Oral history interview with Henry Halem, 2005 May 14

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Henry Halem, 2005 May 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project For Craft and Decorative Arts in America

Interview with Henry Halem
Conducted by William Warmus
At the Artist's home in Kent, Ohio
May 14, 2005

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Henry Halem on May 14, 2005. The interview took place at the artist's home in Kent, Ohio, and was conducted by William Warmus for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America.

Henry Halem and William Warmus have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

WILLIAM WARMUS: This is William Warmus interviewing Henry Halem at the artist's home in Kent, Ohio.

HENRY HALEM: Kent, Ohio.

MR. WARMUS: And the street address here?

MR. HALEM: Four twenty-nine Carthage Avenue, Kent, Ohio.

MR. WARMUS: And this is for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. This disc is number one.

Good morning, Henry.

MR. HALEM: [Laughs] Good morning, Bill.

MR. WARMUS: We're sitting around the table in the kitchen, and I'm going to start the interview with the suggested questions, and I'm sure we'll loosen up as we go along. Henry is putting his eyeglasses back on. I have water on the table and we have copies of Glass Notes: A Reference for the Glass Artist, by Henry Halem [Kent, OH: Franklin Mills Press, 1996]. Tell me when and where you were born.

MR. HALEM: I was born in New York City in 1938-May 5, 1938. And I grew up in the Bronx and lived there until I was 18, until I went to college. And I only came back to visit my parents, until they moved out of the Bronx.

MR. WARMUS: Can you describe your childhood and the family background, and what it was like growing up?

MR. HALEM: Yeah, just briefly, my parents were the children of immigrants that had come over from Russia. And my father grew up in the Lower East Side, and my mother, I guess she had a similar background. And they-when my father started working, he moved to the Bronx in the early '30s, and my grandparents-basically, I never knew my grandparents on my father's side. They died before I was born, and my mother's parents died right after I was born, so I never really had grandparents. And the family itself was-although there were a lot of uncles and aunts, they never really spoke that much to each other. It wasn't a very close-knit family. I never really had that type of family that other friends of mine had with aunts and uncles that came over all the time.

So my father worked in Harlem, and I remember I used to go down and visiting with him in Harlem. He had eventually an office near the Apollo Theater, and I remember that. And one of the guys that worked for my father-I never forgot-was a guy named Ben E. King who became-you know, "Save The Last Dance For Me"-became a very famous soul singer.

MR. WARMUS: What was your father's business?

MR. HALEM: My father never went to school when he was younger, and he developed for real estate people dispossessed proceedings. He used to dispossess-for the courts-he used to write up these papers so that these landlords could kick people out of their houses. And before that, my father used to collect rents, and I remember he carried a gun. And he used to show me his pearl-handle, nickel-plated Smith & Wesson Special he had. And I used to play with it in his office. He used to take the shells out and I used to go bang, bang, bang, bang with it.

I really enjoyed the childhood in the Bronx with my friends. I had a lot of friends in the Bronx. We used to play stickball and punchball and stoopball, and all of those things you read about now. We played all of those games in the street-pitching-in, we'd call it, ring-a-leavey-oh, and all those games that kids played. And the favorite time was after dinner, going out when it was still light out in the springtime and playing. And when it used to rain, there used to be rivers that ran along the curb, and we would take Popsicle sticks and weave these rafts with Popsicle sticks, and go up a couple of houses and put it in the raging stream and see it go down the sewer-stuff like that. So we had a really fun childhood. It was really great.

And friends for life, who I've never seen, except one who moved to Cleveland recently. And so-we kind of-every time we get together, we relive our childhood, talk about-

MR. WARMUS: What was his name?

MR. HALEM: Jerry Fisch. And he, for some odd reason, about 10 years ago, moved to Cleveland, and so we reacquainted ourselves, and we have a great time when we get together. And he always has Passover at his house, and we get together and sit around and talk about our dead parents and so on and about-but in a really honest way; it's interesting how we talk about our parents in a very honest way, and about all of their problems that they had and the problems we had with them growing up. And so the things that we used to think were so great, we look back on and they really weren't all that great.

MR. WARMUS: What about your mother?

MR. HALEM: My mother was probably the guiding influence in my life. We were never really close as mother and son throughout our lives. And my mother lived to be-my father died young, and my mother lived to be 80, 81 years old-died a few years ago. We were never close. I know she loved me a great deal, but I really struggled to try and find a real love for her. She became a professional woman and I never really felt she was a mother. She was always kind of analyzing me and finding problems that I had with this, that, or the other thing. She was very competitive. When I became an artist, she decided to take up painting.

But growing up, she knew I needed an education, and my father, who wasn't the most sophisticated guy in the world-but I loved him dearly-my mother knew that the public school situation really wasn't going to happen for me-that going to DeWitt Clinton High School, like my brother did, wasn't going to happen. I was not troubled, but I was a very delinquent kind of kid. My brother was very bright. I always followed him in school and I was always compared to him and-you know, hope-you're-as-smart-as-your-brother kind of thing and I knew I never could be. So I just took the opposite way and was very delinquent in school and did very poorly academically.

So my mom-when it came to high school-got me into this private school called Walden School in New York, which was a very-maybe not a calming influence on me-but a very important influence in relationship to small classes, very bright students, and teachers that actually took an interest in me: very bright teachers, very interested teachers. I didn't do well academically there, but I discovered my ability to be creative as an artist. There was a woman by the name of Sylvia Weill, who was-

MR. WARMUS: Spell that?

MR. HALEM: W-E-I-L-L, Sylvia Weill. And I got turned on to making jewelry, and she was very encouraging and told me how good I was. Now, I didn't do well academically, but I was always in the art room making jewelry. And I wouldn't say she was a mother to me, but she had things and encouragements and accepted me for who and what I was, and never tried to do more than I was capable of doing, and drew out of me this creative spirit. And then the director of the school, Sam Nash, said I probably should apply to art school.

Oh, before that-I'm sorry-there's another very important thing-the combination of that. My mother found a camp, this very socialist camp called Shaker Village Work Camp that this guy Jerry and Cybil Count-C-O-U-N-T-ran. And I went there-there weren't counselors. This was a teenage camp, kind of like a Buck's Rock Camp, that is still in existence, but it was real socialist. Pete Seeger used to come and play there, and I think Woody Guthrie, maybe, came there and so on.

But there was-we went to Sturbridge Village [Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, MA] on an outing once, and there was a guy throwing pots. I remember this so clearly-this was the seminal influence in my life to be an artist, before Sylvia, before high school. I was like 13, and I saw this guy had thrown all of these pitchers, ceramic pitchers, and they were all lined up and it was-and I watched him throw on the potter's wheel.

And I had never seen anything like this; it was just this whole experience. I never knew this existed in any way, shape, or form. And I saw this, and there was a moment, this epiphany. I said, I'm going to do that. And I remember just staring there. All the other kids at the camp went on to other things, and I just stood there, and they had to grab me and pull me away.

Went back to the camp, and the guy-there was a potter's wheel in the ceramic place-and I was always short-and it was this stand-up wheel made out of the half-shaft of a Ford automobile,I believe, and he had poured concrete into it-and I remember teaching myself how to throw pots-standing up, kicking this wheel. And the guy there said I was terrific. And I taught myself how to throw pots.

And I remember, morning till night, I was stuck-not stuck-but stayed in the ceramic shop, stuck at this wheel, just throwing pots. And I remember coming home, and my mother looked at me and said, "You're pale as a ghost; didn't you go outside and do anything?" And I played baseball now and then, but it was this potter's wheel. And I said, "I want to make pottery." So my mom got me enrolled in the Greenwich House in New York.

MR. WARMUS: What was it you think that attracted you to it?

MR. HALEM: It's a good question. What did-I never thought of what it was that attracted me. I think it was the process-watching this guy throw pots. I remember years and years later, I researched who the guy was, and the guy's name was O'Leary. I never knew his first name.

MR. WARMUS: O-L-E-

MR. HALEM: I guess, O-L-E-A-R-Y. His name was O'Leary, and I guess it was the process of watching him throw pots. I really don't know what touched me deep down inside, but I-the Greenwich House then-I ran into people that became very famous in the pottery. And I'd go-

MR. WARMUS: Where was Greenwich House?

MR. HALEM: On Jane Street, I believe, in the Village.

MR. WARMUS: So G-R-E-E-N-W-I-C-H?

MR. HALEM: Yeah, Greenwich House, it's still in existence. It was a very famous place. I think it was part of the Henry Street Settlement.

MR. WARMUS: Okay, I know that.

MR. HALEM: And Jane Hartsook was the director and she was there a hundred years.

MR. WARMUS: Last name spelled-

MR. HALEM: Hartsook-H-A-R-T-S-O-O-K, I believe. I'd have to check that though; she was very well-known. And I went down there, and there were people-like Marge Israel was down there, and other people, whose names I've forgot, who became very important in the ceramic field. There was a group, I think-[laughs]-called the Argylists or something like that-can't quite remember.

MR. WARMUS: How old were you at this time?

MR. HALEM: Fourteen-13, 14. And I got a little job down there making clay for some of the people that were in residence there.

MR. WARMUS: What do you mean when you say making clay?

MR. HALEM: Well, I would make their clay for them to throw on the potter's wheel. You had to make clay. We made it from dry clay, and I learned how to make clay; I learned how to mix glazes for them, learned how to fire pots. And I was consumed by this, and they took an interest in me. Again, it was a place that I was well liked and part of a team, which in my house, I really wasn't. I wasn't part of a team at home because my parents didn't get along with each other. So there was conflict in my home, but when I was at Greenwich House, there was no conflict.

So I made pots. I still think I have some of the pots downstairs that I made there. But I learned how to throw on a kick-wheel, which was this sit-down wheel, and it was a wheel that was designed by Bernard Leach; it was called a Leach wheel. And it was a big bench you sat at and you kicked-and I was great at kicking on the wheel and throwing. And I became a good potter.

And when I went back to school, to high school, they didn't have pottery there, but I was going to be a potter. And I could throw really well, and I remember applying to Alfred University [Alfred, NY] and Rhode Island School of Design [Providence, RI]. I interviewed at Alfred, and I had a portfolio of pots I had thrown. And this was-people didn't really have pots that they had thrown at that time to apply to school.

MR. WARMUS: Approximately what year are we in now?

MR. HALEM: We're in 1955 or '56. I graduated from high school in-I guess-June of '56 and I started RISD in-I guess-fall of '56.

MR. WARMUS: So you were-were you accepted at both places?

MR. HALEM: No, that's what I was just getting into. Alfred interviewed me and I showed them the pots and they said, "Oh, that's terrific and everything." And they rejected me, because my high school academic record was really poor.

I interviewed at RISD and brought my pots with me, and I had to take an exam, and it was to draw a chair-they used to have a drawing exam and so on. And I guess I did okay at that, because they accepted me, and I remember it was the happiest day of my life, because my father never thought I was ever going to go to college, I was so poor academically.

And just as a little aside, he thought, I'm going to have to do something for this kid, because he's not going to go to college, he's not going to have any skills. So he was going to buy-what was coming into existence then was Laundromats-and he was going to buy me a Laundromat. And he was going to set me up-[laughs]-in the Laundromat business.

Now, if he had, I probably would be the Laundromat magnate now. I'd probably have a gazillion dollars, and own all the Laundromats in the country. But that wasn't meant to be. I went to RISD, and that was the defining-that was the defining moment of my life, was going to the Rhode Island School of Design.

MR. WARMUS: Before we go onto that part, did you have any other childhood experiences, like trips you took, or any other people that you should touch on?

MR. HALEM: Yeah, it was the high school experiences. It was the neighborhood, growing up with kids; I mean, it was like being in a little community. No one moved out. You were born and raised with those kids till the age of 18. You played with them. On rainy days, you'd go up to their apartment. It was an apartment building; it wasn't a house. It was a big six-floor apartment building, and we all lived in the same building or the building next door. We were all of the same ethnic background. We all shared common experiences in growing up.

MR. WARMUS: And what about religious?

MR. HALEM: Religious-we used to go to temple; we were all bar mitzvahed. Everyone went to each other's bar mitzvah. Those bar mitzvah parties were-the memories of those, I mean, we would have food fights at them-throwing olives. I remember they were insane. We were insane kids. Normal kids, you know. I mean today, the things that we did were what we thought was crazy then, now doesn't exist anymore. Kids don't do that anymore.

