. It wasn't as though-like George Thiewes-was that his name?

MS. OLDKNOW: I don't know, but I'll look into it.

MR. ANDERSON: T-H-I-E-W-S? People who were fuming work-none of us knew what the hell they were doing. I mean, for us everything was new. But they were basically two categories of it. There were the guys who were doing things that they obviously had seen somewhere before. And then there were the people who were doing things that, if they had seen it before somewhere, there was no way that any of us would have known that, or they actually made it up. And so for me it was a secondhand collecting, because Dale was doing all of the collecting.

MS. OLDKNOW: So it sounds already from your description-and this may be wrong-you said it was secondhand collecting because Dale was doing the buying, yet you were also doing the living with, and looking at, objects.

MR. ANDERSON: Oh, absolutely. Now, at some point there had come into our life-and I think that it was mostly before we were married-Southwest Native American pottery.

MS. OLDKNOW: Right.

MR. ANDERSON: And at one point-[laughs]-Dale and I and Doug and Heller and his first wife-

MS. OLDKNOW: Annie.

MR. ANDERSON: -Annie-God all mighty, went to the Southwest together. And Annie and I sat on the porch of some inn drinking margaritas, and Dale and Doug went up to the mesas. And Dale decided that Doug Heller should do a Native American pottery show and sell that in his gallery. And so they came back with truckloads of this stuff. And Dale had bought some of it for herself, and Doug had bought some of it for the gallery.

And history will record that this was the only show in the history of the Heller Gallery that sold nothing. [They laugh.] And at one point, Dale said, I'll buy some of this back from you. He said no. And I asked Michael Heller-I had seen a piece on his desk on Greene Street, just before they closed the gallery there. And I said, do you have much of this stuff? He said, no, we're down to about three or four pieces. We use it as wedding gifts. [They laugh.]

And at some point that collection went out of our lives. I think we gave it to people. We gave things to people. But then Dale started collecting glass. And one night-well, actually one day, Doug Heller invited us to come to a dinner at the American Craft Museum. And it had to be in the early '80s. And he said there was a couple he wanted to introduce us to from San Francisco.

There was a table for six, and at our table was Doug Heller and Dale Chihuly, and Doug Anderson and Dale Anderson. So nobody knew which Doug or which Dale anyone was talking to-and George and Dorothy Saxe.

MS. OLDKNOW: What a great group.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, yeah. And we really kind of hit it off. And George said that we needed to join the Craft Museum's Collectors' Circle. And I asked him why. And he said, well, because you are craft collectors. And I said I don't think so. He said, no, you are. So we joined, because I seem to do whatever George tells me to do.

And for 20 years we traveled around the country, and around the world, with other craft collectors and made friends of people from all over the country, and it was really fabulous. But at that point I realized that we really were collecting in this area, whatever you called it. And my call is that between 1980 and the early '90s, we really were craft collectors.

MS. OLDKNOW: Was the field changing during the time that you were collecting? Did you realize that things were changing?

MR. ANDERSON: Well, we realized that there was a wave. Something was happening. People were learning how to do things. They were learning how to manipulate materials. Now, clearly, nobody had to teach sculptors how to manipulate clay. Sculptors had been manipulating clay forever. They were certainly doing different things with glass, which interested us.

And also from that early dinner with Chihuly, we realized that we liked each other, and we became friends. And whenever he would be in a place that we were, we would go off by ourselves and spend time together. And we realized that he was doing something that was interesting.

MS. OLDKNOW: Did you find out about Pilchuck through him?

MR. ANDERSON: No, he may have talked about it, but we found out about Pilchuck in the '80s from George and Dorothy Saxe, when we were in San Francisco. And they said, if you ever get to Seattle, you should go to Pilchuck and meet Alice Rooney. And Dale said, you know, we're not really doing anything this weekend. Maybe we'll go. So we called Alice Rooney and we flew up to Seattle, and we went to Pilchuck and we visited her.

And Narcissus Quagliata was up there. They were living in cabins right next to each other. And Narcissus came down from the shower wearing a towel, and came over to Alice's porch, and we all sat around drinking wine.

And at the end of the afternoon, Dale said to Alice, what can we do to help? And she said give a scholarship. And so we did. And I would guess that was around 1985 or so. And then we did a fund-raiser for them in New York at our house that wasn't very productive. But a lot of people got to know about Pilchuck here who might not have.

And then, by then John Anderson was the president of the board; he came to New York one day and asked us whether we would join the board, and we said we would. And so in 1990 or '91, we joined Pilchuck's board and we stayed on it. I'm still on it.

MS. OLDKNOW: Fifteen years. That's a long time.

MR. ANDERSON: And Dale just went off of the board, because she wanted to make room, and she joined the advisory committee. But she is still running the trips for the auction, which she has done for five or six years.

MS. OLDKNOW: What other boards have you been on, have you served on, in terms of museums and schools?

MR. ANDERSON: The history of this is that while Dale was collecting the art, I was trying to collect people, because I am much more interested in the people. Dale is an experiential learner. She needs to touch, own it. And I am just as satisfied-maybe this is because of my kid growing-up thing-I am just as satisfied to go to a museum, and take everything in, and then come home. She is not.

So we joined-we went to a Glass Weekend event at Millville, the CGCA [Creative Glass Center of America].

MS. OLDKNOW: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.] Wheaton [Village, Millville, NJ].

MR. ANDERSON: The Wheaton Village. And we found that it was terrific. It was fun. It was kind of like a-there were 200 families, all of whom were interested in the same stuff. And that was great. And they were demos and things and-it was a good time. And so we were asked to join that board, and we did. And the next thing I knew, I was the president of the CGCA.

And then there was the New York City Collectors' Group, which we joined.

MS. OLDKNOW: Is that the Metropolitan Glass Group?

MR. ANDERSON: The Metropolitan Glass Group that we joined. But we didn't do anything with them because they didn't do very much anyway at that time. And then there was the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass [AACG], which we joined the board of, and I realized that the same guys on the CGCA board were the guys on the AACG board. And I wound up as the president of the CGCA, and Mike Belkin was the president of the Art Alliance, until he found that it was too much work, and he asked me to be the president of that. So here I am, the president of both boards.

And I realized that each one was doing a very distinct thing. CGCA was raising money for fellowships for artists, three months. They would come down to Wheaton Village. They would live in a house. They wouldn't have any obligations to speak of, and they would work on their art. The Art Alliance was there not only to be a social club but also to raise money to subsidize catalogues for museum shows. Now, there wasn't much call for that, because there wasn't that many museum shows.

And each of the organizations was getting ootzy [sic]. They wanted to raise more money; they wanted to do more things. And Belkin and I made it our business to absolutely limit what each did, because the reality was there was no reason to raise a lot of money, and to have a pile of money for each if you could get what you needed when you needed it. If you could have drawn down because you had the right people, there was no reason to have to manage people's money for them.

So we took the position that we were going to keep both organizations fairly poor. And when there was a reason to raise money, the people were there to ask. And if the reason was a valid reason, they would do it. And that is what happened historically.

So here I am, president of the board of the CGCA, not knowing very much what they were all about.

MS. OLDKNOW: Do you remember when that was?

MR. ANDERSON: You know something, I asked Sue [Susan] Gogan [executive director, Wheaton Village] to find out.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, it will be easy to find out. I just-if you remember off the top of your head.

MR. ANDERSON: She'll send me an e-mail today, to do that. I sort of think it was the-1985 sounds about right.

MS. OLDKNOW: So you were beginning to get very active in the community.

MR. ANDERSON: Immediately.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, okay.

MR. ANDERSON: It was kind of self-defense. First of all, I wanted to meet the artists. It's interesting. George and Dorothy did it the other way. They asked the artists to lead them to other artists. And they met the artists right away. Dale was bringing the material home from Doug Heller, and I was interested in finding the artists, so I was doing it the other way. Ultimately we came out in the same place.

MS. OLDKNOW: Right.

MR. ANDERSON: The CGCA had a problem because it was a subsidiary of Wheaton Village. And Wheaton Village had a problem because Frank Wheaton, who was from Millville, and whose business was in Millville-Wheaton Industries-had built Wheaton Village as a make-believe colonial park for the community. And everyone in town hated him, because he wouldn't support any other philanthropy in town except Wheaton Village. So everybody in Millville boycotted Wheaton Village and wouldn't give them any money because Frank wasn't giving any money to the hospital.

And therefore, Barry Taylor, who was running that, tried to get the CGCA to raise money so that he could fix the infrastructure of Wheaton Village, as opposed to putting it to the programs, which the CGCA wanted.

MS. OLDKNOW: Right, which was the artists' residency.

MR. ANDERSON: Which was the artists' residency. Now the way that all started was that when Frank built the village, his plan was that he would hire glassblowers to work and do glassblowing demonstrations in the hot shop that he built, and pay them to make stuff that they would sell in the stores in Wheaton Village, which was a good concept except nobody came. And he had a huge payroll, and he was building up a huge inventory. So Paul Stankard had the thought to take that hot shop and, instead of paying people to work there, make fellowships and give the facilities to artists so that they could work there.

MS. OLDKNOW: So that was Paul Stankard's idea?

MR. ANDERSON: Oh, absolutely.

MS. OLDKNOW: Interesting.

MR. ANDERSON: And Frank loved it, because while he couldn't control the artists, which he didn't like, he at least cut $150,000 a year from his budget, and that he liked a lot.

When I really understood what was going on, a few of us got together and told Barry Taylor that we were changing the rules of the game, and that CGCA was going to have to have its own bank account, with its money going into that bank account. And the only way money would come out of that bank account is if I co-signed the check. So he couldn't manipulate our money. And it was at that point that we realized what it really cost to run the CGCA program there, which at the time was about $150,000 a year.

And we made it our business to raise what we needed, but not much more, because we didn't-our mission and their mission was so different and we so didn't like their mission-I mean, for instance, there was something missing-

[Audio break.]

-in the hot shop at Wheaton Village, and I couldn't put my finger on it, until I realized it was music.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh.

MR. ANDERSON: I had never seen glass blown anywhere, other than there, where there was no music. And so I said, why is there no music in the hot shop? And I was told that because in colonial days they didn't do it that way. And I said, but that is ridiculous. And the compromise made was that music could be played in the hot shop at Wheaton Village after 5:00, after guests were no longer coming.

But there was a huge culture clash. And we at one point tried to move the CGCA away from Wheaton Village to UrbanGlass, but UrbanGlass was just moving to Brooklyn, and their board couldn't digest the idea, so it stayed."

[...]

"

MR. ANDERSON: Well, I think Pilchuck had done a great job of staying young, and even when they discovered money-[laughs]-that they didn't lose that hippie streak that they had. I remember the first time that we were up there at a board meeting, I had met a guy named Jack and a guy named Jon, and we took a tour of the campus. And we were with Marge [Marjorie] Levy, who was the director. And she wanted to locate some cottages on campus. And we get to some part on the hill, and she says something to Jack. And Jack says, yeah, this is a good place to put the building. And I look at him. I said, do you know about real estate? And he says, yeah, I know a little bit about it.

And as we are going along, the conversation turns to computers, and Marge asks Jon something about computers. And I look at him and I said, you know about computers? And he said, yeah, I know a little bit about computers. Well, it was Jack Benaroya and Jon Shirley, who was the first president of Microsoft. And that was what was so nice about it.

MS. OLDKNOW: What kind of involvement have you had with national craft organizations like the American Craft Council, the Glass Art Society, NCECA [National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts], SNAG [Society of North American Goldsmiths]. I know the Art Alliance-we've talked about the Art Alliance.

MR. ANDERSON: Nothing with SNAG, nothing with NCECA. Our brush with the Glass Art Society left us feeling that they really weren't interested in collectors.

MRS. ANDERSON: It was for artists.

MR. ANDERSON: That it was for artists. And at some point when they made a push because they wanted to raise some money-

[Audio break.]

They said that they were going to do better and be more collector-friendly. But frankly, we went to one of the conferences-one in Tampa-and we found that we weren't interested in what they were interested in, and we shouldn't have been there.

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah, but we wanted to see it, and we went to a couple of the lectures. And it was very interesting, but it was really geared for artists.

MS. OLDKNOW: It is.

MR. ANDERSON: And the [American] Craft Council, until just recently when Carmine Branagan [director, American Craft Council] joined up, is the first person I have ever heard from there that at all got it-

MS. OLDKNOW: Right.

MRS. ANDERSON: She is great.

MS. OLDKNOW: She is very good.

MR. ANDERSON: Except for Lois Moran [editor-in-chief, American Craft, published by the American Craft Council], who I have adored forever. But I think that the Craft Council stopped being relevant 20 years ago. And maybe with Carmine they will find a way of being relevant again.

MS. OLDKNOW: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.] That is what they are aiming to do.

MRS. ANDERSON: I think they want to revive the Young Americans [annual exhibitions at the American Craft Museum]. I think they want to start organizing young talent shows. I think they want to showcase it because there is a new audience for craft or decorative arts, or whatever you want to call it, that there needs to be something that gets behind it that legitimizes it.

MS. OLDKNOW: They are becoming more relevant.

Have craft periodicals like American Craft, or American Ceramics, or Glass, or Surface Design Journal, or Metalsmith-have any of those publications played a part in your collecting?

MRS. ANDERSON: No. I think it's important to look at those things. I think the more that people see, the more it's embedded in their brain, and the more they absorb. But has it played a part in how I collect? No.

MS. OLDKNOW: Okay. Let's talk about your involvement with institutions. We talked a little bit about the Met and the show that you helped Jane Adlin create through acquiring objects for the collection there. Boston-we talked a little bit about you working with Malcolm Rogers.

MR. ANDERSON: And Pat Warner.

MS. OLDKNOW: And Pat Warner too.

MR. ANDERSON: It was really Pat's show.

MS. OLDKNOW: Yeah, and to get the money together for the catalogue. I think that you have found it is extremely important to fund catalogues, and I think that you are absolutely right. Shows are ephemeral; a catalogue lasts forever. And if you want a record, the best way to do it is to fund the publication.

MR. ANDERSON: Absolutely. And by the way, that is one of the things that is good about the Art Alliance. And there has been a yin-yang in that discussion where a certain number of people want-Irv Borovsky is one of the ones who has always wanted us to raise half-million, a million dollars and have it sitting in a war chest so that the Art Alliance can do things at the spur of the moment. The rest of us feel that if you raise the money and it's sitting there, somebody is going to find a stupid use for it, and when there is something real that comes along, you just send a letter out, because you're holding this wonderful group of people together. And it's not just the art alliance. It is all of the other glass alliances that have sprung up around the country, the local groups.

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, the most organized, I think, of any of the crafts is the glass group. And I think part of it has to do with the fact that there are-that the amount of money that is charged for this stuff makes people feel that they are really holding something more relevant.

And it's interesting to see, because people who have collected-I mean, there are two ways of looking at this. One is, oh my God, aren't they smart? They have got such a bargain. Isn't this great? And now it's worth 20 times more than it was. Or, oh my God, isn't that great, but now I can't buy that stuff anymore. I'm not going to spend that kind of money. But because of all of that, it has kept it together. And they all want to promote the material. So something that is to everyone's benefit stands a very good chance of happening. So this is why I think these catalogues and books and things have come out.

MS. OLDKNOW: You were involved with the American Craft Museum Collectors' Group, and there was a lot of different media there-clay, and fiber, and wood, and glass. So you got an opportunity to check out the communities. Would you say the glass community was stronger than the clay community or the wood community?

MR. ANDERSON: Absolutely.

MRS. ANDERSON: Yes.

MS. OLDKNOW: Yes?

MR. ANDERSON: Well, you know, there were two-there were a couple of conversations about that. One of them-by the way, back to periodicals thing-not the periodicals but the catalogue things-I think that with rare exception, whenever there was a book or a museum catalogue to do and to fund, Dale and I were the ones who put our name on it. And part of what we would do is we would guarantee that if we couldn't raise the money, we would give the money, so the institution would be able to know that it was going to be paid. The good news was we were able to raise the money most of the time.

MS. OLDKNOW: But you told me that all your friends hang up the phone when you call.

MRS. ANDERSON: [Laughs.]

MR. ANDERSON: No, that is why I don't call. I only use e-mail.

MRS. ANDERSON: [Laughs.] He writes.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, good.

MR. ANDERSON: You know, in the world, apparently e-mail is the chicken's way, a proper letter is a little less chicken, a phone call is a little less chicken, and a face-to-face is serious stuff. [They laugh.] People won't make dates with us. [They laugh.] You know, the good news on all of this stuff is we have never asked anybody to do anything significant, I mean, big, significant. We have asked for anywhere between 100 [dollars] and a $1,000, depending on who people are. These aren't monumental sums of money, but we have always included everybody.

MRS. ANDERSON: It has always been inclusive. We have friends who believe that five people giving $20,000 to raise $100,000 is better than 100 people giving $1,000 each-and I don't-Doug and I really don't agree. I mean, it's very much about being inclusive. The more people who have a stake in it, the better it is."

[...]

"

MS. OLDKNOW: That is really hard. And I love that part of you.

You said that the glass community was very different than the clay and wood communities. Why do you think that is?

MR. ANDERSON: I'll tell you.

MRS. ANDERSON: [Laughs.]

MR. ANDERSON: When we were at the Archie Bray, Helen Drutt [English] came over to me and for the fourth time asked me the same question, which I have always skirted because I'm always too polite with her. And this time I just lost it, and I did it on video. She said, why do you think glass has become so much more expensive and well collected than clay? And I finally said it: I said, because of people like you.

And Helen said, what do you mean? I have been such a diligent dealer in the ceramic area [Helen Drutt Gallery, Philadelphia, PA]. I have done such wonderful work for my artists. And I said that is absolutely true. But you also do something else which is terrible and it's really held them back. And she said, what is that? I said you sign exclusive contracts with them, and they can't sell their work through other dealers. And there is just so much that you can sell in Philadelphia, and you keep them out of the rest of the country.

I said none of that happened with the glass guys because it was really guerilla warfare. There were artists who didn't know what the hell they were doing, and there were very young dealers who wanted to be dealers, but didn't really know how to be dealers, and they found each other, and they found each other in different places.

So Tom Riley represented kind of the same people in Cleveland [Tom Riley Galleries, Cleveland, OH, and Kirkland, WA] that Heller did in New York and Habatat did in Detroit, and the other Habatat did in Florida, and someone did somewhere else. And all of the sudden, these guys who were glass artists wound up with dealers everywhere, and the dealers had nothing else to sell, and people who have nothing else to sell, sell what they have. So they built collector bases in many cities, as opposed to Helen, who did a great job in Philadelphia, and maybe a sprinkling elsewhere, but not the same way.

And then who is collecting art? Basically, people who have money collect art. And eventually when they have a full collection, they somehow or other find their way onto museum boards, or they start giving away their art. So all of the sudden in Indianapolis, the Glicks gave their collection [Marilyn and Eugene Glick Collection, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN]. In Toledo the Saxes gave part of their collection, now in San Francisco [Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, de Young Museum]. All through the country that was happening in the glass community; it was not happening in any of the other communities.

And also there is something really sexy about blowing glass. And there is something that is very attractive about it. It brings a lot of people. Therefore, because of this kind groundswell base and major support, eventually you wake up and you have got equity in this thing, too. So everybody-there was more equity in the glass world than there is in the other worlds.

MRS. ANDERSON: There is such a difference between gift shop glass and gallery glass. I don't think there is quite as-it's not as easy a differentiation in ceramics. I think people think that ceramic is much easier to do, because they think that they can touch the clay and there is something accessible about it; glass is not. I think that, again, the glass community is a real community all over the country-and you're right-because of all of these different galleries.

MS. OLDKNOW: A lot of it revolves around the market and collecting, because if you don't have that, what do you have?

MRS. ANDERSON: They network.

MS. OLDKNOW: You lose such a vital part of what an active community is. That kind of exchange and purchasing and-

MRS. ANDERSON: And sharing.

MS. OLDKNOW: -because if you just have artists making, then what?

MR. ANDERSON: Then there is this other thing, and that is that there was something that started with a couple of us. It started with George and Dorothy Saxe, who had early on said, look, you have an obligation to open your home to museum groups.

MRS. ANDERSON: Absolutely.

MS. OLDKNOW: And George and Dorothy have been incredible about bringing people in to collecting.

MRS. ANDERSON: The most inclusive. George Saxe said-and it is the truth-that he is our most expensive friend. [They laugh.]

MR. ANDERSON: But we all realized-and we're talking almost 15 years ago-that we needed to open our home to museum collector groups, so that people could see how to live with this material, and also that it really-it is the making of an interesting collection. Now, frankly-

MRS. ANDERSON: It validated people's collections. I have been asked-it's funny-just recently at the MFA if I would talk to a group of young collectors there, because they all have a lot of money to spend, and they are not getting the kind of information that they can have a good time and that they can learn. I mean, it's a serious business, but it really isn't a serious business. There is fun to be had in this. And it's not like buying four Renoirs, and three Rembrandts; it's about meeting the artists, their living. That is part of what is so exciting about all of this stuff."

[...]

"

MS. OLDKNOW: Do you think that collecting is really only something you do once you hit your mid-40s, because you have disposable income?

MRS. ANDERSON: I think that you have disposable income, you have time, and you don't have children breaking everything. I think most younger couples don't have any of those things. Well, there are some, and we know a couple who were in their 40s, but they lived a life that is more like their parents. It is not quite as frenetic-it is more separate from their children, or the children are better behaved, or their houses are bigger, or something.

But, no, I think that is why it's important to go out and talk to younger collectors and not make it as serious as it is, or it will be. I mean, there is a beginning and there is a way to enjoy doing this and it's inclusive, although Doug and I don't collect that way. I mean, the agreement is that I do the collecting and he does the giving away, and it doesn't matter if he doesn't like it. I hope he doesn't like it sometimes. [They laugh.] Well, it's true.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, I think you've asked a very interesting question. I think that the answer to that question is, in my point of view, the generation of the media groupies is over, I believe.