And those bar mitzvahs, going to temple on the holy days, and so on. And it was rather conservative. I remember clearly, the women had to sit in one part of the temple and the men-we sat downstairs, and the women sat upstairs. And we shared all of that.

And I think that was very important that we shared all of those experiences together, religiously, and so on. And so there was never any conflict with any of that. And the parents, they all knew each other, and they used to come down and watch us play stickball, and they would actually get involved sometimes.

And one of the things that they used to do was-one of the coming-of-age things was throwing a ball over the roof. And if you could throw a tennis ball over the six-story roof, then you had come of age. That was our-besides being bar mitzvahed-throwing a ball over the roof was the rite of passage.

And I remember there was a guy named Moe Fuchs, a friend of my father's, and he once threw a football over the roof. And that, I remember that-we were all, it was, like, dead in our tracks. There was this guy and he threw a football over the roof. And then we'd run upstairs, six stories up, and you'd go up to the roof and get it, and you'd lean over and throw the ball back down. So we would do that.

And then during the summer, they'd go up-we had what was called "tar beach"-and all the people would go up and bring blankets and chairs, and they'd go up and sun themselves to get sunburns on tar beach, on the roof. And then television had come in, and then all of the antennas were up and it was a sea of antennas-television antennas.

And so my father-I remember we put our antenna up and I had to drop the television antenna lines down. And everyone faced somewhere-so I would be leaning over with my brother and we dropped the line down and he'd pull it in the house and attach it to the back of the TV. And so we had that.

MR. WARMUS: Were you aware of any differences between growing up in such an urban environment and people living in a country environment? Do you have some sense of that?

MR. HALEM: Well, that's a good question. Things are-when we moved here, I'd have to relate that to my daughter and her growing up, and her childhood with her friends. And I think in a sense, most of her friends really stayed here through junior high school and high school. I think it was similar. I mean, she would visit her friends and sleep over and do all of that-what we did. It wasn't as close.

We didn't have the religious aspect of it here, at all, because I kind of really-Sandy and I really dropped the whole religious thing later on; it just really didn't exist outside of-outside of nothing. It just didn't exist. I mean, we didn't go to temple or anything here. I was caught up with my teaching. Sandy, you know, was a writer. She stayed home, although she was teaching high school at the time.

But what Jess did was-after school she would go to the home of an adult person that we found-this Italian woman, Mrs. Scarpitti-and Jess learned all the Italian ways. They were old-school Italian. And I remember once coming in and Jess was cleaning squid-just learned how to clean squid, and I remember all of this stuff.

So she had Mrs. Scarpitti, who was like a grandma, was like the grandparents she didn't have. And so she had her friends, and I remember Jess would come home and she'd say-she'd relate an experience at a friend's house. For instance-she said, "You know, before we went to sleep, we had to pray at the foot of this girl's bed." And I said, "Well you know, they're Christians and they're very religious, that's what they do."

She said, "No, it wasn't the prayer; it was a waterbed." And she found that just really strange, praying at the foot of a waterbed-and that image. And my daughter always had that different spin on things, and I never would have thought of-it wasn't the prayer that threw her, it was the idea that it was at the foot of a waterbed that got her. [Laughs.] And we never forgot that.

And things in high school, my daughter always saw really funny things that went on, or not so funny. And it became part of her psyche, and she later on-when she grew up and moved out, she took up stand-up comedy. And all of these things growing up in a small town-she couldn't get out of this town fast enough. She found out later she really disliked Kent. It was like her parents were from New York and Philadelphia and New Jersey, and she was filled with Philadelphia, New York City, the Bronx, and the big city. And she couldn't get out of here fast enough. And so she went to college in New York City, and really became a New Yorker.

MR. WARMUS: Where did she go to college?

MR. HALEM: She went to Sarah Lawrence [Bronxville, NY]. And it was really great-it was small; she met incredible people. Franklin Roosevelt's grandson taught economics or whatever he taught there, and famous artists taught art, and all of these incredible people taught English and so on. And so she was imbued with that really intellectual spirit of Sarah Lawrence, and went on from there, and she made great friends. And then when she left college, she got a job with Bella Abzug as her assistant and traveled all over the world with Bella as her personal assistant and got to know all of the women in the women's movement-got very active politically, and then just had had it up to her eyeballs, and got out of that. So she really became her own person. She really became very independent, and I think it was more from the home than it was the influence.

MR. WARMUS: Excuse me, and that's your daughter, Jessica.

MR. HALEM: Jessica, our only child. Yeah, just one child, Jessica.

MR. WARMUS: We'll have to come back to her. But I thought it was really nice, actually, the way you segued from your upbringing in an urban environment to her upbringing and being saturated by what you had received. So I thought that was a nice way to go through it.

MR. HALEM: Yeah, yeah sure. Yeah.

MR. WARMUS: Let's go back to-where you were applying-you're accepted at RISD.

MR. HALEM: Right. I remember when my acceptance to RISD came, I was screaming and yelling and jumping all over the school on being accepted, because I never thought I was going to be accepted anywhere. My rejection from Alfred had come first, and it was my first choice because it was the ceramics school and I wanted to be a potter more than anything in the world.

And the encouragement from my parents to be able to want to do that, and encouraging me to go and do that, was very important in my life. They didn't say, no, you can't do that; you've got to do something that you're going to make a living at. And so I got accepted and my father knew nothing about colleges, even though my brother actually went to Alfred as an engineer. He's five years older than me, so he was already at Alfred, I believe. I don't quite remember that.

But anyway, the day before, or a day or two before, school started, my father drove-we drove up to Providence to look for an apartment. There were no dorms at RISD at the time. And we couldn't find an apartment, because everyone knew about colleges and art schools or whatever, and they were all there already in their apartments.

So we finally found this little apartment, and it was my first time away from home really-I mean, besides going to camp. But when you go to camp, you're still really at home because you had-you know, you were coming back. But I remember knowing that this was it; this was the beginning of another part of my life-and being in this room alone in this rooming house, with a couple of other students around, and going to class.

Oh, I remember, I thought I was going to enroll and just be a potter. I didn't know what art school was. I really didn't know what art school was. I didn't know you had to take drawing, sculpting, or two-dimensional design, three-dimensional design. Now, remember this is 1956 and RISD's program was you had freshman foundation; you couldn't major in anything. And I was very upset at that-freshman foundation, what is this? I had to take all these other classes. I had to learn to draw. I had to learn two-dimensional design.

And the teachers there-it was imbued-I didn't know what it was-was a Bauhaus program, their freshman foundation. And so I remember one of the lecturers there was Sybil Maholy-Nagy-it was [Laszlo] Maholy-Nagy's wife-would come in and lecture. And so she would lecture there. A guy by the name of LaFarge taught three-dimensional design. He had a very heavy accent and I remember him and I think he was-I don't know where he was from. I think he was from Germany.

So I took all of these courses, and made friends, and we lived what we did at school. And we lived on the street-we all lived on Benefit Street. There were no dorms for us to live in, but the girls had dorms. It was very interesting how that worked. And when we dated, we had to have the girls back to the dorms by-there was a curfew, like 11:00-you had to have the girls back at the dorms by 11:00, and we never questioned it; you know, it was something that was just part of living.

But during the day, we'd go to class, and the friendships went very deep at the time. And then the next year, you were able to choose your major, and the reason they had that freshman foundation was so that you-even though you may have come with the idea of having a major, if you learned how to do all of these other things, you then had the options of really choosing whatever it is-you were exposed to all of the other things.

So then you might find something that was out of the realm of what you had in your mind to be at that time. And so if you learned how to draw, you learned how to really visualize on paper, and not in your mind, different things, and drawing became the language of vision. And so even though I really never was able to draw very well, I was able to realize things that I was thinking on paper, or sculpt, or whatever it was we responded to with whatever side of the brain, [an idea] which didn't exist at that time.

And then it was the second year, and then I went in to major as a potter. But in the second year, we weren't allowed to use the potter's wheel. And it was like, that's all I wanted to do. So now this was the second year, so we learned all these mold-making techniques, working with plaster, learning how to mix glazes. Lyle Perkins was the teacher, and Dorothy Perkins-she taught also.

And so we learned all of this-they were the last, really, of the old-fashioned teachers. It wasn't the time of [Peter] Voulkos; it was the transition time. But I knew these other people that were now coming into focus in pottery. Perkins didn't know these people. So we had a ceramic club, and I remember I was part of the ceramic club, and they asked who do we want to come here-they would have people come in-so I said-and my friend Keith Hollingworth-his name was Kappy, he had a nickname.

MR. WARMUS: Spell that.

MR. HALEM: Keith, K-E-I-T-H, H-O-L-L-I-N-G-W-O-R-T-H. Kappy Hollingworth, or Keith was his real name. We used to call him Kappy. And we knew this woman who had had an article in Craft Horizons-her name was Marge Israel-and we said, this is the person we want. So Kappy and I traveled to New York and we went down to the Greenwich House and we found Marge, and we said, we want you to come to RISD and do a workshop. She said sure, she'd love to. And I had a car. It was my mother's car I had borrowed, and we had driven to New York.

And I remember she said, oh, there's a Picasso show-a Picasso ceramics show at-it was at-I can't remember the name of where the heck it was. And she said, "Would you take me to the show?" And we were so excited; there she was sitting on the front seat next to me, who I thought this was-she was the beginning and end-all of ceramics in this group of potters-David Weinrib, Karen Karnes, there were a couple of others in it that were these exciting people. And, of course, you know, Pete Voulkos out on the West Coast and all of the other guys.

MR. WARMUS: And how were you aware of, say, Voulkos's work-was it from a magazine? Or were you able to see any of his work?

MR. HALEM: I had-well, in 1956, I had hitchhiked-it was the summer of '56, I believe, or maybe '57, it probably was-we hitchhiked across the United States. And we ended up in L.A., and I ended up visiting all of the potters whose names are gone now. It was a husband and wife team. And then we ended up going to the Los Angeles County Art Institute, was it? Voulkos had a show there. It was this major-either his first major exhibition of work-and I remember walking into this show and seeing pots and sculptures that weighed hundreds of pounds. It was like being hit by a giant wave. I remember seeing this.

But this was after-no, this was at the same time. Time gets a little confused here; it's a number of years ago. But seeing this show and then going to the studios of these other potters that threw these gigantic pots-I mean they were huge things-things I had never really seen. When you see pictures of things, you really don't get a sense of scale. Seeing the real thing and the real color gave me a sense of really what I wanted to be and do. And I came home, having seen this Voulkos stuff, and I knew, I just knew, I wanted to be Pete Voulkos. And I had met him there and he was bigger than life-all through his life he was bigger than life.

But I remember-to go back a bit now-we were getting this very, very traditional slip-casting background on work and throwing pots: that everything was on-center and everything was very traditional in our education with Lyle. You didn't really deviate much. A lot of hand building-we did a lot of hand building and paddling stuff around and so on-that was part of it, but it really was not, kind of, encouraged to be an iconoclast.

And I remember we brought Marge in, and I even have black-and-white photographs I had taken of that. And I had those-I mean, she was very important. And I remember her sitting down at a wheel and she started to throw. She never really centered the clay; she just stuck her hand in it and just threw this stuff that was all off-center, wobbly, and funky, and Kappy and I thought this was the greatest thing in the world. And if the pot collapsed, she just pushed all of the clay together, didn't wedge it or anything, and would just try and do something again.

Now, I don't know whether she was doing it because that's the way she did it, or she just sized up what was going on there and was just trying to break set and just throw that monkey wrench in that system. And I remember Lyle making excuses, and he kept saying, "Well, I'm sure she does know how to wedge clay, and, you know, throw-I guess-the correct way or whatever it was." But Kappy and I would have nothing to do with that.

MR. WARMUS: Explain what wedging is.

MR. HALEM: Well, wedging is when you take the clay and you get all the air and lumps and stuff out of it and you manipulate the clay-it's like kneading bread. And you prepare the potter's wheel.