MS. OLDKNOW: What does that mean?

MR. ANDERSON: That means that I don't think you're going to find 45-year-old hedge fund managers who are going to become glass collectors. But I think that you are going to find 45-year-old hedge fund managers who have a ton of money, who are going to look at contemporary photography and buy a Candida Höfer large-format photograph to put over their fireplace. They are going to buy a Bill Morris Canopic Jar, and they are going to put it on their table. They are going to buy a Jay Musler City Bowl. They are going to go out and buy a Frank Stella early painting.

MRS. ANDERSON: This is about the secondary market.

MR. ANDERSON: They are going to collect in the round.

MS. OLDKNOW: But I think what Doug is saying is that we're also seeing this with artists; they are not media-specific anymore. There was a show recently in Los Angeles at the Hammer Museum called "Thing," that was new sculpture by young Los Angeles artists, none of whom identified themselves with any craft-associated medium, but who were using all kinds of craft materials, and all kinds of combinations, making things that I have never seen before ["Thing: New Sculpture from Los Angeles." The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA: February 6 - June 5, 2005].

MRS. ANDERSON: Really?

MR. ANDERSON: Well, Tina, for years we have been talking about the fact that we like our art well crafted, right?[...]"

[...]

"

MS. OLDKNOW: I love the way you say, you can do whatever you want. Are you usually that way with your commissions?

MRS. ANDERSON: Yes, I don't believe in telling artists what to do. The fact is that we commission, or I commission, somebody who I know, and who knows me, and knows Doug. And the only thing I will say on occasion, if there's a-like certain shelves are 17 inches high or whatever, it has to-it can be five feet long, but it can't be higher than 17 inches because it won't fit, and I need the ability to be able to move it. But I would say, other than if it's a specific window or door, that's the only requirement that I have. And we will discuss philosophy and, you know-no, nothing.

It's when we discussed Tom Patti's piece for Doug's 50th birthday, which he did these five circles, orbs, balls, whatever they were-I mean, I gave Tom absolutely no direction whatsoever. When it was our 20th anniversary, I commissioned Bill Morris, and Flora and Joey, and there was somebody else-it was, I think, Lucy Feller-to do a piece. And the only thing I gave each of them was the fact that it had to be under 17 inches. And other than that, that was it.

And Flora and Joey did a piece that was a boat, and it had hemp in it, and it had glass in it. And it was the first time that they had ever used all those elements together.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, really? Because now, that's characteristic of their work.

MRS. ANDERSON: But that was the first.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, that's great.

MRS. ANDERSON: And they said-they were very funny-they said this was one of the most difficult things they did, because it was the two of them discussing their work, but it was like Doug and I were at the table, too, and they're not used to doing that. But that was successful.

And then the Bill Morris rattle, that was the first rattle he had ever done. Doug had sent him a postcard from Colorado, just of a rattle. And when we talked about doing his commission, this is what arrived.

MS. OLDKNOW: So it was a Kwakiutl rattle?

MRS. ANDERSON: Kwakiutl rattle.

MR. ANDERSON: It was, but Bill translated it and he-now what does he call that?

MRS. ANDERSON: Bullfrog.

MR. ANDERSON: Yeah, it's a bullfrog.

MRS. ANDERSON: Bullfrog.

MR. ANDERSON: Because there's a frog on the rattle that has bull's horns.

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, how funny.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, you know, the funny part about what Dale always says about the Marioni / Troutner commission in Florida is that, because I have a habit of giving things away, she decided that there were certain things that would never, ever be given away, and they're built into the house. I mean, that's the way it is."

[...]

"

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, and then let's talk about Toots, the wonderful thing that she is, who not only had--

MS. OLDKNOW: Toots Zynsky?

MR. ANDERSON: Yes.

MRS. ANDERSON: There is no one like her. I curated a show with Marilyn Patti for UrbanGlass at Steuben Glass. I got to pick pieces of people that you had to have, the winners of the UrbanGlass Awards, but I got to pick whatever pieces I basically wanted. And Toots decided that she didn't like any of the pieces that were available, so she was going to make a piece. And it was this incredibly gorgeous red--and--black thing. It was big, it looked like this big volcanic eruption. It was just gorgeous. It was perfect and the show was beautiful in itself.

And we went to Florida, and Andy and Charles Bronfman were still in New York, and I said, you have to go see the show, and so they did. I said, so what did you think about the red Toots? I thought that they might like that. They said, there wasn't a red Toots there. I said, what are you talking about there wasn't a red Toots; what happened to it? Apparently Barry Friedman sold it, and there was now a blue Toots or something else was there. And I said to Toots, oh my God, I'm so sorry that they never saw it.

Well, for my birthday we had a party in Las Vegas and we invited a group of friends. It was 75 friends who all came out there. And what, in fact, it turns out that there were several artists who were invited, one being Toots, one being Dale, one being Flora and Joey, and the other being Tom and Marilyn. I mean, because those are all really as close friends as we really have. So for my birthday, Toots sent me one of these red pieces. I mean it was just to die for.

Now, let me just tell you a little bit about this birthday, because it's not enough just to have a party. You need to have something interesting. Doug and I were trying to figure out what to do. And all of a sudden I had this momentary thought of genius, and I said, why couldn't we have--and we were doing it at the Bellagio Hotel [Las Vegas, NV]--why couldn't we have the ice people who make ice sculpture at the hotel make Tom Pattis, and why couldn't we have the sugar people who blow sugar, why couldn't they make Tootses and Flora and Joeys? And why couldn't, when they were baking a cake, why couldn't I have a Dale painting on the cake? Right? Sounds easy.

So Doug says, I don't know why not. So he made an appointment to go out there, with pictures and stuff like that, and then met with the young woman who was our banquet manager, I guess, representative. And we met with the ice chef, and we met with the sugar chefs, and they looked at us like we were both stark raving mad, right? They said huh? Anyway, so Doug sent books and videos of all the artists so that they would really understand the work. So what ultimately happened was they did a first course, which everybody got, which was a Tom Patti. And what it was, it was the size of a Tom Patti cube. It had layers of gels, so you had the color. They dug out the bottom of it and they put those light things that break, so it illuminated, and then we put microgreens and crabmeat salad on top, so everybody had an appetizer with a Tom Patti.

MR. ANDERSON: And on the menu, it said "Everyone should have a Tom Patti, at least for a minute or two."

MRS. ANDERSON: And we never told the artists. We never told the artists we were doing this. So when 75 of these things came in, Tom almost had heart failure--

MR. ANDERSON: Tommy is still talking about it. [Laughs.]

MRS. ANDERSON: So then we had--then, the sugar guy had never, ever been able to do this. Well, he probably went off and practiced for a month, called us up and said, I can do it. So we said, fabulous. So I wanted everybody to have a little one. He said, no, he couldn't do it. So what he did was he made a huge Toots, and it was orange and black and red, and then he filled it with chocolate mousse and then made candies of Flora and Joey's fruit that was suspended and entwined around it, so when that dessert came out and every table had one, everyone was nuts. At this point, they roll out the cake, which is a sheet cake, and I had picked out a painting of Dale's, which they scanned on the cake.

MS. OLDKNOW: That was probably the easiest part.

MRS. ANDERSON: But, all of a sudden, the ice chef and the sugar chefs all came out. They wanted to meet the artists. So it was this incredible--it was, and the hotel was really great, because they learned how to do something and now I'm sure they do it for a lot of people. But they were so enthusiastic about it; the artists were excited.

MR. ANDERSON: And Chihuly, who I didn't know has a thing about birthday cakes.

MS. OLDKNOW: I didn't know that.

MR. ANDERSON: And the thing he has about birthday cakes is he has to be the one who is there first, and he's got to stick his thumb in it.

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, me, too. So we took pictures of it. It was quite impressive.

MS. OLDKNOW: Really? [Laughs.]

MR. ANDERSON: It was good. And the other part of it is that we are friends in this group of 75 people, our friends. They all came. But they're from different worlds, so there are some who get this art thing, and there are others who completely don't care about it, some of them who are almost offended that we've developed this new circle of friends--I mean it's only 25 years or so.

MRS. ANDERSON: This was the last commission that we did. And it is--it was for Doug's 60th birthday, and what I did is I called--and I don't even know how many people are in it--and I called a series of friends and I asked them. I have a jeweler who is a wonderful jeweler in Palm Beach, and her name is Tracy Dara Kamenstein. And I asked her if she could do a notebook.

All right and I sent--and of course, I had to do this in secret so Doug didn't know about it, and I don't know how to use e--mail, so we really had an issue about this. But what I wanted was, however many people this is, they're our friends, they're all friends. A lot of them are artists. I wanted a piece of work that we could then engrave on a silver page, which Tracy would get this engraved. It's a ring binder. And there was a size limit; I guess that's, what, four inches, five inches. And each page is a sterling silver page. And so all the artists, all the friends, all wrote things about Doug. And they put--so it's Toots again, and it's Bill, and it's Dale, and it's Catherine, and it's Flora and Joey, it's Jane Adlin, it's Bruce Pepich and Lisa, it's my friend Rosaline, and there were a whole bunch of people who did things, and then Tracy did the last page. And it--there are poems. There are stories. I think this is one of the most spectacular things that I have ever, ever seen, and Tracy did Doug in diamonds. [Laughs.]

MS. OLDKNOW: This is fabulous.

MR. ANDERSON: Isn't it great? Yeah. I can't afford to have another birthday. [They laugh.]

MS. OLDKNOW: I think it's wonderful that art is so integrated into every part of your being and activity. It's not just something that you hang on the wall and give away and then buy new again. You've reached the point of why acquire anything if it's not made by someone with intention, and that's really nice.

MRS. ANDERSON: And it turns out that so much of it is done by friends."

[...]

"

MS. OLDKNOW: This is Tina Oldknow interviewing Doug and Dale Anderson at their home in New York City, New York, on July 22, 2005, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, disc number six.

We want to talk a little bit about SOFA and your involvements. We've discussed already how instrumental you were in bringing SOFA to New York, after your connection with the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, working with Glass Weekend to bring that to New York, that failing, you having discussions with Mark Lyman, getting this idea out about bringing SOFA to New York.

And SOFA New York, I think has been, if not as successful and big as the Chicago venue, a very important venue for SOFA. And Dale, I think you also worked on getting SOFA to Florida for palmbeach3. And do you want to talk about your relationship with SOFA and Mark Lyman a little bit?

MR. ANDERSON: Well, we've known Mark Lyman since he worked for--I guess it was called the Lakeview or the Lakeside Group in Chicago, and they did the first show of--the first objects show there. And I think that they were the guys who ran the Chicago Art Fair when it was really in its heyday. Tom Blackman?

MS. OLDKNOW: Blackman. Tom Blackman.

MR. ANDERSON: And Mark worked for him, and then that show didn't seem to go anywhere and Mark started SOFA, Sculptural Objects and Functional Art. And we've gone to every single one of them, because we love them. And over the years, we really liked Mark and Anne.

MS. OLDKNOW: Do you think SOFA changed the market?

MR. ANDERSON: SOFA changed the market completely.

MRS. ANDERSON: Totally.

MR. ANDERSON: Changed the game. In Chicago, I think that the number that they use is that they get 35,000 people a year going through the SOFA show. When you think about that, there are museums that would be happy to have 35,000 people a year going through their whole museum. They do it in a long weekend.

You could say that the dealers who show at SOFA have a particular way of showing that only a decorative arts collector can love. You can also say that they are able--because of the way they show, they are able to bring to everyone's attention just an immense amount of material to look at.

MRS. ANDERSON: Part of what SOFA is about is that collectors expect to see the newest work and the best artists, and it's the showcase for them. And what Mark Lyman did that was so smart was that he gave it an international component, and so different countries have been invited every year to participate. So it started with, I think, Australia and New Zealand, and then it went to England. It now has Danish craft in it. There are all kinds of international galleries there and it really is the best of the best.

It's not necessarily all--there's not a whole lot of new, emerging artists, because I think that the booth space is a little bit too expensive for them to have a significant amount of that. I'm sorry that there isn't. But it is where you get to see everything that is going on in the contemporary crafts world.

MR. ANDERSON: It's also where you see everyone who is interested in contemporary crafts world, so go ahead.

MS. OLDKNOW: In terms of being collectors, how did it change the way that you buy?

MR. ANDERSON: It didn't change anything for me because I never buy anything. [Laughs.] And I just go there from dawn until dusk, and I hang out and it's--I mean people have laughed. People have called me the mayor of SOFA, because I don't think that SOFA would be the same without me.

MS. OLDKNOW: I don't think so either.

MR. ANDERSON: But I just love being there, because I get to see all my friends.

MS. OLDKNOW: Everyone.

MR. ANDERSON: From everywhere, be they the artists or the dealers. Well, we know the dealers are there, and we know that a lot of the artists are there. But we get to see all the collectors and catch up.

MS. OLDKNOW: And museum people.

MR. ANDERSON: And the museum people.

MRS. ANDERSON: And all the groups, all the different art groups have meetings there, and then there is a whole lecture series that is really very good, and panel discussions. And it's got everything going for it.

MS. OLDKNOW: Do you think that it's brought people into collecting, or do you think that it just attracts the people who are already collecting anyway?

MR. ANDERSON: I think it's definitely brought people into collecting in this area. And the hope when Mark moved it from Coral Gables, the second show--from Coral Gables to New York--we spent a couple of days in New York City looking at possible venues for the New York show and concluded that even though the Park Avenue Armory was really too small, it was really right, because of what we all wanted to accomplish.

And here's Mark, he's got conflict of agendas. His agenda is to run a business and to make as much money as possible running that business. On the other hand, our agenda has always been to introduce the best of this material to people who are collecting, but in the other side of the contemporary art world, to broaden the base of people who are collecting the stuff that we've been collecting and care about. I guess you could make the case that part of the reason was that if you expand the market, the value of--rising tide lifts all boats. The other side of it is just the fact that sometimes you discover something terrific, and you want everyone else to know about it, or how smart you are for having discovered it first.

But Barbara Tober, and her role as really longtime chairman of the board of the American Craft Museum, was really the hook for making this happen, and she and her husband, Donald, have to get a major credit for this, because certainly in the early years in New York, they were the ones who brought the crowd. And it may not have been the numerical crowd, but it was the right crowd. And she needs to get credit for that. And Mark would not have moved the show had it not been for her commitment and the Craft Museum's commitment to do that opening night thing, which turns out to be great for the Craft Museum but is a ton of work and oftentimes it isn't great for the institution that is doing the opening night thing, so credit to them. Frankly, I think it's the best show that the Craft Museum does every year, even though they don't have to curate it themselves, but it's clearly attached as their show.

MRS. ANDERSON: It's successful. It's very successful. And the timing of it, though, is not good, because the Armory's dates are always well booked, and the ideal time to probably do the show in New York is the beginning of May. And they end up doing it right around Memorial Day weekend, and luckily it starts on Wednesday, because they'll get the Wednesday and Thursday New York group. But then everyone goes to the country, and they just can't--they somehow haven't been able to change the dates. Now, in Chicago, there is no problem, because everyone knows in October, it's that time. You're going to Chicago.

[Audio break.]

MR. ANDERSON: We were talking about Florida?

MS. OLDKNOW: We're talking about SOFA Palm Beach. Before we start talking about it, I want to say that I think that it is brilliant to pair SOFA with contemporary art and sculpture and photography, and maybe you can talk a little bit about that. I think that it has changed SOFA; I think it's changed the way we look at craft. I think it's absolutely needed to happen. I think it's the best show. Has it been running two years?

MR. ANDERSON: One, this is going to be the second year.

MS. OLDKNOW: That's right; this will be the second year. January 2005 was number one.

MRS. ANDERSON: The year before, and the year before that, they started mixing in some painting and sculpture, but it really wasn't a thought--out show. It just was sort of like who could--who came, who didn't. And when Mark Lyman was suggested to do the SOFA component, it became a commitment, as did the photography portion of it. So there was really a third, a third, and a third, basically.

And the show was laid out that way, and the expectations were once we figured out what this was, that this was sort of a radical idea that you were going to see decorative arts, you were going to see photography, and you were going to see sculpture--you know, and painting. And I think it was easier for the SOFA people to get behind this idea because they've always said they wanted to show in a fine arts context. And the problem was that the painting and sculpture galleries really didn't want that to happen, because they didn't want the competition and they really thought that they were better than the several galleries anyway, and there had never been a photography show. So they sort of were, I think, sort of mezzo--mezzo about it. They were willing to try.

So when some of the decorative arts galleries, or whatever you want to call them, came for the first couple of years, they did phenomenal business, particularly the glass galleries, because the painting and sculpture collectors had never seen anything like this. And so they were very dead--set against having decorative arts there, because it was really eating into their business.

MR. ANDERSON: In other words, you're saying that the people who normally would have been clients of the painting dealers spent their money on glass.

MRS. ANDERSON: Or at least made a major discovery noticing this. And glass really is the most accessible of the decorative arts, because it shines. It's just there. And it was also more expensive, so the price points were more in line with what I think people were used to spending, but not nearly as much as painting. By the introduction of the photography, people didn't know quite what to do, so there were SOFA collectors, there were painting and sculpture collectors, and there were sort of latent photography collectors. So when people walked in, they immediately went towards the glass, and [Doug] Heller was the first--he always gets that first space and people met.

There was a woman there who I had met who collects paintings. And she walked in and she was wildly interested in Karen LaMonte. And she saw Karen LaMonte's [cast glass] dress and she said, oh my God, this is the most fabulous thing I've ever seen. Oh my God, this is so great. How much do you think it is? Well, I could see the price tag, but I wasn't going to tell her. I said, well, why don't you ask Doug Heller? So she goes over. She says, how much is it? And I think he told her it was something like $52,000, and she looked and she said, that's so expensive. And I said, but you've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for paintings.

[Audio break.]

I said, "Honey, get used to it." Well, for the whole weekend she circled that piece. You know, I don't think she bought it, but I promise you that the next time she sees it, she'll then want to touch it, and one day she will own it.

MR. ANDERSON: Oh, okay.

MS. OLDKNOW: Do you think there was a lot of that kind of crossover? Do you think that new people did buy glass, for example?

MRS. ANDERSON: Oh, yeah.

MS. OLDKNOW: You do?

MRS. ANDERSON: There were a lot of people who did. But what was interesting was a lot of--

MS. OLDKNOW: Did the craft collectors buy photography?

MRS. ANDERSON: Yes, yes.

MS. OLDKNOW: They did?

MRS. ANDERSON: And then there are people like us, who collect all of it. And they were in heaven, because they could look at it all. And so for me, it was a natural progression to see this kind of a show. And I must say painting doesn't necessarily do it for me, but photography and contemporary craft does.

MR. ANDERSON: So we had conversations with dealers. And I guess we know them for enough time so that they don't get offended if we say something that isn't pandering to the way they do things. And one of the nice things about this whole industry is that, for instance, one night we had dinner at Dan and Linda Silverberg's house, who are collectors who live in Cleveland and Frenchman's Creek about a half hour's drive from Palm Beach.

MRS. ANDERSON: Glass collectors.

MR. ANDERSON: Dan and Linda had invited Lino Tagliapietra and his wife, Lina, to come over for dinner, and Lino said, I would like to make dinner. Invite 50 people. So Lino--[laughs]--and Dan spent the day shopping for the fixings for dinner. And Lino and Lina, and Toots Zynsky, made dinner. And a few of us helped clean up.

But as we were sitting and talking, we were talking with a group of the dealers and making the point to them that the way they show at SOFA, and appeal to collectors who are used to looking at stuff that way, is not the way they need to approach contemporary art collectors who are used to looking at a more reasoned, museum--curated approach to presentation.

MS. OLDKNOW: So, less objects in the booth, more space.

MR. ANDERSON: Less artists.

MS. OLDKNOW: And fewer artists.

MRS. ANDERSON: Or that you're able--as in the painting and photography galleries--bring a piece out. They will bring it out. They won't just have everything lined up on the wall.

MR. ANDERSON: And some of the dealers--first of all, some of the dealers just know that naturally. I mean, Doug Heller and Katya and Michael certainly know that. Barry Friedman [Barry Friedman Ltd., New York, NY] knows it. Tom Grotta [browngrotta arts, Wilton, CT] knows it. Leslie Ferrin [Ferrin Gallery, Lenox, MA] knows it. What is her name from Chicago, dealer from Chicago?

MRS. ANDERSON: Bonnie Marks.

MR. ANDERSON: No, no, the other one, the one that John Krane bought a cabinet from.

MRS. ANDERSON: Ann Nathan [Gallery, Chicago, IL].

MR. ANDERSON: Ann Nathan.

MS. OLDKNOW: I like her booth. It always looks good.

MR. ANDERSON: Presents beautifully. And beautifully in terms of what--if you're looking for crossing over, then you have to feed potential new clients the way they are used to eating. And so we had this whole conversation with a couple of the dealers who don't see it that way. And they were explaining why they don't want to do that. And we were explaining that ultimately this is going to be a very successful show.

And if they don't present the way that the promoters of the show want them to, they simply won't be invited back. Because the promoters now have a vision and their vision--it is one thing for the SOFA dealers to talk about wanting to be part of the so--called real art world or the other part of the contemporary art world, and it's something else for them to behave that way. And we're hoping that, over time and as they see what is going on and they see who is getting people to cross over and look at their material and who is not, they will understand why.

But Dale had a completely other take on it, which had to do with the fact that a lot of the SOFA dealers are trying very hard to find other people to represent--in addition to the ones they now represent. In addition to the ones who are successful for them, they tend to keep trying other things. On the one hand, you're looking for the contemporary art collectors to cross over to you. Why don't you follow your clients around the show, and see what is turning them on, and lead them there. So why don't you kind of tune your head a little bit--

MRS. ANDERSON: Which is what Leslie Ferrin is doing.