MR. WARMUS: Did you like that part of it? It sounds like your early attraction to clay was very visceral and-

MR. HALEM: Yes, I really did like that and I was very good at it-wedging clay. And because of that, you really built a really strong upper body. And the wheels that we had were not electric wheels now; you've got to remember they were combination electric wheels. They were the Randall wheel, I believe we had. And the Randall wheel was developed by Ted Randall at Alfred University, which was a combination kick and electric; there was a motor with a little wheel on it. As a matter of fact, I have one out in the studio. I still have my wheel here.

And you would start kicking, and then you'd get the motor going so you could get-you didn't expend all your energy-and you'd get good speed up and you could center really quickly. And then everything else, you didn't use the electric part; you would kick it and so-and that's how I had learned. And then I remember as a sophomore potter, all of the sophomore potters-none of them knew how to throw. But I knew how to throw, and I could throw as well as the seniors could throw, in my sophomore year. So I was doing that and making pots, and remember there were only, like, four majors in the whole program, so there were only, like, four or five of us at the most. It was really small classes.

And so, it went on this way, and then I got very friendly with the painters, and I joined the painting club. And guys like Jack Tworkov would come in, and we'd sit around, like you and I are sitting around now, in a little room with just a few painting majors and, like, talking to guys like Jack Tworkov. And I remember at that time, they were in transition, and they were transitioning between the Cezanne school of painting and the Franz Kline school of painting. That was that transition.

And I remember those guys had their own-we had our own cliques, but we were all friendly with each other. There wasn't this art/craft demarcation kind of thing; it was all just part of one big melting pot of making things with your hands and your mind and your brush or your fingers, or whatever it was. And at night, we would get out on the street and we would just talk about art. When we partied, it was about art. And everything morning, noon, and night was about art.

Graphic designers were great friends with us; we never had value judgments on a higher arcing of things, as I recall. Now, look, it may have been there, but I was never conscious of it. We all had great respect for the institution and for who and what we were learning. And for four years-it was a four years that there's no way to recreate in the rest of my life-that four years. And it's something when we get together, we all look back on it. And I go back to Providence; I have friends-you know, my friend José lives there, and I just walk around my old haunts. Turn it off.

[Audio break.]

MR. WARMUS: Okay, we're on track three now; we're starting again. Tell me about the end of your education at RISD and what came next.

MR. HALEM: Okay, yeah, after RISD, remember it's at a time when they had a draft. The draft was still in existence, and so one had to think about two years in the army.

MR. WARMUS: What year are we talking about?

MR. HALEM: Nineteen sixty. And after I got out, I wanted to make pots. I didn't know what the heck I was going to do, and I ended up in New London, Connecticut, at a studio of-a guy by the name of John Enders had a studio there.

MR. WARMUS: Spell it.

MR. HALEM: E-N-D-E-R-S. John Enders. He was the son of the guy that had the Nobel Prize who was the head of the Harvard Medical School. His father, who I met and didn't hang out with, but walked with, for-his father was John Enders, who was the guy that had the Nobel Prize for the development that led to the Salk polio vaccine. And I met this guy.

But I had a ceramics studio there. This guy John Enders-and I made pots there for a while, and John Enders used to do some painting and so on. He was a strange kind of guy, but a nice guy. And I remember I came-after that I came back to New York and I had a really strong body of pots. And I applied for a Fulbright, and it was at the time that guys like Dan Rhodes were coming into prominence, and these guys also applied for Fulbrights at the same time I did, as I recall. Could have it wrong, but that's the impression that I had, and I had heard that he had a Fulbright.

And I got rejected for the Fulbright, but I got a strange letter that said, your work is very strong, but the Fulbright, it's full. I wanted to go to Japan; I should have added that. And they said, it's full to Japan because the Japanese potters were-you know, [Shoji] Hamada and those guys were-everyone wanted to go there.

They said, if you would reconsider and reapply to go to Korea, we would reconsider your application for a Fulbright. And all I knew about Korea, at that time, was the Korean War. Now this is 1960; the Korean War had not been over that long. And I thought, I don't want to go to Korea, a war-torn country, or whatever. I didn't know anything about Korean pottery. If I had known what I know now, I would have gone. I was a fool.

So I considered-I considered going, and at that time you needed permission to leave the country because I was of draft age. So I went to my draft board in the Bronx, and I remember the woman saying, "We can't find your records." And I said, "You can't find my records?" And I thought, I've really blown it. They lost my records and I never would have been drafted. She said, "Wait a second," and she came back and she said, "Oh, you're in the to-be-drafted pile." And I remember I ran home and I said, "I'm going to get drafted." And my mother had a connection with the National Guard-a doctor she knew in the National Guard-and-

MR. WARMUS: Can we stop one second?

MR. HALEM: Yeah.

MR. WARMUS: I don't think you actually explained what your mother did when she was-

MR. HALEM: Oh, okay. My mother had-although she never finished school, when I was in junior high school, she went back to school. My parents never got along, and I think my mother knew she was going to have to make a living, because she was going to leave my father at some point in time, which she eventually did. They never divorced, but she left him. And she became a clinical psychologist and got a degree. My brother was graduating high school, I was graduating junior high school, and my mother was graduating with a degree in clinical psychology from-

MR. WARMUS: From?

MR. HALEM: Out on Long Island somewhere. Can't remember the name of the school.

MR. WARMUS: Like Stony Brook?

MR. HALEM: No, that didn't exist then, I don't think. It was-ah, whatever.

MR. WARMUS: So that explains what you meant earlier when you said, my mother was always analyzing me.

MR. HALEM: Yes.

MR. WARMUS: You actually meant analyzing-

MR. HALEM: Oh, yeah, she took me to an analyst when I was a kid, I remember. Dr.-I used to stand there and watch-my mother was in analysis very early on, and I remember I was a little tyke looking through this glass at my mother, in this room sitting with this old German woman. I had no idea what was going on. It was a very strange kind of thing, and then she took me to this psychologist or psychiatrist-I don't know what he was-Dr. Bernard Zuger was his-I never forget his name. Zuger-Z-U-G-E-R.

[Audio break.]

So I went to him and so on. I never knew why I was really there. I guess my mother figured I was screwed up, and I guess I was. But I didn't care. So my mother became actually very sophisticated, in relationship to basically what I needed intellectually, but not emotionally. And so I remember coming back and telling my mom, "I'm going to be drafted." And she said-my brother had been in the army for two years and he said I really didn't want to go into the army. I mean, Vietnam didn't exist; we didn't know anything about it.

And so she got me into the national guard, which was basically six months active duty, but it precluded your going into the army for two years. So they told me at the draft board they would give me a dispensation to go to Korea for the year, but when I came out, I'd be automatically drafted for two years. That's how the whole national guard thing came about. And I didn't want to go in for two years, so I didn't really care about going to Korea, so I sort of gave up the Fulbright. But it was something I was giving up that I didn't think I really wanted to do, to go to Korea.

So I went in and I went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for basic training. And I had been a trumpet player.

MR. WARMUS: You went into the national guard or the army?

MR. HALEM: Well, the national guard. You do six months active duty with the regular army to become qualified to be-you know, protect all the people.

MR. WARMUS: Jersey.

MR. HALEM: To protect New Jersey and New York and so on from the hordes of people that wanted to take over. But in any event, so you did this, and I played the trumpet in the basic training marching band for Q Company, and we got out of a lot of basic training, like crawling on our bellies with machine gun bullets flying over our heads. The guy that ran the band-we had such a good band, the commanding officer-it was a point of pride. We'd rehearse while the other guys were getting shot at, although we did throw hand grenades and stuff like that.

And then that ended, and my training was to be in the medical corps, because I was going to back to the national guard as a medic. So I went down to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, which was the Brooke Army Medical Center. And I remember getting off the plane there, and it was a huge army base, and basically we got medical training. And it was at the time that the polio vaccine came in, and I was one of-I guess it was-a dozen guys.

We learned to give injections, and they had polio vaccine in these things called syrettes. They weren't regular-it was a syringe, but it was like a miniature toothpaste tube that had the vaccine in it. And I remember it was a huge base, and all of these guys lined up, and I was one of the guys that had given one injection before I was to give out now-probably if I gave one injection, I gave 2,000 injections or 1,000 injections. It went on morning till night. These guys would line up and it was in the inter-muscular shot. And you'd just go boom, squeeze it, and you would give a guy a polio vaccine shot.

So we did that, and then we used to-I drove an ambulance because I knew how to drive a shift, so they put me in an ambulance. And we used to go out to the range where they had-the airborne rangers would come for their training, for whatever it is they were training for. And I would sit in an ambulance with a buddy of mine, and we'd just sit and read magazines while these guys would fire weapons. And if anyone got hurt-and once in a while a kid would get his hand hurt, and I remember you'd treat it. And then you'd go for training and classes, and, you know, you'd watch a surgery or whatever, and you'd learn how to treat a sucking chest wound and you'd learn what triage is. It was like a MASH-unit-type thing, would be the only thing you could equate it to.

So if a war had broken out, we would have been called. We would have gone into the regular army. But once you got out, you went back to your guard unit and you'd go once a week for a meeting, which was a big joke. You'd just kind of march around the armory in the Bronx, and whatever. It was the Rainbow Division I was in, which was started by Douglas MacArthur in World War I. So we did that.

MR. WARMUS: Did you make any friends there that extended beyond your time?

MR. HALEM: Yes, a guy named Jack Block, who I'm still friendly with.

MR. WARMUS: B-L-O-C-K?

MR. HALEM: B-L-O-C-K. He was a saxophone player, and I wanted to be-I wanted to be a trumpet player. And we roomed together down in the Lower East Side. And it was before the Lower East Side became the in place to be. It was still, like, a Polish neighborhood, and I wasn't doing art at all. I was just going to play the trumpet, and I worked in bookstores. I managed bookstores. I managed in the MetLife building, I think it was, or New York Life building in New York. There was a little bookstore. And at night, I would play the trumpet in this-I practiced and I took lessons with a well-known trumpet player. I was not a very good trumpet player.

But we'd go to the jazz clubs. I mean, jazz was a real important part of my life. And we would hear Thelonious Monk play. We'd go and hear John Coltrane. We'd go and hear Zoot Sims and Al Cohn. We would go almost every night to hear Al and Zoot, and we got to know them. And we would hear James Moody. We got to know James Moody. The Half-Note, the Five Spot, the Jazz Gallery. And we were really-jazz was really big-time for us. And he was a pretty good alto player. I was a lousy trumpet player, but I would play and do my stuff.

And that's where we learned how to smoke grass. I remember I would-the first grass we got was from the girlfriend of a very famous saxophone player. She would come into the bookstore; I got to know her. And she would give us these-she gave us this Kodak film-would come in these canisters. And that's where you-everyone kind of stored their dope in the Kodak canisters. And I remember the first time we smoked dope or smoked grass, the first time we got high. It was, like-it was incredible, the feeling.

We never really got that involved with it that it interfered with our life in any way. It was always after-and I stress this-it was never-you never woke up in the morning and lit a joint. You would do your job, you'd rehearse, you'd play, and then after, to relax, you'd smoke a joint here and there. It never was something that was that important. It was just really enjoyable. And it was never that much of it.

And so we lived the life of hipsters in New York for two years. It was really great, you know. And doing all that and just meeting these people. And down the Lower East Side, we used to go-and then the art house films, we used to go see all the time, and then going to the museums and the shows. It was a time when things weren't crowded. There was space. There was real space in New York. It wasn't crowded. You didn't do things just to be hip; you did the right things, and you really were hip.

MR. WARMUS: So it hadn't been commercialized. It wasn't taken over by marketing.

MR. HALEM: No, it may have been there, but we weren't really conscious of it. I don't think the big bucks had really taken over. I think it was really fame and not fortune that was important. And prior to that, when I hitchhiked across the United States, we went to North Beach [in San Francisco]. I remember in '57, we went to North Beach to hear Gregory Corso and those guys in the Lighthouse. From RISD, we went there. This is before-prior to my going to New York and doing this.

So I knew about this stuff. I knew about the Beats. And being one of the-we wanted to be Beat. That was important. And the Beat thing was an intellectual thing. It was about poetry. It was about Allen Ginsberg. It was about, I think, things that really mattered. And it was the things that were the '60s-what the '60s was about. It was breaking with that tradition. And growing up in the '50s and '60s was like nothing that has ever come after. I mean, everybody has their own time and place, and that's my reflection on that.

MR. WARMUS: How did you react to the change, the takeover of music by popular rock stars, ranging from Elvis to the Beatles?

MR. HALEM: Well, you know, the Beatles came soon after. I didn't understand it, and I remember telling someone-I lived in Richmond, Virginia, at the time, which is when I got out of New York-becoming a potter in Richmond. And the Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," came out, and I remember the daughter of a friend of mine down there thought it was the greatest song she ever heard, and I thought it was, ah, they'll be gone in a week or two. I never really paid that much attention to it.

But I did pay attention to pop music. I did like pop music. And I did get to like the Beatles some years later, and that stuff. But it was all mixed in with jazz. I think it was-and [Bob] Dylan-and living in Richmond, Dylan came on the scene. And I thought that was real stuff. I thought what Dylan was doing was real stuff. It was still his acoustic stuff. And I was playing guitar at the time, too, and I tried to be a Dylan and that kind of thing. But I also had grown-

MR. WARMUS: Excuse me, what do you mean you tried to be Dylan?

MR. HALEM: Well, play his music, you know. And it really raised the political-I mean, the political aspects of life became apparent to us. And prior to that, in New York, as a real young person, I was imbued with the folk spirit from camp, the hootenannies, and hearing Pete Seeger. I used to go to hear Pete Seeger all the time. And I'd go to all the hoots and I was playing guitar at that time also. And I'd go out to Long Island to a guy named Roger Sprung's house.

MR. WARMUS: S-P-R-

MR. HALEM: S-P-R-U-N-G. He's still around, from what I understand. And so there was that folk thing in high school, which was really big. And so all of that was there; it was all mixed in. I mean music was music. Again, it still wasn't separate. You could still like folk music and be a hip jazz person, too. Things weren't black and white. And so all of that was always mixed in in my life. And I mean, if you look at my record collection of CDs and vinyls, you can see it's really-it's still all there, and I really still listen to it.

MR. WARMUS: We'll want to talk about the relationship of that to your work later.

MR. HALEM: Yeah.

MR. WARMUS: And let's not forget.

MR. HALEM: Yeah. Yeah, after New York and managing bookstores and playing jazz and going to the museums and all the jazz stuff and so on, I had this urge to get back to my pots, to being an artist. I woke up one day and said, this is going nowhere. I'm not going to be a musician. I'm not that dedicated to it. I don't have the mind for it. I don't practice enough. It's really about the life of a jazz musician, not being the musician. And I said, I got to get back.

And I remember this job opened in Richmond, Virginia-the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts-to be the first resident craftsman. And I applied for that and got a letter from Lyle Perkins, who wrote a letter for me, and I got that job. And picked up, moved to Richmond, Virginia, and became the first resident craftsman of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

MR. WARMUS: What did that involve?

MR. HALEM: It involved my-well, actually learning to be a teacher in many ways. But my job was to take a truck with a potter's wheel-the first portable potter's wheel had come out. Some guy on the Cape had made this electric potter's wheel. I can't remember the guy's name. And I bought one-the museum bought one for me-and my job was to go to every little burg and ville in the state of Virginia, set up the potter's wheel in front of some group that they would arrange-some women's group, some social organization, some school-set up a potter's wheel and throw pots, and show them what throwing pots was, and then lecture on the history. And that's where I learned to articulate ideas and get a sense of order in relationship to being able to talk to groups of people, and learn how to be poised.

MR. WARMUS: It was like-it's almost like being a platform speaker. You did your stint going to all these groups.

MR. HALEM: Yeah, exactly.

MR. WARMUS: But how did you do the feedback? In other words, some people, they start talking and they do it and they're just not very good and they never change. And other people seem able to do that. Do you think you were naturally articulate, or do you think this experience made you more articulate?

MR. HALEM: I think it's a combination of the two. I always had a very big voice. I always got in trouble with my voice. From five years old, I was always pulled out of class for cracking jokes. I was always the school clown, which has continued through my whole life. I always felt comfortable in front of groups of people. I never got anxious in front of groups of people. I was always able to think on my feet and articulate what I was thinking. I never really had to write things down. There was a natural flow and there was a continuity of thinking that I basically think I always had.

MR. WARMUS: Does that come from your mother or your father or-

MR. HALEM: That's a good question. I don't think it comes from either of them. I think it comes from-I don't know where that comes from. Usually things pop into my mind-and I can say, oh, this event or that experience. But I can't really say there was anything that prepared me for that. I just think it was probably always needing to hold my own in groups of people, if anything; to be heard and known in some way, to speak up. I always had a big voice. People used to always have to say, talk lower, talk lower. And I'd talk lower maybe for a second-and-a-half, and then my voice would climb again, and so on. And I think in no small way that had an effect on also with the Glass Art Society early on-things I did with them. It was all part and parcel to that.

MR. WARMUS: Talk a little bit about traveling around Virginia and meeting all these people and-

MR. HALEM: Oh yeah.

MR. WARMUS: -the culture and how they perceived what you were doing.

MR. HALEM: Well now, this is 1963, I believe. And Richmond, Virginia, is still just at the ends of segregation. They still had colored and white bathrooms. They still had colored and white drinking fountains. This was-it was just changing-and this was a shock. I wanted to leave immediately, but I had no place to go.

And I remember they had classes there, and the classes at the museum were always all-white classes. And there was a woman who was the wife of a very famous newspaper columnist whose name-I had dinner at their house. She went by her name and he went by his name, and he was a very famous columnist that wrote for the Richmond paper, and he was in all newspapers around the United States. And I remember we sat around dinner and she was appalled that they let colored people-in her words-colored people in her class. And I remember her husband saying, "Get used to it." And I sat there with the person that had brought me to dinner, and I just kind of sat there at this conversation and I was, like, appalled. And that was that experience, which was my first time in the South.

Richmond was a very beautiful, beautiful city. And my traveling around with this potter's wheel-I would like-let's say, go to Blacksburg, Virginia, and there's an all-girls school there. So I would set up and I'd have to give a lecture in front of a sea of all these gorgeous women, and talk about pottery or whatever it was I was talking about. But generally-I remember one in particular I went to, and it was this private club. And we sat at this very exclusive club having lunch, and once again, this woman started in on this conversation.

I mean, these people did not know who was sitting with them. They never paid-we were invisible-and she started in about being at school, and it was something about a roommate who was Jewish, and she started to make these kinds of denigrating anti-Semitic comments. And I remember her husband-he was a lawyer-a Yale graduate, was there. And I remember clearly him kicking her under the table. He knew-[laughs]-what was going on. He knew she had just blown it.

And I was kind of sitting there-I remember I was like, I didn't know what to do. I didn't say anything, but I remember she stopped after he kicked her a couple of times. I'm sure she's probably still black and blue, if she's still alive. And I remember that. And these were the kind of people that would have me as their honored guest. And I remember her saying something about-when she said-oh, I remember what it was that she said after the college thing-and she said, "And you know we don't let Jews into the club here." And so and that's when he really started kicking her and so on. So I guess my name wasn't a giveaway in any event.

MR. WARMUS: So was this an unusual program? Were you, like, one of the few people doing something like this?

MR. HALEM: Yeah, I was the only one. This was the first of its kind.

MR. WARMUS: Do you have any idea who came up with this idea?

MR. HALEM: The guy who was the-Leslie Cheeks [Cheek].

MR. WARMUS: Spell that. Is it like it sounds?

MR. HALEM: C-H-E-E-K-S. He's a very famous person. He brought exhibitions in of people that were just becoming famous. I mean, you could read-his name is in the literature. He was the director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

MR. WARMUS: So, but did you ever find out why he came up with this program?

MR. HALEM: No, no, never knew that. I was the first, and it continued for a while. I don't think they have it anymore. And then there was-they had it in weaving, also. Pat Angerella-boy, I remember her name. Pat Angerella.

MR. WARMUS: Spell it?

MR. HALEM: Oh, God, I can't. It's an Italian name. I guess it would be A-N-G-E-R-E-L-L-A, I guess. Pat Angerella, she was the weaving woman that came in, and she did weaving and I did pottery. And they gave me a little studio there, and I made pots and built a kiln.

MR. WARMUS: Did you sell anything?

MR. HALEM: Rarely, through the gift shop.

MR. WARMUS: What was your first piece-when did you sell your first work?

MR. HALEM: That's a good question. I guess it was through the gift shop there. You mean to a perfect stranger, someone other than an aunt.

MR. WARMUS: Than your mother.

MR. HALEM: Yeah, exactly. [Laughs.]

MR. WARMUS: That doesn't count.

MR. HALEM: I mean that-yeah-[laughs]-of course that didn't count. I guess it was through the gift shop, but I never really paid that much attention to it. I'm not even sure they paid me for it. I'm not ever sure that-I'm not sure that they didn't own the work.

MR. WARMUS: It was more they just paid you the contract-

MR. HALEM: They paid me a salary to live in this house. And when I lived there, they brought in-they had a show of an artist-I have a piece of his. Turn it off for a second and I'll tell you his name.

[Audio break.]

MR. WARMUS: We're starting again on track four of CD one. Go ahead.

MR. HALEM: Okay. Down at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, people would come through. And I remember the painter Will Barnet came, he was a-he's still alive. He's 90-some-odd years old. He just recently had a show. And I used to meet these people when they-I'd pick them up at the bus. And he didn't want to stay in a motel, so he stayed at my house.

And I remember I had a stained-glass lampshade, which he liked very much, so he traded me this woodcut he had done back in the '30s for this lampshade. And it was my first piece of art that I had collected, and I was so excited. And I still got it; it's hanging in my bedroom here. And I remember this big book came out on Barnet, this big coffee table book, and I opened the book, and there right at the beginning is the print that I have. And it was like, whoa, that's mine.

Anyway, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was a very important part of my life because it got me back, basically, on track. It got me back on track to being an artist and to making art. I never-one thing I recall, though, is I never thought, how the hell am I going to make a living at this? And how I was going to make a living at it was, was to be a teacher, because when we were students, that's what I always had the impression we were being trained for. I was not really familiar with the private ceramic studio. I think the teacher that we had, Perkins, was really kind of really out of the loop that way. I respected him as a teacher in many ways, but I think he was really out of the loop in so many ways, in relationship to the potential of what we could do with being a potter.

So I sort of finished there and I didn't have a graduate degree, and I thought, if I'm going to teach, I'm going to need a master's degree. So I was in my middle-20s; I applied to grad school. No, I'm out of sequence here. No, I'm not. I applied to grad school to Mills College [Oakland, CA], which was an all-girls, but the graduate school was co-ed and-

MR. WARMUS: Where was that?

MR. HALEM: This is out in California, and the person that was teaching there was-you know who it is-he makes the clay machines and he was a great potter. He's a great potter still. His name will come to me. And I was accepted there, but I needed money. I didn't have any money to go to school. My parents really couldn't afford to send me there without a scholarship. And so they accepted me, and my academic record again raised its ugly head and they rejected me for an assistantship. And so I couldn't go to Mills.

So I applied to George Washington University [Washington, DC], which had its graduate program at the Corcoran [now Corcoran College of Art & Design, Washington, DC], which was very fortunate, because there was a Japanese-Teruo Hara, H-A-R-A. Teruo Hara, T-E-R-U-E [sic], I think. Teruo Hara was teaching there, and he was-I think-the first wave of Japanese potters, in Japan, that had broken with the rich tradition of Japanese pottery. And he was a member of a group-I don't remember the name of the group, but he was a member of a group that was-they were the real iconoclasts of Japanese pottery.

And he knew he wasn't going to get anywhere in Japan, so he left and came over through the West Coast. And I remember Pete Voulkos telling us stories of when Teruo Hara came through and they'd taken him out to eat. He didn't speak any English and it was a very complex thing-all these funny stories about Teruo. And Teruo found himself in Washington and got this job as the teacher at the Corcoran school teaching pottery. And there were about four or five of us that enrolled in the graduate school there through George Washington University.