MR. ANDERSON: Yeah. And Leslie is doing that. She is doing it with contemporary photography. But I think part of this is the dealers have to understand--the dealers have to ask themselves what business they are in. And if they are in the business of selling glass, then that is fine and they should. If they are in the business of selling good sculpture that is contemporary art that is made out of glass, maybe they should change their mission statement a little bit, and give some thought to it. But it's an opportunity for everyone to see what is happening.

MRS. ANDERSON: A lot of this stuff is stale; it's stagnant. I mean, there are a lot of wonderful artists who have said what they have to say, as in everything. A lot of people don't have another vocabulary. They are satisfied producing what they produce. But eventually the same collectors are going to want more. And hopefully they will be able to find it in the area that they like to collect. But if not, then it has naturally progressed to another type of art.

There is not enough time devoted to finding younger artists who are committed to being artists, not somebody who just slops down a piece of glass and says it's a $3,000 thing, but people who have gone to art school, who learn, who have experience, who have things to say, who are not stuck in one medium.

MS. OLDKNOW: Part of the problem is that if dealers are not going to show emerging artists, and they don't really have a place to sell, it is very hard for them to break into the market.

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, there are all these galleries and it's in every--it's in the painting galleries; it's in the photography gallery. Just because you're an artist doesn't mean you get to be seen by the person in the gallery who makes the choice, because it's still about who you know who can get you in front of the person who makes the decision. And I find that a lot of the galleries are lazy about either going out and looking, or having people submit work to them.

And God knows, looking at enough stuff as you do and I do--most of it is not worth the piece of paper that it is printed on. On the other hand, there is great stuff. And then you look at the all of the painting and the photography people who go to the graduate classes, you know, the graduate--degree things at Yale or NYU or whatever, and they pick these artists up who are much too young and who really need a little seasoning, but this is the new talent, and so they run and they take it. There has to be something in the middle, which is, by the way, what I think we're doing in a sense with Israel."

ON PILCHUCK"

"

MS. OLDKNOW: Can we move on to Pilchuck?

MR. ANDERSON: Absolutely.

MS. OLDKNOW: Pilchuck is something you have been involved with in a number of ways. Not only in serving on the board, and being very involved in the school, but also starting specific programs, like the curator program, and the collector program, and then of course working with me on the book [Tina Oldknow. Pilchuck: A Glass School. Seattle: Pilchuck Glass School, in association with the University of Washington Press, 1996].

And then also I want to talk about the tours that Dale develops for Pilchuck auction weekend each year. It's no longer just one night, but it's an entire weekend. You're always sold out; people are lining up to go. It is incredibly successful.

So let's talk about Pilchuck. Let's turn our gaze. We have talked a little bit about when you joined the board. When George and Dorothy told you to go there, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do when you first joined the board? Did you feel that, oh, we'll just be on the board and do this, and the ideas for the programs came later? How did they develop?

MRS. ANDERSON: I think that joining any board, particularly one out of state and one that you don't really know all the players, or the majority of the players, you sort of watch. And Seattle is very much Seattle--centric. And so they were not very used to having out--of--town trustees who actually were activists. So they didn't really know what to do with us and we really didn't know what to do with them.

And so I think we kind of sat around awhile. And Doug is much more of an activist than I am, actually, in this area. And so finally, he likes to participate. Why is he going to be there unless they use him, and no point in having to go and just sit. The book project was the first thing that Doug absolutely aggressively got himself involved in.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, in answer to your question, John Anderson was, at that time, the chairman of the board of Pilchuck. And it was a time when Pilchuck itself was in change mode. Alice Rooney had had her well--known tiff with Dale Chihuly. John as a volunteer, stepped in after Alice left to run the school. He suggested to Chihuly that he take a furlough for a year and just let everything cool off and heal. And at that time we joined the board. John asked us to join the board and we liked him. And we basically said, what can we do? And he said, you can bring an East Coast opinion and your East Coast connections to Pilchuck, and that would be great.

So we started going to Seattle and loved Seattle. And frankly, if we never accomplished anything on the board, and just learned how to fish, that would have been great. [They laugh.] And if we didn't do anything except make a whole bunch of friends out there, that, too, would have been great.

And Dale is right that we performed kind of an unnatural act. We sat quietly. And one day Bob Seidl, who was one of the old--timers at Pilchuck and, I think, their first president after John Hauberg, kind of moved away from it a little bit, said that they have been, for years, wanting to write a book about Pilchuck, but they could never get anybody to run the project. And I said, I'll do it. I mean, that is something that I could do from back East. And also, I didn't know where all of the bodies were and I didn't care if I offended anyone.

I said, I'll do it as long as everybody agrees to leave me alone. And everyone was so happy that someone would do it that they agreed to leave me alone. And we hired a spectacular woman to really run the project, a woman sitting right across the table from me, Tina Oldknow. And we agreed that my job was going to be to protect her from us--and us included me--and it included Marge Levy, who was the relatively new director of Pilchuck, and the board, and John Hauberg [co--founder, Pilchuck], and Dale Chihuly, and everybody. And I felt like I was Rocky Graziano, just prepared to take on all comers.

And--well, why don't you talk about it, because it was your project.

MS. OLDKNOW: It was interesting because there was a committee, and you were the chair of the committee. And I had some doubts about working with the committee on a book because, you know, what was this going to be? After the first committee meeting I realized that the outline didn't go over that well. It didn't go over that well because I didn't explain it enough; I assumed that people would know the book would be entirely illustrated. I had not mentioned how much text there would be versus how many illustrations. I remember John Hauberg was clutching a copy of my draft outline saying this is horseshit and it should be burned. [They laugh.]

MR. ANDERSON: He never expressed himself well.

MS. OLDKNOW: No, he didn't. [They laugh.] And never shy about that, although he was so sweet later. He apologized and he was really adorable about it. But, you know, I had this committee there and they were looking at me. John was saying, we want something that has lots of pictures and not so much text. And I said, well, you know, if you want a National Geographic treatment of this book, I'm not the person to do it. And it's fine. I can be released from this. There are no hard feelings, but it's just not what I think that I want to do.

And I was really encouraged by the fact that the entire committee said no, no, no, we want you to do this; we want you to do it the way you want to do it. And everyone shot John a dirty look. And it worked out great and it turned out to be a great project. But I needed you to be there to do a lot of the hard work: raising the money for the book, keeping people away from me, doing all of the organizational work with Katy Homans and our editor, Suzanne Kotz. It was a lot of involvement on your part. And you were always very efficient about everything, and that was great.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, I am sometimes efficient. I remember Bob Seidl, when Hauberg was talking about wanting it to be a National Geographic and Seidl wanted it to be a scholarly text. I remember saying something that I had heard someone say before, and that was that it would be very easy for you to do. It should be a cross between Johann Sebastian Bach and John Philip Sousa. And you did it. You actually wrote a readable scholarly text, with a lot of pictures. And the book was terrific because it really told the story of Pilchuck.

MS. OLDKNOW: Yeah, I wanted other people to tell it, rather than me.

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah, but you did it. It was preserving a history that, a few years later, some of the people were dead.

MS. OLDKNOW: Yeah, it was disappearing. It was actually hard to get a lot of information out. It shouldn't have been done any later than it was, because I think that a lot of that information, people were just forgetting. And once it was written down, then they could forget and not be so obsessed about keeping it alive, and they could move on.

MRS. ANDERSON: It was the time--Doug was the right person to do it; you were the right person to do it.

MRS. OLDKNOW: You took a big risk on me. I mean, I hadn't written that much.

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, wait a minute, they took a big risk on him, because it was really the first project that he had done and they really wanted to do it. No one would do it. And he finally said, I will. And they said, well, let's go for it.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, the other thing was that--it was a big learning experience for me. First, I had never been involved with doing a book before. So that was one thing. Second, I had never been involved with really doing anything with the folks in Seattle. And Seattle, which John Hauberg used to keep talking about coming of age after being cut off from the rest of the country by the Cascade Mountains, and it wasn't until the airplane routinely was flying in and out of there that they got to be part of the rest of the country. There is a very Seattle way of doing things, and I hadn't a clue.

So when we were sitting around talking about this book, we budgeted it at about $125,000, if I remember.

MS. OLDKNOW: Yes.

MR. ANDERSON: And I said at a board meeting that Dale and I would pledge $10,000 to kick this off, as long as I was going to be running the project--let's get it funded and let's get it funded now. Figuring that the rest of the guys around the table would say, hear, hear; here's mine, and we would pass the hat and there would be $125,000, and we finished with that part. John Hauberg said, I'll see your $10,000, and then the rest of the crowd sat still. [They laugh.] And I'm saying to myself, oh my goodness. Is that the way it goes here? Suckered again.

So Marge Levy [director, Pilchuck] and I sat down and we said we need to raise this money. And we caucused with Chihuly. And through this, because Chihuly has so much experience with books, whenever I would come to Seattle, I would call him and we would make a breakfast meeting. Now, fortunately I had a career before all of this in the processed meat business. So 4:00--in--the--morning meetings were something I was not shocked by. It had been a while, but when Chihuly said that he does his best work at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, I said, okay, fine, and so I would show up and we would make Irish tea, and eat a muffin, and we would talk about books.

So I got a great education from Dale. And at one point, I said, we're stuck. We have to raise this money. And he said, oh, it's very easy. We'll do a special edition of 500 books. You'll put a separate--a different kind of cover on it--a cover and slipcase--and I'll blow something to add as an incentive, and we'll sell the 500 books. How much should we sell them for? He said $500 a book and we'll make this problem go away. I said, okay, fine, we'll do that, figuring what the hell; if I can't raise any money, we may as well not be able to sell 500 books with Chihuly things in them. [They laugh.]

And I wasn't there and Dale wasn't there when Chihuly designed and the team blew the 500 objects. They were blown at Pilchuck, weren't they?

MS. OLDKNOW: They were blown at Pilchuck.

MR. ANDERSON: Were you there?

MS. OLDKNOW: Yeah, I was there.

MR. ANDERSON: Talk about it.

MS. OLDKNOW: It was really wonderful, because one of the things that interviewing all of the artists for the Pilchuck book did was to bring back that sense of community of the earlier days. Because a lot of the artists, many of whom are very successful, don't see each other as much as you think that they would. Even though they all live in Seattle, even though they would show up at Kate Elliott's gallery [Elliott Brown Gallery, Seattle, WA] for openings. They didn't see each other much.

So this blow was great, because a lot of people came together who had spent time together at Pilchuck 20 years previously. It was Dale, Billy Morris, Sonja Blomdahl, Flora Mace, and Joey Kirkpatrick. I think probably Martin [Blank]. Some of the blowers from Chihuly's studio were there. Charlie Parriott. We have a picture that we took of the group. It was a big group, and a lot of the really well--known artists were there.

MR. ANDERSON: And I remember at the end, we were having a problem finishing selling all 500. There was one person from San Francisco who bought 20 of them. We learned that the person was a gallery, and they immediately started selling them for $2,500.

MS. OLDKNOW: Well, they were selling them as affordable Chihulys that came with a book.