And so I moved up to Washington. I was living in D.C. and started working with Teruo at the Corcoran. In the basement of the Corcoran museum [Corcoran Gallery of Art] was the school, and they had a big ceramics department. And I learned-this is where I really learned to be a potter. I learned to throw in traditional Japanese style, off the hump. I learned really about glazes. I learned all about reduction glazes, the reduction red glazes. And I still have some of the pots here that I made at that point, and they were pretty good pots, and I learned to be a pretty damn good potter.

And at that time, I met a woman and we got married. I got married-

MR. WARMUS: And her name-

MR. HALEM: Was-her name was at that time was Judy Sibulkin. She had been married before and that was her previous husband's name.

MR. WARMUS: Spell it?

MR. HALEM: S-I-B-U-L-K-I-N, I believe. Her name was Judy Sibulkin. Her maiden name was Judy Myers, M-Y-E-R-S, and we got married. She was also a potter.

MR. WARMUS: [Inaudible, cross talk.]

MR. HALEM: Yeah, she was in the program. And we were pretty damn good potters. She was a really good potter-very different than me. She didn't make pot pots, she made these sculptural things with press molds and so on that were really interesting. And there was a contest-a big contest-that first prize was a one-person show at the Smithsonian Institution. This was prior to them building the crafts part of it. What is that called-

MR. WARMUS: The Renwick.

MR. HALEM: The Renwick. This was prior to the Renwick. You would get a show at the Smithsonian Institution itself. And this is where I got to know Paul Gardner, so remember that name.

I entered it, I won first prize, I won third prize, and I won three prizes out of that, my pots were so good. And Judy also won first prize, so we co-won the first prize, which was a one-person show at the Smithsonian Institution. And so this is 19-this is after the assassination of Kennedy. This is after I left Richmond.

And Judy and I had this show, and we put together all of this work, and a lot of her work-and I was doing the sculptural work-was very political. A lot of antiwar-Vietnam had really come on strong now. I had all of these-I did all of these body pressings of these twisted bodies and these faces and so-and all this very political stuff. And we submitted it along with all my pottery and stuff and other sculptural pieces, and we had over a hundred pieces at work. We had a huge body of work. We really worked hard.

We had our own studio that we made work at. And we painted a lot of our work. We broke with doing glazing, and I did a lot of acrylic-painted stuff-these sculptures. And we submitted the work, and I had a lot-not a lot, but a few pieces-that were very political, about Kennedy and the assassination. And they told us-and some stuff that had some sexual context to it-and they said, we can't put any of that stuff in the show because Congress gives us our money and Congressmen come through here all the time. And they're just going to go berserk. So we said fine.

So we found another gallery in Georgetown, the Hinckley-Brohel Gallery.

MR. WARMUS: Can you spell that?

MR. HALEM: H-I-N-C-K-L-E-Y B-R-O-H-E-L. The Hinckley-Brohel Gallery, they said, "Oh, we'll show that work." So the show at the Smithsonian-I got to know a guy named-I think his name was Jeff Miller. He was the curator-he was the assistant curator under Paul, Paul Gardner. And that's where I got to know Paul. And they put together this show, and we were the first and only living artists that ever had a show at the Smithsonian Institution. And I had this one pot that was painted-a big painted pot-that they bought and put in their permanent collection. It's in their vault somewhere. It's never-I don't think-ever been displayed.

MR. WARMUS: Would Paul Gardner have been the one to choose that?

MR. HALEM: Yeah, I believe so. And we became friendly. And their working with a live artist was new to them. They had never worked with anyone living. And so they had to build all of these things-these pots I had made-actually a lot of the show was my graduate work, my thesis work. And they had to build all of these special holders to hang them on the wall with museum quality. I had just hung them on the wall with whatever I could for my show, which really wasn't museum quality.

MR. WARMUS: Do you think that Paul Gardner came up with the idea of this show, or who-how did this-

MR. HALEM: I don't-boy, that's a good question. I just think they may have-I don't think the Smithsonian knew what it was getting into when they said that they would agree to this, because this was a big show. I've got slides of it somewhere, the whole show. And I had my thrown work and a lot of sculptural work. It was an-that opening, it was just-I mean, talk about being on top of the world at that opening.

And then after that opening, we had a later opening. We ran over in Georgetown the same night at the Hinckley-Brohel of all of the controversial stuff that we had there. So that night with Judy and I-that opening-was just phenomenal.

MR. WARMUS: Were you married by that time?

MR. HALEM: Yeah, yeah, we were married when we had that. Yeah, I'm sure we were married. The marriage was short-lived. We were very competitive; we were very young. It took two to get married and it took two to get divorced. I mean, it's easy for me to blame-you can play the name-game from now till the cows come home. But I was a jerk and she was a jerk, and we were both just two jerks that got married. Maybe she doesn't see herself that way, but we tortured each other in so many ways. I was very insensitive in many ways, and, you know, it was getting even. So we got divorced, you know. It was very difficult; it was very painful.

MR. WARMUS: About how long was this?

MR. HALEM: About four years, approximately four years. And it was mutual, the divorce. Actually, earlier on, we worked at it. We went to a therapist to try and bring it back together. And I remember halfway through the therapy, the doctor said, "You know, I'm trying to bring you people together, but I now have to find a way to-with the least amount of pain-separate you two." We were very angry with each other and we came by it legitimately; we tortured each other. So the anger-she came by her anger at me very legitimately, and I came by mine, you know, legitimately. And so we got on with our lives.

MR. WARMUS: So the political art that you showed, was that-but you also showed more formal art at the Smithsonian, so it sounds like you had two different sort of styles that you could work in, and it seems interesting that you were so, kind of, savvy in a way to-rather than sort of withdraw from the Smithsonian show, it sounds like you diplomatically put some work in that fit that show, and, at the same time, you were able to have the other show.

MR. HALEM: Well, I really-yeah.

MR. WARMUS: So it sounds like you were actually sophisticated, as a student, in terms of how you would negotiate your way through these worlds.

MR. HALEM: Well, I really liked my work. All the work I did at the Corcoran was really terrific. My pots were really good. They were different kinds of pots. I was doing two types of work side by side. The influences of Voulkos were very strongly in my work-that I conceptualized in my own way. And the influences of Voulkos were there, but also the influences of Hara were there, as a potter. I really did enjoy and loved making containers and using the pieces that I made. And it had nothing to do with sales; actually, we had a gallery in-we were living in-not Washington, but we were living outside of Washington-Alexandria. And we had a shop on King Street in Alexandria and a little gallery where we sold prints. We sold pots, and we gave pottery lessons to kids.

MR. WARMUS: So you were running this gallery?

MR. HALEM: We were running it.

MR. WARMUS: And this was after graduate school?

MR. HALEM: This was probably during graduate school.

MR. WARMUS: So now we're in the sort of mid-'60s, like, maybe '65 or something?

MR. HALEM: Yeah, yeah, somewhere in there. And she had a child from a previous marriage, who I had adopted, Jody.

And after that, we had gotten a loan from the Small Business Administration to start this gallery and so on and-let's see, am I out of sequence here? I'm out of sequence. Let's see-we went-I didn't have my degree. We met at the Corcoran. I didn't have my degree. Boy, I, the sequence, it may come to me.

But anyway, I got a job at Mary Washington College [Fredericksburg, VA], and I did not have my degree yet. I was still in the process of getting my degree. I was working on my thesis-that's it.

And we moved down, I got a job, and I said, "I don't have a master's degree." And they said, "That doesn't matter. You went to the Rhode Island School of Design. That's a great place. We're going to give you a part-time"-I got a part-time job teaching ceramics at Mary Washington College, which was just fantastic, while we were still doing our degrees. Yeah, the sequence is correct.

And we moved down to Fredericksburg, and we had a studio down there because it's a school. And I built a big gas-fired kiln and I taught there for a year part-time. And then something happened that put my job in jeopardy, and they said, "You're going to have to leave." So they very politely said, "We'll allow you to resign," which I did, and we moved back up to-that's when we moved up to Alexandria, after that, and that's when we had-

MR. WARMUS: The gallery?

MR. HALEM: The gallery and that space, and so on.

MR WARMUS: You managed the space, the two of you?

MR. HALEM: Yes. We managed it and we'd go to work and we'd do it. It was actually a lot of fun. And we got to know actually some of the Color Field painters that were out of Washington. We got to know them, whose names slip my mind now. Peripherally, not good friends-you know, we didn't party with them, but we got to know them a little bit. And let's see-this is getting now close to where the glass thing is going to come in, because it's at the point of getting our degree from GW. They refused us our degrees, and this was at a point where I'm starting to get-separate myself from Judy to get divorced. And so there's a lot of tension in the home.

GW says we can't-and this is a number of us-you can't get your master's degree because you can't pass the language exam. They had a language-through arts and sciences-and they had a language exam you had to pass in order to get your master's. We had all of our other credits. We had our show. We did a written thesis. We did the whole nine yards.

And so I'm in the process of trying to get divorced, and I had promised Judy and her daughter-I said, "I'll move you wherever you need to go." And we applied to the University of Wisconsin. And they said, "You can come here for a year." Don Reitz said, "We can't just give you your degree; you'll have to study here for a year and do another thesis before we'll give you a degree, but we'll give you credit for all your other credits. All you got to do is ceramics." So we said okay.

MR. WARMUS: Stop-go back a second to this English. So basically, there was a test you took.

MR. HALEM: Yeah, we took a language exam, which we flunked. I mean, I don't even think I knew how to say yes in French. Tried it in Spanish-you know, it was just ridiculous.

MR. WARMUS: So it's not an English-language exam.

MR. HALEM: No, it was foreign language.

MR. WARMUS: So you had to know a foreign language.

MR. HALEM: Foreign language.

MR. WARMUS: And it could be Spanish or French.

MR. HALEM: Spanish, French, German, anything-any language you wanted it. Now, I had taken a little French and a little Spanish. And we took classes and tried to learn it. We didn't have a head for it.

MR. WARMUS: What was the thinking of having a language requirement for a graduate degree in art? Do you understand?

MR. HALEM: Well, I'm getting to that. It was part of arts and sciences. So we enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, and the week we were leaving, they realized-George Washington University did exactly that-they said, what are we thinking here? Why do they need a language requirement to get their degree? So they wrote us a letter and said, "We're waiving the language requirement. You have your degree."

So all of these problems of the graduate thing-we now had our master's degree. And so I told Judy, I said, "Okay, I'll move you out there. I'll find an apartment for you and Jody," and we had this caravan. She had her car and I had my car-piled all the crap in the car.

MR. WARMUS: Why? Let's go back for a second-why the University of Wisconsin, out of all the possible choices?

MR. HALEM: Don Reitz. Don Reitz was hot. He was real hot. Nothing to do with glass; I didn't even know there was a glass program out there. But Don Reitz was the head of the ceramic program. And obviously Harvey [Littleton] had this glass program that I didn't know about.

MR. WARMUS: Spell Don Reitz for us.

MR. HALEM: R-E-I-T-Z.

And so we went out there to do whatever the hell we wanted to do. We were more or less enrolled. We drove out there, found an apartment-Eagle Heights Apartments-I remember that. Eagle Heights. And so she got an apartment, and I had turned 30; I had just turned 30 years old. And so I helped her-

MR. WARMUS: What year are we in then? I guess it's pretty easy for us to figure-

MR. HALEM: Nineteen sixty-eight, 1968.

So I moved her and her daughter into the apartment, and I stayed there for a few nights until I could find a place to live. And I remember, it was really funny. I went, and there was a place where you could-the university had an apartment-finding place you could go to, and they had things listed on the wall-apartments. So I went and I looked, and I found this-there were a bunch of people milling around and I-there were these two guys standing there and they said, "We're looking for a third roommate." And so I said, "Okay."

So the three of us, we went to the place and went to the landlady and she sort of interviewed us. It was a basement apartment; it was one giant room, and I remember she said, "How old are you?" And the guy wrote 22, 21, whatever, and another guy wrote 21, 22. Now this was at a time that you didn't trust anybody over 30, and she came to me and said, "How old are you?" and I said, 30. And I remember these two guys-their heads just snapped around, looked at me like, 30? And they were shocked.