MR. ANDERSON: [Laughs.] And at the end--I know Dale and I bought about five of them at the end, and we gave them out as very luxurious Christmas presents to people, and it was fabulous. Maybe that gallery in San Francisco gave Dale and his people from Portland Press the idea of making edition pieces and packaging each with a book.

MRS. ANDERSON: You know what? That was creativity, but that was your first real involvement with that board. And after that, you were accepted.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, they were blown away. I mean, here we were--the reality is that we quickly raised a quarter of a million dollars. There was a cost attached to it, but it wasn't that significant, so we netted--let's call it $200,000. The book may have cost 125 [thousand dollars] to 150 [thousand dollars] so, in addition to getting their book, which they hadn't seen yet, they were 50 [thousand dollars], $75,000 ahead.

MS. OLDKNOW: Well, the book was signed by all of the artists who participated in the blow. Chihuly had a special party at the boathouse and they had all 500 books lined up and all of the artists, armed with pens, went around and signed every single book.

MRS. ANDERSON: Do you know that the regular book, not the edition, is still being given away--everybody who goes on the trip gets a book.

MS. OLDKNOW: That is excellent.

MRS. ANDERSON: Until we run out.

MR. ANDERSON: I don't remember how many we printed. I have to believe it was about 8,000.

MS. OLDKNOW: I think so.

MR. ANDERSON: And the University of Washington--

MS. OLDKNOW: They don't have any more.

MR. ANDERSON: No, I know they don't. And they sold. So Pilchuck continued--it became an ongoing income source for Pilchuck, and, frankly, I really got into the idea of books from that. First, it was fun. Working with you was a treat. Working with Katy Homans [Pilchuck book designer] was a treat.

So that was that story. Then it was also interesting to work with Marge Levy on that level, because Marge--I always think of Marge as being an extraordinary, strong--minded, visionary leader, who, when she wanted something done, because it was her idea, or if you could feed her something that she could make her idea, would be like a tank driver making it happen. And that was perfect for me, because I'm kind of a fountain of these kinds of ideas and she liked some of them and she didn't like some of them, but at least we got things done.

And the first one that we tried was a development idea that started with the thought that Pilchuck is a school. And Pilchuck teaches people about glass. But Pilchuck was focusing on only one part of the community. They were focusing on the artists. And yet it was important, as far as Dale and I were concerned, that Pilchuck have a greater responsibility and focus on collectors, and teach collectors about what they are collecting, and do it in a way that is fun, and also do it in a way that created money for Pilchuck to do what it does.

MRS. ANDERSON: And bonds.

MR. ANDERSON: And bonds as well. So we proposed to Marge that we do a weekend for 10 collector families--

MRS. ANDERSON: It was less than that.

MR. ANDERSON: I thought it was 10. Maybe it was seven. And we offered to the collectors the opportunity to come to Pilchuck for the weekend, live on campus, and work with artists making monoprints and blowing glass.

MRS. ANDERSON: Casting glass.

MR. ANDERSON: Lampworking, casting, and learning about what they were collecting and how it was made. We offered this to a group of collectors and we didn't put a price tag on it. We got a few who wanted to come--seven or 10 couples, I don't remember. And we then went to--Marge went to a group of artists and asked them whether they would be interested in volunteering their time to teach this group of collectors and--

MRS. ANDERSON: And to demonstrate.

MR. ANDERSON: To do demos and to hang out and do slide presentations of their work. And the smart ones realized that this is a very clever opportunity to make relationships with people who buy art, and maybe they would buy some of theirs.

And I remember getting a phone call from Charles Bronfman before this. And he called, and he said, what is this going to cost me? And I said nothing. And he said to me, nothing costs nothing. I said, okay, how much do you want it to cost you? He said, well, tell me what I should do. I said, give a scholarship. So he said, okay, I'll give a scholarship to a Canadian. Oh, wait a second, that is not good enough. I'll give a scholarship to an Israeli, too.

So Charles and Andy decided they would give two scholarships. And Marge and I figured that was for one year. Well, it's 12 years later or so, and they are still giving two scholarships.

MRS. ANDERSON: But even--all right, so at that particular weekend, Dante [Marioni] was there. So was Bill Morris. They all were there.

MS. OLDKNOW: Ginny [Ruffner] was there.

MRS. ANDERSON: Fritz Driesbach and Joey [Kirkpatrick] were there. You name it; the best of the best were all there and, by the way, having the best time. Dante and Andy Bronfman bonded. And we have pictures of them--of him teaching her how to make a goblet. Well, she had an experience--I want you to know that they are one of his major collectors now. But that was all from there. There were a lot of relationships that happened.

MR. ANDERSON: So the second time we did it.

MRS. ANDERSON: Being we did it--we sponsored it.

MR. ANDERSON: Yeah, we covered the cost of--

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, I see.

MR. ANDERSON: This was not a monumental event, because nobody wanted to get paid for doing this, so it was just care and feeding of everybody.

MRS. ANDERSON: And Charles and I didn't sleep there. Charles and I would drive back to Seattle and then we would come back the next day. [Laughs.]

MR. ANDERSON: And we did it a second time because we knew that we could get it righter the second time. And we did and it was fabulous. And at the end of the second one--because everyone was just very low key, at the end of the second one, Marge offered to send a bus with everyone in it to the airport, to Sea--Tac [International Airport], to get everyone to their plane. And the room got a little quiet and we couldn't figure out why, until we realized that most of the people there had come with their own planes. [They laugh.]

So it was kind of, like, oh, yes, all right, fine. Everyone had a great time. And my guess is that pretty much everyone who was there has maintained some kind of financial relationship with Pilchuck. It's a very special place. It sells itself. You don't have to do much of anything.

MRS. ANDERSON: But then, it eventually didn't work out. It wasn't a program that the general artist community wanted to do. But that was the lead--in to the curator's program. That is how that really began.

MR. ANDERSON: Why don't you talk about how that curator program began?

MRS. ANDERSON: I don't really remember. [Laughs.]

MR. ANDERSON: Okay, then I'll talk about it.

MRS. ANDERSON: Yes, excuse me, I do.

MS. OLDKNOW: Martha Lynn?

MRS. ANDERSON: No.

MS. OLDKNOW: Ruth Summers?

MRS. ANDERSON: No, from L.A.

MR. ANDERSON: LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art].

MS. OLDKNOW: Jo Lauria?

MRS. ANDERSON: Jo Lauria. Jo Lauria was sitting with us one day, and we were talking, and she was complaining. And she said, you know, how am I supposed to write about things like graal and all of these technical things if I don't really know what they are? And Doug said, you know, you're really right. So he said, well, maybe what you ought to do is you'll go to Pilchuck and they will show you. And we said, oh, maybe a lot of the curators should go to Pilchuck and see what this is all about, and who knows what is going to happen from that? And that was the beginning.

MR. ANDERSON: So I called up Marge.

MRS. ANDERSON: Marge Levy.

MR. ANDERSON: Marge got to the point where she almost wouldn't take my phone calls. [They laugh.] But I called her up and I tell her the story about Jo Lauria. And without missing a beat, she said, if you'll pay for it, I'll put together a curator's program. I said, if you keep it under $5,000, we'll pay for it. She said, easy, done, deal. And we set up a curator's program. And the point of it was exactly--you know, you learn that if you can get a double bump on a program, that is good. If you can get a triple bump, it's extraordinary.

So the original plan was to teach curators about technique so that they could write about it. The second bump was that we learned that curators are--first, they are underpaid, but they are under--travel--budgeted, and they are overworked.

MRS. ANDERSON: And they are isolated.

MR. ANDERSON: And they are completely isolated. So here we find the backbone of the intellectual community of the museum world not given the resources that they should have, and also they really don't know each other. So in the first time we did this--and we had no idea about any of this--in the first time we did this, I think we had 15 or so curators there. And Marge put on a fabulous program. And it started with 6:00 in the morning walks in the woods, and really enjoying being in the outdoors, and people getting to know each other.

Part of what we did in that session was we wanted to put together people from similar museums, similar kinds of museums. So we put Bruce Pepich and Mark Leach in the same cabin. [They laugh.] Mark Leach had just finished building or finished with the plans for the Mint Museum of Craft and Design. Bruce was just starting with the plans for his new building in Racine. We told Bruce to bring his plans along, and we told Mark that he couldn't leave the cabin until he had critiqued the plans.

We tried to get people together who could work together afterwards where--you know, one of the things that we all find is that there is a potential for a circuit of museums that do craft. Why should the Mint Museum have to curate five shows a year, and the Craft Museum curate five shows a year, and Racine five shows a year, and Bellevue [Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA] now five shows a year, when they could get together and they could either take each other's show up front, or they could co--curate and co--write things? It would be a hell of a lot cheaper and it would be much more efficient. And people from around the country would--everyone would get to see everything and not everyone would have to pay for everything, much more efficient.

So part of the thrust of what we kept talking about in that first curator's program was basically that.

MRS. ANDERSON: Wait, wait. And then they got--all the curators got to do what the collectors had done. So they got to work with all of the artists: they got all of the demonstrations. And the artists were thrilled to come out and do this with the museum people. And then what we did is something that we do with the auction weekend, is arrange collections for them to go to. So they got really treated phenomenally. So this was a win--win on every level, and everybody was dying to do this. I mean, we had what, five years?

MR. ANDERSON: Yeah, we had a five--year run of this and had between 50 and 60 curators--we added some writers to one of them. We always invited George and Dorothy Saxe to come, because they get it and their experiences were as important to this an anything else. And it was a fabulous thing.

And then in the midst of all of this, Marge left and was no longer the director. And Barbara Johns became the director. She did the last one. She wasn't comfortable doing it. Funny, because she had been to one when she was a curator at Tacoma [Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA], but she didn't like being on the other side of it as the host. And Pike Powers was a little burned out and didn't want to do the work. And then there was a whole mishmash amongst the artists, because everyone wanted to be invited to participate, and yet we wanted to participate the artists who were most likely to be the kinds of people who museum curators would want to know, with the thought maybe they would do a museum show with them or something.

MRS. ANDERSON: It became very political, and there were too many personalities, and it was too much, I don't want to say jealousy, but in fact there was. And then after Barbara Johns is no longer there, Patricia Watkinson came. And she didn't see the value of this at all, and it became too much work for the school, and they all of the sudden forgot the benefits and the reasons why we had done it in the first place. And so Doug, thank God, called you, and you, smart thing, said, oh, wow.

MS. OLDKNOW: Well, it's great that we can combine it with SOFA New York. I think it would be hard to get people come to Corning just for the weekend. But if you need to go to New York anyway--and all curators need to go to New York, it's one--stop shopping. For an overworked person, for someone like me to know that I can go to one place for a certain number of days and get all of this information, and that is all I need to do, it is very attractive.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, let me put on the record the fact that you are being very modest. And we did a test last year with you at the Corning Museum, and you and all of your associates at the Corning Museum, and while I was very conflicted about our moving the program from Pilchuck, first Dale and I--I am still a board member at Pilchuck and I love Pilchuck, and the idea of taking away something from Pilchuck was hard, but they didn't want it. So I took away something from Pilchuck that they had taken away first.

And second, I was really kind of worried about losing the magic. And Pilchuck is magical and the folks who are up there are magical. But what we got instead was better. It was better and it was more relevant. And my sense is that the takeout ultimately is much better, and here is why. Corning has more things that curators can learn to use for their best interests later."

[...]

"

MRS. ANDERSON: When Doug and I first went up to Pilchuck, even before we were on the board--no, I guess we were on the board. Marge Levy used to do the auction tours, and they were wild. She would get you started at, I don't know, 8:00 in the morning, which was not for me. But I would get up and do it, and we would have a full day running. And we would go to studios--not a lot of collections, but it was a lot of studios. It was constantly artists.

Then we would have dinner at 8:00 or 9:00, and she would say, who wants to go see Martin Blank at 11:00 at night? And everyone would get up and say, yay! But there were maybe 15 or 20 people--not even. Sometimes there were minivans. And it was these exhausting, wonderful, exuberant, things that everyone would come home and just lay down and recover for days.

And then eventually they got be a little bit more grown--up. And then eventually they started being less interesting. And the auction was really great, but the tours really weren't so fabulous. Then at one point, there was nothing exciting about the tours. And Fraeda Kopman and Anne Cohen and I, who were the three out--of--state trustees who were assigned to this committee, said, let's do something about it.

And so my job was really to do the trips, because I had done this for the American Craft Museum, so I understood this. And Anne Cohen's job was to bring the people because she is like the pied piper and half of Los Angeles would follow her anywhere. And Fraeda's job was to do some of the selling and marketing of the trips. So between the three of us, we were really pretty good.

But there was a problem because the Seattle people were doing the trips and they did not like the idea that the out--of--towners were now sort of rebelling and saying, you know what, we can do it better. So there was a lot of acrimony. Seriously, it was not a very pretty picture, until we finally worked it out. Finally they just, in exasperation, said, okay. So it was now going to be about what I wanted to see. And there is a wealth of collecting out there--contemporary art, the likes of which--I don't know how many places really have things like that, and huge homes to accommodate it.

So the first year was really good. The second year was terrific. Last year, we were sold out to the point where we were 75 people and had a waiting list of, I think, 20. And we were turning people away from this. And what had happened is that Doug had used the curator's list, and he would talk to the curators at some of the museums and ask them if there were people that they thought would be interested in coming on the trip. And so they would do mailings for us when they realized that we weren't competition, that we were indeed giving them an opportunity to do something good for their collectors. And it was now about attracting a totally different group of people, because why preach to the choir? You want people to come who don't necessarily know much about this.

So the trips now became very heavy--duty art trips. And--

MR. ANDERSON: And eating trips.

MRS. ANDERSON: And eating trips. And, I mean, this is a group of people--

MR. ANDERSON: In people's homes.

MRS. ANDERSON: People like to be treated well. And so these trips were very well priced, because we didn't really charge more than the trip, in fact, was. And on top of it, you got a $500 patron ticket to the auction, which is, of course, the reason why the trips were happening in the first place. So they would start on Wednesday night, and you would have cocktails at--you know, Benaroyas [Jack and Becky] and the Rubinsteins [Sam and Gladys], and whoever, and then you would go to The Ruins [dinner club in Seattle, WA] for dinner.

And then the next day you would go up to Pilchuck, and Bill [Morris] would be blowing. And then you would go and see a few collections. And then the next--that night you would go out for dinner. And the next day you would go to Chihuly and have brunch there. And you would see maybe four or five other artists during the day. We would go to the auction. And then the next day, you would have brunch at the Shirley's--you know Jon and Mary Shirley, or the Brotmans [Susan and Jeff] or the--

MR. ANDERSON: The Trues [Bill and Ruth].

MRS. ANDERSON: The Trues or the Hedreens [Dick and Betty]. And you would meet some of the top hundred collectors in the United States, and you would see the collections, and you would hear what they had to say and be entertained by them in their homes. And you would come home and think, wow, that was quite something.

[Audio break.]

--no galleries. There was nothing like that, because you could do that for yourself.

MR. ANDERSON: No museums.

MRS. ANDERSON: No museums, unless they were something so extraordinary. Those trips became very much sought--after trips. This year, it sold out again.

MR. ANDERSON: And it is not until October, and it was sold out by July 4.

MRS. ANDERSON: Obviously it's a good formula. [They laugh.]

MR. ANDERSON: That is a good thing.

MRS. ANDERSON: And we have, like, 70, 75 people.

MS. OLDKNOW: That is a big group.

MRS. ANDERSON: We divide them.

MR. ANDERSON: The interesting part of this is that we asked Pilchuck to give us a scan on how much art was bought at the auction, and how much of that art was bought by the 75, which really turns out to be 40 to 45 families, because some people come by themselves and some come as couples. Out of the 800 to 1,000 people who come to the auction, what percent is bought by the people who come on the tour? And typically it's 25 to 35 percent. So 75 people, which is really under 50 couples, are buying 25 percent to a third of the million--plus dollars worth of art being sold at the auction. And that is a number that their development department has just started to comprehend.

And one of the things that we have felt over the years--Dale and I have collected collectors to bring to Seattle. If we retire from the board and from the advisory committee, the one thing they can post on our tombstone is we collected collectors. And we were sitting down to try to figure out, in our own silly way, on an airplane one day an economic impact study of the people, we brought to Seattle for the first time. And Seattle is so attractive to people who come back by themselves for all of the other stuff that they didn't get on these trips.

What possible economic impact did we have on the city of Seattle? And, frankly, someone ought to knight us for what it is. There was one trip that we did when Dale was--

MS. OLDKNOW: I think you deserve a key to the city.

MRS. ANDERSON: [Laughs.]

MR. ANDERSON: We do. And Pilchuck does. And we have a new development director there. And one of the things that she and I started talking about was that Pilchuck needs to do an economic--impact study of it on Seattle, in terms of how it perceives itself and sells itself for state and city funding, because the economic--it's not bullshit. I mean, this is real.

We did a trip for--Dale did a trip, I'm sorry, for the American Craft Museum when she was doing those trips. And she decided to do a trip to Seattle at the time of the Pilchuck auction. And because Marge was so busy doing her trip, Dale hired Katya Garrow, now Katya Heller, to lead the trip with her.

MRS. ANDERSON: I was afraid that--because Marge was doing the trips for the school that our group was going to get short shrift, and I thought, uh--uh, this was not going to happen, because the Collectors' Circle was really great and those trips are normally 30 people. So Katya and I really planned this trip. We did everything. This was where we started with the University of Washington ceramics department, and the glass--the jewelry society out there, and the contemporary art collecting and all of this. I did the trip again that I wanted to do with Janice Haggerty.

Well, the board of the museum got wind of this, and they decided that they were now going to have their board meeting in Seattle, which meant that I was going to have 70 people on the trip.

MR. ANDERSON: No, no, no, it was 52 people.

MRS. ANDERSON: Fifty--two? Okay, 52.

MS. OLDKNOW: So this was the American Craft Museum.

MRS. ANDERSON: The American Craft Museum. They wanted to go on the trip. The whole board wanted to go on the trip. So they joined the other people who were on the trip and we had--it was wild. I mean, just wild.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, at the end of that trip--because the buying was out of sight.

MRS. ANDERSON: Out of hand.

MR. ANDERSON: And at the end of the trip there was a dinner. And I stood up and I said, I'm going to ask you each to do one thing for me, and that is when you go home, just send me a postcard with a number on it and tell me how much money you spent.

MRS. ANDERSON: [Laughs.]

MR. ANDERSON: And everyone laughed. They thought it was very funny, and everyone did. And at the end of the day when we added it up, it was a $1,400,000.

MRS. ANDERSON: But this was all through Seattle.

MS. OLDKNOW: And this was in addition to what was raised at the auction.

MR. ANDERSON: Correct.

MRS. ANDERSON: Oh, yeah, because every--the number--

MR. ANDERSON: This had nothing to do with the auction.

MS. OLDKNOW: At the auction they are raising almost a million dollars.

MR. ANDERSON: Correct.

MRS. ANDERSON: But when Doug gave you the number of the impact at the auction of 25 to 30 percent, that has nothing to do with the shopping that they did at all of the artists' and every place they went.

MS. OLDKNOW: I think that is an important thing to say, that it does not dilute the buying that occurs elsewhere.

MRS. ANDERSON: Not at all, not at all.

MR. ANDERSON: There is a case that I like to make that if you come to Pilchuck to the auction, one of the things that you get is you get to see young artists at the beginning of their career. And a lot of these artists are people who were awarded scholarships to Pilchuck on a competitive basis, and in order to thank Pilchuck, they are giving their work to the auction.

MRS. ANDERSON: And they are giving good pieces.

MR. ANDERSON: And you would--and because Pilchuck--and this is a Chihuly thing completely. We remember the years where there was no catalogue for the auction, and the years where there was a black--and--white catalogue. And Chihuly said that he would tell everybody not to give work unless we did a color catalogue. And Marge started doing a color catalogue. Now, that was tremendously important, because in that catalogue each of these artists has a photograph in color of their work, so that the galleries get to see it.

MS. OLDKNOW: Combine that with New Glass Review and you have got an incredible resource there.

MR. ANDERSON: You know, someone ought to publish all of the auction catalogues as a compendium.

MS. OLDKNOW: Or just put them online.

MR. ANDERSON: Or put them online.

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah, that would be a good idea.

MR. ANDERSON: Right. All right. I can't--Tina, do me a favor, you recommend that. I can't.

MS. OLDKNOW: No more ideas. No more ideas."

[...]

"

MR. ANDERSON: There was a book many years ago, and Tony Wimpfheimer published when he was an editor at Random House, called The Proud Possessors [Aline B. Saarinen. The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times and Tastes of Some Adventurous American Art Collectors. New York: Random House (Vintage Books), 1968], which was a wonderful study of collectors. When we gave an advance copy of this book to Phil Kotler, he said that he would love to see a book about collectors and the work that is in their homes. And I can see a snake pit in terms of how you go about doing that, and I don't know whether you can sell this to a publisher, because it might appear to be a vanity book. But maybe there is some value in that.

There is a whole area of installation art that has come out of these folks who started by the campfire at Pilchuck 35, 40 years ago, guys who could barely blow a bubble, who now are doing the entire face of the Time Warner building. And I think that there is a fabulous book on installations that somebody could write, and if someone wants to write it and if we can find the money for it, I would be happy to play this role again. Want to do it? [They laugh.]

MS. OLDKNOW: Yeah, I'll do it.

MR. ANDERSON: But I think there is a market for that, and I think that is interesting. I think that is an interesting story about the journey of some of these artists from RISD [Rhode Island School of Design, Providence] to doing the Reichstag or something. I mean, these guys have really come a long way.

MS. OLDKNOW: And of course, one of the leaders of that is Chihuly.

MR. ANDERSON: Yes.

MS. OLDKNOW: Who showed a lot of people the way, and then they took off.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, Dale Chihuly is the engine that powered this whole train. Anybody who has anything negative to say about Dale Chihuly is going to get hit by me with a bat. I mean, this guy made everything possible. There is nobody like Dale Chihuly. I mean, he is a spectacular man, and the most generous man I have ever, ever met.