But anyway, we moved into this apartment, and we divided the apartment up with curtains between the beds; I remember it was this one big-and we had some pretty wild parties. And I introduced them to drinking wine, I remember. They had smoked a lot of dope, these kids. I had really stopped sort of smoking dope then; I really wasn't doing it anymore. And I went in and I needed money; I had no money. So I had an apartment and I went to see Harvey. Now, why I went to see Harvey-

MR. WARMUS: Harvey Littleton.

MR. HALEM: Harvey Littleton-I went to see Harvey Littleton; he was the head of the art department. And I asked him, "Are there any assistantships?" Don already had his assistant picked, and that is when Harvey said, "I am looking for an assistant."

Now, remember, I am sort of one of the "Young Turks" in ceramics; I am sort of known in ceramics. I had these shows-the American Craft Museum [now the Museum of Art & Design, New York, NY] had shown my work-or whatever the museum was called then-and my work had been published in Craft Horizons, so I sort of had this reputation, peripherally.

And I knew Harvey as a potter, and he knew me as a potter. And he asked me, would I be interested in being his assistant in glass. And I said, "I don't know anything about glass." He may have said, "I don't either," but I don't think he really said that, you know. He, of course, didn't say that. And I said, "Sure, I'll be your assistant," and it paid X number of dollars a month, which was perfect. I would be able to pay the rent and put some food on the table. Also, he had his own gasoline tank out at the farm and I was able to gas up my car, so I didn't have to pay for gas. He was out in Verona, Wisconsin, outside of Madison.

And I became Harvey's assistant. I went into the glass studio and there were people there that-they were 10 of us: Audrey Handler was one of the students; she had already been there a year-Dan Schwoerer, who owns Bullseye Glass, was one of the students, and there were other people there. There was a lampworker there whose name I don't remember either, who is fairly well-known today in lampworking-he and his father. And this was the class of 10 of us.

Now, I didn't have to go to any other classes, and I was in charge of keeping the shop clean and working out at Harvey's farm-working on his pieces-grinding them, polishing them. But at school, I was there basically seven days a week. I had the key. I opened it up in the morning and made sure the cullet was charged. We used marbles at the time-475. You know, we ought to probably break it here.

WARMUS: Okay, this sounds like a good point.

MR. HALEM: Yeah, because there is a lot of little detail needing-

[Audio break.]

MR. WARMUS: This is William Warmus interviewing Henry Halem at his home in Kent, Ohio, and we are on disc two, session two, after lunch on Saturday, May 14, 2005. It is 1:15 p.m., and we're continuing from where stopped at the previous session, talking about Henry's time at the University of Wisconsin.

MR. HALEM: Okay-1968, the classes I had said was 10 students. They were there to get degrees. I already had my degree. Glass was relatively young at that time, and the classroom situation was very loose. It wasn't very sophisticated. Our furnaces were small-they were small day tanks. The glass we used, as I said, was these 475 marbles. These marbles had been-were developed by Nick Labino-Dominick Labino at Libby, and they were basically used for fiberglass, to spin fiberglass, but they were adaptable for glassblowing. They were very stiff, but we managed to use them. The furnaces really weren't all that hot, and we just actually taught each other.

Harvey was the teacher, but Harvey really-Littleton really never came into class. He would come-one day a week we would have a breakfast class at the-there was a hotel or motel-hotel-type structure down the street from the Monroe Street studio, and we would gather there for breakfast and Harvey would more or less hold court, so to speak. One day he might bring in-he had a collection of obsidian arrowheads and he would talk about obsidian, or he would talk about Tiffany or these kinds of things.

So they were very informal. We would sit around. They were actually a lot of fun, but he never ever really came in the classroom to show us anything about glassblowing. He really wasn't very accomplished as a glassblowing teacher or as a teacher in general. I'm not sure-I don't know what he did in his ceramic days, but I know, as a teacher, we more or less, in glass, taught ourselves. But that was okay. Harvey-I have a tremendous amount of respect for what Harvey did, even though in some of the situations they were-not adversarial but-he wasn't encouraging in some respects, but in other respects, his idea that we could do it by ourselves was actually very liberating. It was very different than any of the other classroom situations that we had, where the teacher really was always there.

And in looking back on it, I think there is something to say for letting 10 motivated people just knock themselves out and try and figure these things out for themselves. I'm not sure that in a school situation the idea of having to make art or teaching-I don't think you can really teach art. I mean, they call it art school. I am not sure really anymore why they call it art school (after all of my life in art), or whether this kind of-the way these schools are formalized-whether they can't be reinvented to mobilize them in another way, where the students are more in charge of their own education than acquiescing to a traditional structure of demonstration and then the student carrying out the orders of the teacher, whatever that is.

I think there is another way to do it, and I think by accident, Harvey found that way. And even though you might look at the works that we did and so on, I think there is a vitality to those crude things that we made that has gone out of what exists now. And I think that camaraderie and that vitality was present then-the need for larger classes, the enrollments are huge. I think success in no small way has been the undoing of glass education, in many ways.

Not that I want to go back to the way things were, but at that time and place, I'm not sure there was any other way that it could be done, because nobody knew anything. The only people that knew anything were in Europe in factories, in some ways. Erwin was very important-Erwin Eisch was very important, and some of the Europeans that came over were very important. Willem Heesen came over, as did [Sybren] Valkema, and they came over and did their demonstrations and worked with us.

And through those other people coming in and through people that had graduated, like Fritz Dreisbach, who would come back, it was a real give and take among us. And I remember one incident, it was kind of funny. I was the oldest of the group, and I came in one evening and all of the students-all nine students-Bob Barber was one of the students there, too-they were all gathered together in this knot of students, and they were all very upset that Harvey never came in to teach them anything.

Now, I was Harvey's assistant out on the farm, and I knew Harvey-I think-better than they did in relationship to the fact that they really didn't want Harvey to come in and teach them. And so after they got through all of their screaming and yelling, I went in there-I was a little bit more mature than them-and I just asked the question-I said, think about it, you guys know Harvey; do you really want him to come in and teach? And it was kind of a dead silence, and they all looked at each other and they realized they really didn't want him to come in and teach, and they just broke up and went their own ways. And it's funny, to this day, Danny remembers that story like it was yesterday. When I speak to Schwoerer when I'm out at Bullseye visiting him, he remembers that. And he said, "Boy, I'm glad you showed up."

Because I remember, I was out at the farm with Harvey and I wanted to learn how to make goblets. And I said, "Harvey, can you show me how to make a goblet?" Well, Harvey never said he couldn't do anything; Harvey could do everything; so Harvey said, "Oh, sure, I can show you how to make a goblet." So he started to try and make a goblet, and I think if I didn't stop him, he'd still be there trying to make-[laughs]-this goblet. He just really couldn't-and there is no reason why he could; he never had a teacher. He just kind of did this stuff on his own.

But, you know, we were used to teachers that were trained and Harvey was totally untrained, so he was kind of an anomaly in this world of trained teachers. He could teach ceramics because he had studied with Maija Grotel at Cranbrook [Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI], and so on. So he knew the formality of it. But Harvey was inventing this as he went along. We were basically reinventing the wheel, and Harvey was the hub and we were the spokes.

And I think that is in itself an amazing accomplishment. And the fact that we became disciples-not of glass, but we became disciples of Harvey-it was Harvey's philosophy-he was wrong about a few things, but they were inconsequential things. We figured out he was wrong, and we had no problems with figuring out that there was some things that were wrong.

For instance-like the potters, he wanted us to do it alone. He didn't want us to work in teams like they did in factories. He wanted to separate everything from the factory. He wanted a totally different image and he wanted us to work alone. He didn't want anyone bringing punties or bits and stuff like that. And we figured out pretty quick, you can't do it, you know. You can do it alone, but it is counterproductive.

And so time went on and people would come through, and Fritz showed up all of the time with his yellow Suburban and he would-he was always one step ahead of us. He figured things out-he was really good with his hands. And we invented glassblowing in the way that we did it. I mean, if you think of what was going on at the time with the incredible Italian stuff that was going on in Murano [Venice, Italy] and Sweden and Germany and-there was some incredible glass being blown. But we were blowing early American glass. We were blowing, as we eventually called them-I mean, these were just these misshapen things, but the thrill of being able to drink something out of what you made.

We used to go to Jingle's Tap, which was right next door. You would go out the back door and Jingle's had this bar. And we would bring our mugs, and he would take them and fill them beer and charge us for the beer, and we get like probably three ounces of beer in the mug, but it was exciting.

I was only there a year. The other guys were there a few years, but that one year as Harvey's assistant out on the farm was very interesting. I ground and polished a lot of Harvey's work, and Harvey was very serious about what he was doing. I wasn't a great fan of his aesthetic, but I don't know really what aesthetic I was comparing it to. I didn't know really what I was looking at.

What I did know that moved me to stay in glass, though, was when I saw the work of Erwin Eisch. And I was pretty familiar with art forms-different periods of time and art movements. And when I saw Erwin's work and I saw this German Expressionism in glass and the plasticity of the material that he was able to elicit from it, I thought, wow, there is some potential to this.

The work that Harvey did never moved me; it was very cold. I found it very cold, and it was a method. He found something that, I think, was fairly easy to make, in that respect, and I think he mined that. Harvey was and is a very bright guy, and I think he knew what he was doing. He knew how to get the shows. He was very consumed with money-sales were very important and so on and so was his success, and our success was his success. But the work of Erwin showed the real potential-at least to me-for what glass was. And that is one of the reasons I stayed with glass and didn't go back into ceramics.

And as the year went on and Fritz would come, we would learn different things and, being a little bit older, I had really learned how to learn, so I picked this up pretty quick, or the crudity of what we were doing, pretty quick. If I was asked to do thin stuff, which you couldn't do with 475 marbles-we knew nothing about batch or anything like that, so we struggled along with these 475. And one day I was standing in the studio and the phone rang, and a woman at the other end said, "We're looking for a teacher-someone who can teach ceramics and glass. Would you post on the bulletin board that there is a job available?" And I said, "Sure." So I hung the phone up, and the next day I picked the phone up, and I called and I said, "I noticed on the bulletin board there is this job available at Kent State University for ceramics and glass. I would like to apply for that job." They said, "Sure."

So I came for the interview and I got the job, and after I got the job, the woman said how come no one else called. And I said, go figure. I have no-well, obviously I never posted the job on the board. [Laughs.] You know, I was no fool; my father didn't raise no dumb son. So I got the job here at Kent State after that year at the University of Wisconsin working for Harvey.

We had an incident-Harvey got a metal lathe-Danny Schwoerer was one of his students there and he was a very bright guy; he knew how to do a lot of things with tools. And Harvey started to need things-bases made on this lathe out of aluminum and stainless steel and so on. And he asked me, "Do you know how to run a lathe?" And I said, "No, I don't." And he found out that Danny did, so he fired me. He just up and fired me. And I called the university and I said, "Can Harvey fire me?" And they said, "No, he really can't, but there is nothing we can do." So I had to turn my check over to Danny. I get paid every month and I had to give Danny my check. So I was really scuffling for money at that point.

So Danny got the job as his assistant-in-residence running the lathe, and so that was that. And I was-I was very angry at Harvey-that Harvey just, with the wave of his hand could just-for really his own personal reasons just-his insensitivity was really-Sandy was living with me at the time and she was writing Harvey's book, and he would give her this sheaf of notes and she would put the book together.

MR. WARMUS: And Sandy's last name?

MR. HALEM: Sandy Perlman. We weren't married yet. P-E-R-L-M-A-N.

MR. WARMUS: And what was she and what program?

MR. HALEM: She wasn't in any program; she was just my girlfriend and she came out there to live with me. And we hadn't plans to marry, but we were having a great time living out in Verona, not far from where Harvey was living in Verona. And, you know, Harvey had his editor and so on, and then Sandy really was very instrumental in getting this book off of the ground, and then when the book was published, Sandy's name was never even mentioned, not even a thank you, which is typical Harvey, because it's really all about Harvey in that sense. But it was basically a love-hate relationship.

Anyway, that year went on. I mean, there a lot of Littleton stories. I could go on for hours with Littleton stories and Labino stories and those kinds of things, but I think that is a whole book, probably. But anyway, that year ended, which was a-it was a fabulous year in so many ways. I mean, even though it was a divorce and so on, I didn't have a care in the world basically. I didn't have any money either, but it didn't seem to matter. All I had was records and my clothes.

And I came east and took the job at Kent State University in 1969. I did a workshop that summer. The guy that hired me-his name was Miska-M-I-S-K-A-Miska Petersham-P-E-T-E-R-S-H-A-M-Miska Petersham. And I knew him from my pottery days-he was a potter. But he had the idea-he saw glass also and he wanted to start glass, and he actually built the first furnace here. It was in the basement of one of the old buildings on campus. And he didn't know much about glassblowing. He knew Nick Labino though, and he brought me in to do this workshop when they were moving the studio over to where the studio eventually moved to, downtown-the first move. And I did this workshop-Jack Ink was one of my students, and, as a matter of fact, he was my first graduate student. And I think probably Jack knew more than I did, but I was the teacher.

In any event, we built the furnace, built the-we had to build all of the equipment ourselves. I knew how to build equipment. I was good at equipment building. I knew that from my ceramic days. I knew how to build annealing ovens and all of that stuff. I knew how to get element wires. So I was very lucky that way. And also, there was some funding to do all of this. So I built-I mean, the studio was about the size of a large living room actually. And the students-we crammed ourselves in there. As a matter of fact, I had to finance half of the studio myself out of my own pocket because there wasn't enough budget. Down the street there was an old glass place that did window glass, and I found an old grinder in there-an old Somaca Grinder-and I bought it out of my own pocket.

MR. WARMUS: How do you spell that?

MR. HALEM: Somaca. S-O-M-A-C-A-and they were manufacturers of that kind of stuff. So I bought that, and I bought a polisher for polishing glass out of my own pocket and we put that in a little back room. And we made art, if you want to call it that. But basically, we concentrated more on glassblowing. And even when we were students with Harvey, as much as he wanted us to make art, we still reverted back to making containers. We really-that was really our tradition. But when we had crits with Harvey, he really demanded to see-he demanded to see art.

[Audio break.]

MR. WARMUS: Okay, this is track two, and we're going to go backtracking a little bit and talk about four pieces that were made during this time period.

MR. HALEM: Yeah, you know, the aesthetic at the time-we all had our own personal aesthetic, and I don't know what each of us in the class was trying to master. I tend to think, in what I do remember, it was technique-and I'm not going to get into the analysis of that word. It was extremely important to us. And in my own aesthetic-from ceramics, my aesthetic was very well developed. I was very familiar with form; I was very familiar in philosophical terms, in romantic terms of what beauty was about, and what constituted art, in the way that I saw art.

In glass, it was a different story; it was starting over again. I didn't have-I only had the sophistication of an aesthetic; I didn't have the ability to express myself with glass in any way, shape, or form other than the container, which I was primarily interested in. I think that comes from my pottery, where I was a pretty good container maker. Even with sculptures I was-I don't know-I guess, pretty good. But anyway, the idea of mastering the technique was very important to me. For instance, to try and make a bottle shape-a seemingly simple form, but when you're teaching yourself, when you have no one to show you, you go through the machinations of doing it-it's not like clay, where it happens really quickly-with glass, it's a very slow emergence of the bubble and the form, and then you have to transfer the glass to a punty rod, and then you get to the point of really forming the final shape, and before you know it, it's on the floor.

MR. WARMUS: Explain why the transfers of the punty to the audience.

MR. HALEM: Well, when you're making a piece of glass, you're making it backwards. You're starting with the bottom-when you're making a container-you're starting with the bottom first, so you're making it basically backwards. So if you're making a bottle, you're making the bottom, and then the top of it isn't formed, so you form a good part of the body of the piece, and then you have what is called a punty rod, which is just basically a solid rod that has a hot piece of glass on the end of it-almost molten but just a little bit sticky. You stick it to the bottom of the piece and you basically crack it off of the blow pipe-I'm not going to get into the details of that; it's not that important.

And so then you-you no longer can breathe into the glass; you can no longer give it the breath of life the way you did when it was upside down or backwards or whatever. And so you now have this piece that is now facing forward, and you have a device called the glory hole. And the glory hole reheats the top of the piece, so then with different types of tools you then start forming the top of the piece to finish it off. So you have to make the neck, and then you have to make the top of the piece.

Now, all of these are-at least at that time and I still think today-is fairly complex in making it all work aesthetically. I mean, forming it is one thing, but making it aesthetically pleasing-the right size, the right shape, the neck, the transition from the body to the neck, the transition from the neck to the top-those are all very difficult things to accomplish with glass. Now, remember, you can only touch the glass with tools-with steel tools; you can't use your hands. It's hot; it's not like clay, where you can stop the wheel and push it here or push it there and wait around a little bit. You're constantly having to reheat it to make it malleable, because as the glass cools, it hardens. And so you have a very, very brief period of time that you can work the glass. So you're just walking back and forth to the glory hole.

So all of this technique problem-all of the problems of forming-conspire to really get in your road, to really reach an aesthetic that is easier with clay than it is with glass, and then also you have to keep the punty hot enough, because if the punty rod that is holding this together cools too much, the piece falls off. If you didn't put the bottom on when it was hot enough and it just cooled a little bit, it would fall off when you broke it off of the neck. So when you're learning, all of these things are happening. It's constantly falling on the floor; you're constantly starting over again and over again and over again. And so, you know, there were many called, but very few were chosen. You really had to have patience and a real love of really wanting to do this. And those of us that stayed with it, once we started, we were like a dog on a bone; we wouldn't let go.

And I'll tell you, when you got a piece, we would-[laughs]-you would make these pieces and you designed them at the bench. You really rarely, if ever, made a drawing of what you were going to make. You always just start-I'm going to make a bottle, so you would make a bottle. Oh, I'm going to use some silver nitrate decoration here-twist it around it and put it here and God knows where it is going to end up. And so you're doing all of these things, and you're designing it as you go, and you finish the piece. And then you have to put it in the annealing oven, so you have to cool it a certain way so that it doesn't break, because there are certain physical properties that the glass has. When it's hot, it's expanded and when it cools down, it shrinks, and if it shrinks too quickly, the exterior of the glass shrinks at a different rate than the interior of the glass and it just falls apart and breaks.

So we put these pieces away and we had some idea the next day, when we would come back-we would fill the annealing oven up-it wasn't one person to an annealing oven; the whole class were kind of filling the annealing oven up early on. And we all felt we knew what our work looked like, and we thought it was-you would put it away and you would think it was like 12 inches high or at nine inches high, and you were really excited about it. The next day you would come in afterwards-and you kneel, when you opened the door-and there were all of these little turds just kind of sitting in the fiberfrax-all the same size, all looking exactly the same, all about an inch thick-trying to figure out whose piece was what and remembering, "My piece was bigger than that," but it never-the pieces never were. And so that was the early-on aesthetic.

The second semester, things got better for many of us, and for myself, I started mastering some of the techniques, because I could spend a lot more time there than a lot of the other people did. But we all had our idea of what we wanted to make. So I started to make these things-these baggies that I made-which I have another one over there which-I always wanted to make something different; I didn't want to make what everyone else was making.

So I made these pieces that hung on the wall instead of stood on bases. So I made these things called baggies which I-instead of round, I would flatten them out and pull the edges out or pull the bottom out, punty it up, put two handles on it.

I figured out how to set my own handles, which was no easy task. I learned how to bring my-hold the piece in the left hand, and then with the right hand make it gather with one hand, and put the handle on; hold the piece with my left hand, cut with my right, take the rod that-put it down, and then with the tweezers grab it and pull a handle. And I became a master at this; it was incredible.

But to think-I think the only thing I ever taught Fritz how to do was set your own handle. He thought that was the greatest thing since sliced white bread, when he saw that trick I figured out.

Then Erwin came and showed us how Tiffany did feathering. Well, I got to tell you, that trick that Erwin showed us on how feathering was accomplished-it was like an explosion had gone off in the studio.

MR. WARMUS: Explain for us feathering.

MR. HALEM: The feathering-Tiffany's major body of work that Tiffany did was an Art Nouveau-type piece, and the feathering harked back to Egyptian core-form pieces where different color wraps of glass were put around the piece and then, when it was very hot, you would take a hooked tool and drag it through the wrappings, and you basically would just pull this thin edge of the wrappings through the next wrapping, and then that would pull it through the next wrapping so you got this feather effect, not unlike what you would see in the feathers of a-what's that with the big tail-anyway-

MR. WARMUS: A tropical bird.

MR. HALEM: Yeah, tropical bird-sounds like-sounds like a jeopardy here. What has a big tail? Anyway, so this-we learned to do this feathering that Tiffany had mastered, and everything that started to come out of the studio-well, not everything, but a lot of the stuff-started to have this Tiffany feathering.

And we were doing fuming at the time-iridizing with tin chloride. You would put a hot bit in tin chloride, and the fumes from the tin would envelope the piece, and you get this iridized surface, which was very popular in Tiffany's day. Ours was very crude looking, and it didn't look very good like that.

MR. WARMUS: To stop for one second and go back to when Eisch visited. So Eisch was invited by Harvey, and he was a teacher?

MR. HALEM: Yes.

MR. WARMUS: And how was he as a teacher?

MR. HALEM: He was terrific. He brought an assistant with him, and the assistant did a lot of blowing for him in molds and so on, and then they would take this stuff out of molds, and then they would re-manipulate the mold piece. So they could very quickly get a basic shape, and then, with that basic shape, manipulate that into all different kinds of things. That was another extraordinary thing to see.

And then the feathering-there was some people at schools that would come and visit-there were some schools around-and then we would show them how to feather. And they were, like, blown away by that, and they would go back to their school, and then this whole Tiffany thing started. It got to the point where you would see Tiffany ad nauseum. Everything was Art Nouveau, and at the early GAS [Glass Art Society] meetings, I mean, people would get up and scream-"Let Tiffany die" was one of the phrases that was bandied about-"Let Tiffany die."

MR. WARMUS: And that was a group of people like Orient & Flume?

MR. HALEM: Yeah, that came later. I mean, a lot of the studios that had grown up at that time after-you know, in the early '70s-the studio movement started, and that stuff sold like crazy. That was the stuff you could sell. People were just nuts about it.

One of the earliest galleries in on it was Lillian Nassau in New York. She bought-as I recall, she bought the whole body of Charley Lotton's work. Charley really mined that field of Art Nouveau glass with the floral decorations and so on. He figured out pretty early on how to do it, and Lillian Nassau found him. And I remember going into Lillian Nassau's and saying I knew this guy, and they showed me all of his work.

MR. WARMUS: I knew Lillian well, and there's actually-there is a long interview with her also-I don't think for this project but the Columbia oral history project [Columbia University, New York, NY], and she was a big fan of Lotton.

MR. HALEM: Yeah, and I remember they were early, and she took me into the back room and showed me all of Charley's work, and she was buying it all. She knew the market. She was really bright on that score. And so that-all of this Art Nouveau stuff came about, but I hadn't really-I did my share of it and my share of demonstrating it when I was teaching. Harvey didn't want any part of it, of course. That was just really anathema to what Harvey was about.

And Harvey respected our struggles. He really did, and I think he left us alone in that respect. And I felt very comfortable in mastering technique. And there was-the next thing I wanted to learn after the bottle shape which I thought I had mastered in so many ways-was the goblet. Now I got to tell you, the goblet is like dope. The first one may be free, but after that you are hooked. And the goblet is one of those shapes that, for me, it was like a magnet. I was just drawn to that goblet shape-pulling stems, setting feet, yeah.

And I would make sets of goblets. And it was very funny because when you would start the day, you wanted them all to be the same size. I remember from my production pottery days making these rice bowls; you wanted them all the same size. So I would start out making one goblet, and then, as the day wore on, you make the second goblet with theoretically the same gather of glass, but suddenly the goblet gets a little bit bigger, and then the third goblet gets bigger than that. And what is happening is you're learning your technique from the previous piece that you made, and your technique gets a little bit better; you can make it a little bit thinner; you can stretch it a little bit more; you can work it a little bit better. And so without knowing it, you're your own teacher, and I think that may be missing a bit now in some way. I would love to really talk to the students now and get their thinking about what they are doing when they are doing it.