MS. OLDKNOW: Incredibly generous.

MR. ANDERSON: And has done well by doing good.

MS. OLDKNOW: Good. Just to conclude our interview, and I think we have covered a lot of territory, I wanted to ask you what have been some of your favorite pieces that have come and gone? You said you loved the Ginny Ruffner, even after you gave it away. You had to have another one made that was like it. Now you have got this plan where you install pieces in your apartment so that Doug can't give them away, so that you can keep them.

A lot of collectors say they could never give away a piece, because they love them too much, and they must be with them all of the time. And you are wonderful the way you keep adding and processing through and giving away. What have been some of your all--time favorites?

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, I would say that most of the favorites at the moment are living in this house, or in Florida. But there are artists that I notice after all of these years that we seem to--that I seem to buy in depth, if that is not the right expression for it, whatever. I love Gregory Grenon. I think that he is a phenomenal painter. The fact that he happens to use reverse painting on glass is beside the point. I think he is a German Expressionist. I adore him. I have big pieces in both of my bathrooms. And I would have a hard time getting up in the morning and not seeing him. [Laughs.] It's just how I feel.

There is a--Laura Donefer was the first piece I ever bought of hers many years ago. It is made out of bone, and fur, and hair, and glass, and things, and it is one of the most frightening--looking things I have ever seen, and that is how I feel in the morning when I get up. And then on the outside near my sink, I have a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful little Tom Wesselman nude, and that is how I like to feel the rest of the day. But those are important things to me.

MS. OLDKNOW: What was the hardest thing before the Ginny Ruffner that you have given away?

MRS. ANDERSON: Well, I wasn't particularly happy about the Steve Weinberg that Doug gave away, that I wasn't ready to give away.

MR. ANDERSON: How about the Toots piece that I gave to the Norton that you keep beating me about?

MS. OLDKNOW: Oh, I remember that.

MRS. ANDERSON: Oh, it was the most perfect one, and it had copper inside and I loved that, and she swore--Toots swore that there were three other ones, or two other ones, that were made around the same time. And her mother had one, I think, and she found another one. And she showed them to me. Neither of them were it. It was the one that the Norton took. That was my ultimate favorite of all of them.

I mean, we have given--Louis Sclafani--

MR. ANDERSON: Yeah, sure.

MRS. ANDERSON: All right, he was doing these bottle things. And Doug decided it was time for them to leave. And I loved them. I just loved them.

MS. OLDKNOW: So he decides when it's time to leave.

MRS. ANDERSON: Mm--hmm. [Affirmative.] He is cruel.

MS. OLDKNOW: Your objects.

MR. ANDERSON: Such power. [Laughs.]

MRS. ANDERSON: Sometimes we really discuss it as it's being moved out of the house, but generally--[they laugh]--I'm not really privy to his pattern of what he does. But the Sclafanis were leaving and they were going to Racine. And I said, but I'm not ready for them to go. He said, you'll find another thing to put there. I said, excuse me; I want them. I love them. His work has changed. He said, I'm making pillows. These things were so divine. But they were going to Bruce. So I didn't feel so terrible; I could see them. On the other hand, when they got there, one was broken. And we were--Sclafani could never make another one. So I was really--I was unhappy about that. I felt that if they had stayed here longer, maybe when they were ready to leave, they would have been intact, because they weren't ready to go either.

MR. ANDERSON: I don't remember that about that.

MRS. ANDERSON: Oh, I loved them.

MS. OLDKNOW: Do you have any gag orders on any works of art--that you tell Doug, no way is this ever leaving?

MRS. ANDERSON: No, actually I don't. But we almost came to blows--the first Tom Patti I ever bought was at Holsten in Florida, and it was in the '80s. It was this important piece, because it was right when he was going from one shape to the next, and it was really fabulous. And I said, oh, I have to have it.

MR. ANDERSON: It was a Solar Riser.

MRS. ANDERSON: All right, and it had an indentation. It looked like an eye cup.

MR. ANDERSON: It still is a Solar Riser. [They laugh.]

MRS. ANDERSON: It is still. So I said, we'll buy it. I, of course, didn't bother to ask the price. It is not my area. So when Doug turned purple huffing and puffing, I said, what is the problem? He said, well, it's $12,000, which in those days for a piece of glass, or anything, was a lot of money.

MS. OLDKNOW: Tom has always led the field in price too.

MRS. ANDERSON: On pricing. So I said I have to have it. Doug said absolutely not. I said, oh, do you want to make a bet? So Doug tried to lose it. He tried to negotiate himself out of it with Ken Holsten. They had such carryings on, and finally Tom and Marilyn and I figured we're going to put it in the press. So the Shiny Sheet [Palm Beach, FL], which was a local paper, took a picture of us with the piece in hand like we had bought it. So how could Doug say we weren't buying it? But I'm telling you, for years he razzed me on that. [They laugh.]

MR. ANDERSON: I called Ken Holsten--and Ken razzes me about this--I called him and I said, Ken--it was the next day--and I said, I know that Dale hasn't negotiated the price with you. He said, oh, that's not a problem. I said, oh, good, I'm glad to hear it. So you'll give us our normal 40--percent discount--[they laugh]--and I said it with a straight face, and he got quiet. And he said, no, I don't do that. And I had someone else who would buy it last night. Why don't you call them, I said? He said, well, the moment is gone. Okay, so now let's talk about this moment. [Laughs.] But ultimately I was just fooling with him.

MRS. ANDERSON: Another thing I thoroughly enjoyed. When the Craft Museum did the glass show, Bill Traver had done a Bertil Vallien show. And they were these beautifully spacy heads on wooden bases that were very tall, and he had this really New Age sort of music. And Doug was sitting there absolutely in a trance. And I thought, ooh, I love this!

MR. ANDERSON: There were 50 of them, or 40 of them, in his gallery.

MS. OLDKNOW: I remember that show.

MRS. ANDERSON: You remember that show?

MS. OLDKNOW: Mm--hmm [affirmative], it was incredible.

MRS. ANDERSON: So I knew that when they were going to come back again, I really wanted them. So now Doug Heller had them, and he was the one who was responsible for, I guess, doing Bertil's thing for that show. So I said to Doug [Heller]--and I never do this because I think that this is cheating and it is not fun to outmaneuver somebody else. But I said, you know what, Dougie, I really want to go and I want first crack at them. I want to buy some, and Bill and Fraeda Kopfman want some, too.

MR. ANDERSON: And George and Dorothy.

MRS. ANDERSON: And George and Dorothy. But George and Dorothy had. All right, but Bill and Fraeda didn't have any, and we had had other pieces, but they had all been given away. But I really wanted these things.

So we walked in as Bertil was setting them up, and they were moving heads around the place. I mean, it was just unbelievable. So I walked in and I said, okay--it took me about 15 minutes and I bought six. I bought three for me, and I bought three for Bill and Fraeda. And I said if Bill and Fraeda didn't like them, I would keep them, or Doug could exchange them, or whatever. Bertil looked at me, and then he started really explaining what these were about, which was this dream world with people and all of this kind of stuff. But I love those pieces. They are some of my favorite things.

MR. ANDERSON: When art collectors who don't know anything about glass come into the house, that is the first thing that they are drawn to.

Those--they are tall sculpture, and it's Giacometti meets--I don't know what--Cycladic art.

MRS. ANDERSON: Everybody knows that they are going to see Chihuly, and they all know what it is, and when they see the staircase, that is such a "wow." I mean, it is such an incredible installation. Everybody knows what that is, so you expect that. But, like, Tom's spheres are very subtle, and you wouldn't think that that would get the response it does, but in fact it does. So does Gregory. Gregory Grenon gets a lot of attention, because people who like painting basically like his work. Of course, Bill Morris--what is to be said about Bill?

Jay Musler is a really interesting guy. I like his work, I like his sensibility, I like his sense of humor.

MR. ANDERSON: I like him.

MRS. ANDERSON: I like him enormously. I mean, I love the Akio Takamori. I mean, he is truly one of my all--time favorites, and I like him enormously.

MR. ANDERSON: I like him.

MS. OLDKNOW: You tend to collect more than one object by an artist, which I really like, because a lot of people do it like stamp collecting: I have got one of this, one of that. And you don't do that.

MRS. ANDERSON: Flora and Joey. I think we started collecting when they started doing the heads with the wood.

MS. OLDKNOW: Yes.

MRS. ANDERSON: The Sentinels or whatever they were called. I would say that we have two of those, but we have collected the fruit, we have collected the boat image. We have a pretty good assortment of their work.

MR. ANDERSON: And those little--the early cylinders with the dolls on them.

MRS. ANDERSON: Yeah, we have some of those. Yeah, you're right. I like--the artists that I like, after all is said and done, that is still what I go back to--are those artists. And I have to say, when I always say, uh, I'm not going to buy another whatever, when we walk into Chihulyland, and invariably I see something that I want, it never ceases to amaze me, because there's nothing so revolutionary about it, but they are so beautiful. And if you really know what a good Chihuly is, they are really extraordinary.

MR. ANDERSON: Well, the new best friend in the glass world is Hank [Murta] Adams.

MRS. ANDERSON: Oh, I love him.

MR. ANDERSON: You know, you talk about collecting through an entire art movement, and then getting to the end, because I always say that the glass movement is over. But you go back, you look back at--and I think that we have probably bought something from everyone of any consequence--we have owned something that has passed through our home and is now living in a museum some place. Hank, we never got, never knew him, never got his work, until Bill Warmus's show. And when we--

MRS. ANDERSON: Bill and Fraeda Kopman have two of them. And when I looked at them, I really looked at them. I mean, they were fabulous. I think Hank is fabulous.

MS. OLDKNOW: Dick Marquis?

MRS. ANDERSON: Dick Marquis. He's absolutely sensational. His work is so beautifully done. Now, a lot of these artists, we have given away pieces of theirs. So it's a matter of fact--the capsule, the pill capsule of Dick's with the little thing [American Acid Capsule, c. 1970]. Well, Jane--the Met is getting that.

MR. ANDERSON: Jane laid a claim on it. She had got that one. I'm trying to think. But there is--Bruce and Lisa have some of Flora and Joey's fruit. They have the small fruit bowl. But now we have one still in Florida that is the latticinio fruit. We have that. But I don't know. And then, of course, there is the photography, which is--I don't even know what to say about that. But, like, I love Carol Eckert. These are wonderful, little, miniature, beautiful things.

MRS. ANDERSON: Kind of wonder what kind of movie is going on in her head. [Laughs.]

MS. OLDKNOW: Well, this is good. I think that we are going to wrap now. It has been a wonderful interview. And a wonderful process.

MRS. ANDERSON: This was fabulous.

MS. OLDKNOW: Thank you very much.

MRS. ANDERSON: Yay. [Laughs, clapping.]

[END OF INTERVIEW.]"

Oral history interview with Dale and Doug Anderson, 2005 July 21-22, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interviewer Tina Oldknow. website accessed June 6, 2009. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/anders05.htm