But anyway, you would do that, and then so what the next day you would say-you know, you would take eight hours and you may have six goblets, and the next day, they came out of the annealer. If they came out in one piece, you would look at them and it would be like a set of pipe organs. You would have the small one, and they would just go up in size to the last one, and the stems would be crooked because generally you would be afraid they were going to blow up on the end of your punty rod. So you put them away too hot and the stems were still moving.

We didn't have blown feet; they would just drop pads on a marver, which is the big steel plate that you work the glass on for some different processes, and we would just squash them down and stick this ball into the pad and punty the piece up; you would manipulate it, and then you would punty it up, and then you would work the top like you did the bottle.

And then as you got better at it, you would start to decorate it. And there were some people that were better at it than others. I remember having in '68-making this beautiful set of goblets that had these wonky, wonky stems, but the tops were flat; they came out-I mean, they were even and it was, like, weird, and like a fool, I sold this set of goblets. And some years later I saw them-the person, who is a friend of Sandy's-a doctor-and I saw them, and I kicked myself for selling them. They were so beautiful.

The innocence that our work had early on-there was that sense of awe over the material; there was a sense of what we saw as the mastery of the material. There was this sense of reinventing something that was two thousand, three thousand years old. There was a sense that we were important, that we-although we didn't know we were part of history, although we didn't know we were making history, we felt we were making our own personal history, and we wanted to spread the word.

I don't think we really saw ourselves-at least in my respect-going into my own studio. I wanted to show others-

[Audio break.]

-how to do this. I was so thrilled with what I was doing. It was getting back to my early days of ceramics when I was a young teenager throwing pots, but this was even more exciting than that. The immediacy of the material was captivating; I didn't have to wait for the magic of the glaze to come out of the final kiln; it was all done in one shot; it was there.

And trying to-we used to go to the library and get books and look at the ancient pieces and try and figure out how they were made. We had no idea how things were made. And you would look at things, and we had no idea. You would look at Roman glass, and we would try and reinvent how the Roman glass was made with the little that we knew.

MR. WARMUS: There is a kind of tradition in some forms of glassmaking of the secrecy of glass, for example, in Murano. So this is an interesting contrast, because yours was almost like an evangelical approach; it was the opposite of secrecy. How did that come about?

MR. HALEM: That is a good question. I don't think we ever knew there was anything like secrets; it wasn't in our vocabulary that there was an alternative to not showing. It was an automatic; it was a given. Why wouldn't you show somebody how to make it? We weren't selling anything; we didn't have studios; it wasn't our livelihood. Why shouldn't we show someone the magic and share it? I don't think it was a matter of, "Well, if I show him this, he's going to do that," or whatever; as I said, not showing somebody was never in the vocabulary.

MR. WARMUS: It seems like that became a hallmark, do you think, of American studio glass-that willingness to show and to go out and spread the word.

MR. HALEM: I think so. I definitely think so. The person-it's interesting you say that. Nick Labino is interesting in that, my getting to know Nick-Nick was never a teacher; Nick never alluded to being a teacher.

Nick never really wanted to be part of us; he was very competitive with Harvey. He never saw himself as an artist; he had the opposite-he was the kind of inner-city glassblower; he didn't have an art background.

MR. WARMUS: He was a scientist.

MR. HALEM: He was a scientist. He was an engineer-scientist kind of person that liked to blow glass.

MR. WARMUS: When did you get to know him?

MR. HALEM: Well, when I was with Harvey, he would come out and visit. That is when I got to know him. There is funny story with that. He came out and he left-I think in no small way he was jealous of all of the-of what Harvey was getting from it, and he wasn't getting what Harvey was getting. I mean, that is my spin on it. And when I came to Kent State to teach is when I got to know Nick. And I liked Nick.

Nick wasn't unlike Harvey in how he acted, in many ways. And in some ways, he was worse. Nick treated people sometimes very shabbily-very shabbily.

I remember what-once what he did to Jack Schmidt. Jack Schmidt had some students out with him, and Jack was making a piece and the piece fell on the floor, and he just ridiculed Jack and said he wasn't much of a glassblower and so on. And he would do-when Marvin [Lipofsky] brought Dick Marquis to meet Nick, Nick gave him a pot of glass that no one could blow, and Dick was a good glassblower-couldn't even blow it. And there was some ridicule there.

So Nick didn't think of us as artists. We didn't melt our own glass; we melted cullet, and if you were melting cullet, he really wanted nothing to do with you for that much. He just thought that that-you had to melt it from scratch.

MR. WARMUS: He melted very interesting colors, I think.

MR. HALEM: Oh, yeah. He was the magician. That was his field; he knew that, and he made some really interesting colors. And you can see them in the castings that he did. He made all of those compatible colors, and he did those hot castings. They are not so great aesthetically, but technically he had mastered a lot of things. He mastered annealing. He-[laughs]-I'll give you a story.

I came here to teach 1970. I'm not even here a year, and they shoot four students. Now, I had done a lot of these body casts in ceramics, so I was very emotionally involved in the shootings that had gone here at Kent State.

MR. WARMUS: These were the national guard-

MR. HALEM: Through the national guard shootings of the four students at Kent State over protesting the Vietnam War-actually the bombing of Cambodia was the overriding issue. I decided I needed to do something, and I thought, well, I had done these press molds in ceramics of these faces I had done in clay. I had done one-I did a life mask of Pete Voulkos, and I have that casting-I have two life casts of Pete Voulkos's face downstairs as a matter of fact, taken when he was alive from Mount Snow. I don't have the mold, but I have the pieces-the clay pieces that I pressed out of it.

Anyway, I revived-I had no idea no one was doing glass castings. I didn't know the history of what was going on in this country, really, with glass. I mean, there was, you know-Robert Fritz was on the West Coast and Marvin was out there, and I think even Dale was out there. I think Dale was already at RISD.

MR. WARMUS: Marvin Lipofsky.

MR. HALEM: Yeah, Marvin Lipofsky and Dale Chihuly.

And I sculpted these pieces out of clay, and then I made a mold from the bronze casting molds that I had made when I was casting bronze as a student, which was one-third plaster, one-third kaolin, and one-third silica. And I think there was some-no, yeah, that was it, and that was the face coat. And so I would put that over the clay-wet clay-and then I would back that with another coat of another thing that had vermiculite in it-this was straight out of bronze casting.

And then I would pull the clay out and clean the mold, and then I put the mold in the oven, heated it up, and then poured the glass into it, and of course the mold just boiled like crazy, because I didn't know what was going on really-the moisture and everything in it-it was like, oh, God, this isn't going to work. So then I thought, oh, the water-the moisture is-so I dried them out, and then I would heat them up to very hot so the glass would flow. They still boiled a bit, but a lot less, and it was only kind of around the edges, and I thought, oh, I got it now.

And we didn't have computers then. There were no controllers. This is the early '70s-this is like '71, '72. And so we had-what were stove controllers, which was on stoves that-one through 10. There was high, low, and then one through 10 to regulate an electric stove, and that is what we had on our annealing ovens. So I would sleep in the studio, and I would by hand turn these-the knob down, and these pieces always cracked; I never could get them right.

MR. WARMUS: Because in an annealer-if you'll explain that to the audience.

MR. HALEM: The annealing-the thicker the piece gets, the slower-the longer it has to be annealed, which is-annealing is the process where the glass is relieved of stress. That is, when you put the glass in the oven, it has hot and cold spots in it. And so if it cools down at a constant rate from when you first put it in the oven, the hot spots will cool at one rate and the cold spots will cool in another and they will crack. So what you have got to do is even the temperature off so that all of the glass is at the exact same temperature, which is the annealing temperature of that glass, which is-for most glasses that we use-is around 950-960 degrees Fahrenheit.

Then after it is annealed correctly, where you even the temperature, you then have to cool it at a constant rate so that it cools evenly, which means the glass is going to shrink at a constant rate. And then you can take it out of the oven, and you have got a piece of glass that is not going to fall apart. That is it in a nutshell. There is a little bit more complexity to that, but that is basically it.

Now, when the glass gets thicker, these time frames really extend themselves out over a long period of time. All of my pieces were breaking, so I called Nick up-here is the story about Nick-and I said, "Nick, I need you to help me with annealing. I'm doing these castings and they are all breaking." And he said, "I'm not interested in helping you out," you know. So I wasn't going to take no for an answer. He said more to me at the time, but I don't remember, but he basically said no, he wasn't going to help me, at least over the phone.

So I drove out to the farm, which was just-which was around Toledo-near Toledo. I drove out there and I brought my castings with me-a couple of broken castings, which were these sculpted-clay sculpted heads-they were very realistic. These-good scale, thick-and I showed him these castings. And I remember, his eyes got big and he looked at them and he looked at me and he said, "You have been doing your homework." I remember that-he has just said that. He said, "Come into my office."

And we went into the office and he explained to me the theory of annealing, because I had been working at it in a way that he could recognize on his terms. Now, there was no reason why he should have told me anything; he is not a teacher; he never set out to be a teacher; why should he tell us anything? I came to understand that years later-you know, I understood where he was coming from years later. At that point I didn't; I was pissed off that someone wouldn't tell me what I wanted to know. So he told me the theories of annealing, and he showed me how to build a controller that he had shown-Bob Barber had built a controller that we didn't really know about.

But he showed us this thing-what was called the variable auto transformer, or a variac, where you would set a cam up-it's a very complicated-it's simple but complicated to explain. It had a string attached to it, and you had a chicken timer that you got from Grainger, and the chicken timer would turn and it would pull the string and it would take the variable auto transformer and automatically vary the electricity, so the elements got cooler and cooler in the oven automatically without you having to do it. More often than not, the chicken timer would get hung up and it would break the string, and nothing-it wouldn't work, but it was better than what we had.

So I went back and I started my castings again, only this time I knew how to anneal; I didn't know about annealing-we only knew how to anneal thin things; we didn't know how to anneal thick things. And when you anneal thin things, it's a lot easier; they kind of almost anneal themselves after a while. You kind of figure it out, but thick things were a whole different thing.

So I did these political pieces of these heads that were based upon the Kent State shootings-the grand jury.

MR. WARMUS: They have one of those in the Corning Museum [Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY].

MR. HALEM: Yes-yeah, I'm getting to that. And so I made the first two of these, and one of those first two was the piece that Corning bought. But there was-and it was made out of this white milk glass that we had gotten from Fenton-Fenton Glass-this milk glass. We had gotten rid of the marbles and we had gotten this glass from Fenton.

And I remember, I made-I finally figured out how to make the mold-the original molds I had made of the one-third, one-third, one-third, with the clay in it-the clay would stick to the glass because silica has-the clay had silica; in the glass, in the molten glass was like your glazing clay. So the glass, when you pour it in the mold, it would just fire the clay and it would stick to the surface. So I had these castings that had all of this skin-this ceramic clay skin-this ugly clay skin on it. So I quickly got rid of the clay and I started 50 plaster and 50 silica, again, still not knowing no one is doing any castings. The last person to ever do castings in this country was Frederick Carder [1863-1963]. So I started doing these castings and they started to work.

Most of them checked-as a matter of fact, the piece at Corning has a big check in the back, but it didn't go all the way through it; it is still in one piece. There was a show that came up that the museum in Toledo [Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH]-the Toledo museum had a big glass show, and I put that piece, the piece that Corning has from the shootings at Kent State-I put that piece in it; I put a white piece in it that was very highly influenced by Erwin Eisch; and a third piece, a black piece. I had gotten away from working with clear glass. I couldn't relate to things you could see through, from my ceramics-I mean, I needed surface.

And all three pieces were accepted for the Toledo show, and the casting was in the show. And I was in New York doing a job for the New York State Council on Crafts-the New York State Crafts Council or something like that-and I had taken a portable furnace to New York-to the Coliseum, and I was blowing glass in the Coliseum-I had this portable glassblowing furnace. And I was blowing glass in the Coliseum-right in the middle of the Coliseum at this huge expo of crafts booths, the forerunner of SOFA [Sculptural Objects and Functional Art Expo].

MR. WARMUS: How did you fuel the-

MR. HALEM: There was a big pillar in the middle of this place that had a gas line in it.

MR. WARMUS: Which would not be legal today.

MR. HALEM: We paid the fire people off. The fire inspector came and he was paid off-a hundred-dollar bill, I remember. The guy is still around. He ran a magazine.