In a telephone interview with The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, Jutta-Annette Page, Glass Art Society board president, and Pamela Koss, the executive director, discussed the cancellation of the 2013 conference in Boston, announced on Thursday, January 3rd.
GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet: Can you talk about what led to the decision to cancel the Boston Glass Art Society conference?
Jutta-Annette Page: There were a number of problems that we encountered regarding venues, finding a place for the mobile hot shop unit was one of them. The other was finding a place for the student exhibitions and the final party. This conference is large and complex, and in order to pull this off, you have to follow a certain timeline. When one part is not falling into place, it starts to have a domino effect, the others are toppling. You can only wait so long. The Toledo conference [in 2012] was so successful because we were able to invite the world. We knew which international artists were coming, and once we had the commitment, the lectures, and the locations where they were going to be held, we could go to local sponsors and begin the fundraising process. Without all the pieces in place in Boston, it made it very difficult.
Pamela Koss: I think there’s a lot of competition in Boston. For Toledo, we were a big conference. In Boston, we ranked lower. Boston is a hotbed for technology and medical conferences which have very large budgets, and we were in competition with that. Having said that, the fact that we didn’t have principal pieces put together, and weren’t able to put them together, made that more difficult. I think when people look at the GAS conference, they say “Gee, I can do that. I put a party on in my back yard and it worked.” When we did the GAS conference in Boston in 1996, it was half the size it is now. It’s just more difficult, when you think about moving a thousand plus people in buses in rush hour, getting them back in time so they’re not missing things. It’s difficult in the best circumstances because we do work on a limited budget, we’re trying to keep the price point for the artists at a reasonable level so they can afford to go. Unlike other conferences, where a company can sponsor you to attend, most of those who attend the GAS conference are paying their own way.
GLASS: When did you have a sense that there were serious problems with this conference?
Koss: When Jutta is talking about timing, we usually have a pre-conference brochure in people’s hands in mid-November. I’ve had the brochure halfway completed for two months. And here we are in January, and it’s still only halfway done.
Page: The other thing is the wider arts community. The reason we decided on Boston, there is interest in contemporary glass there, there are studios there, and two of them are rather old. But you also need to have an arts community that gets behind something like this. That’s not to say that it doesn’t exist in Boston, but it goes to the point that Pam was making. Boston is a large city with a much wider spread, more competition, and also, the issue of the two cities — Boston and Cambridge — that made it more difficult.
GLASS: To what extent was the change in leadership at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design a factor? They changed presidents in 2011.
Page: Whenever you have a change in administration, that can cause problems. In Toledo, I made the proposal to the GAS board in 2008, and in the process of planning the conference, we had a change of director at the Toledo Museum of Art. In the case of Toledo, the new director [Brian Kennedy] came in and backed us up. By the time the conference came around, he had found his own bearings, and was very comfortable in the community around him. The change at MassArt came at a critical point in the planning for the conference, and that certainly did not make it any easier.
Koss: That being said, it’s important to say that we still had the support of both MassArt and MIT. There were many problems that happened in Boston, and it’s hard to identify any single thing.
Page: If you have a disappointing decision like this, it’s natural that some might seek to find blame, but that is really not helpful. We need to stress that MassArt came through in the end for our international exhibition venue. They really tried. You can’t say they didn’t try everything they could.
Koss: This would have been a really difficult conference at best, even if we had gotten everything done. Just doing it between two separate cities [Boston and Cambridge] was a challenge. But then to be pushed back so far in timing — we’re only five months out. We hadn’t launched registration yet because we couldn’t.
Page: And without enough funding in place ...
Koss: I guess that’s the other thing. When opportunities did come forward, they were at a very high price point. Not what was in the budget initially. ... We hadn’t even secured the venue for the closing night party. Contrast this with Toledo, where the city worked with us, everybody in Toledo wanted to be a part of the conference. Venues were given to us at no cost. This was not the case in Boston.
Page: That’s the thing, we can’t think of it in terms of one or two people. We have to think about 1,200 people doing things at the same time. The community has grown so much, we are glad to have this increase in attendance. It is the event in the year where people can come together internationally, see their colleagues and friends, have an exchange and learn. But we want to do all this at a price point where the artists can afford it.
Koss: Nobody is more disappointed than we are.
GLASS: What are the implications of the cancellation for the Glass Art Society?
Koss: Is it a big impact? You bet. But we have other things going on this year besides that. We are looking forward to other events, regional events in 2013. I don’t have a plan I can give you today, but these are some of the options for us.
Page: The thought behind it is really concentrate on 2014, make that a terrific conference. We are going to have a terrific conference, and really focus on that.
Koss: We’re looking at trying to do some things virtually. Our tech display vendors, making sure that the Web traffic goes to the suppliers and vendors. We are redoing our Website to make it more interactive for our members. We are launching a Webinar series, offering training options for people throughout the year. These are things that will continue past the annual conferences, giving our members information to use. That’s still our mission, we’re still doing our job, there’s just this one particular thing for this year that is not going to occur.
Page: Some of the response we have received from artists [to the cancellation announcement] were not all negative. We are hearing some say that they can save up for the following year’s conference. We are in the fourth year of a recession, and some of the responses saw this at this as an opportunity to save up for the 2014 event.
GLASS: Does it help to have had such as strong 2012 conference in Toledo to weather this cancellation in 2013?
Page: Yes, it helps financially to have had Toledo. But the Toledo conference also set the bar very high. We couldn’t follow up with another conference that was substandard. And the pressure we put on ourselves, we wanted the Boston conference to be as good as Toledo. We were thrilled to be at MIT.
GLASS: Is there any discussion of making the conference a bi-annual event rather than an annual event?
Page: I don’t think we want to go that way to bi-annual event. We’re already looking to 2015 and 2016, with longer lead-times. There’s not really any plan for making a two-year hiatus a regular occurrence.
GLASS: What could you have done differently with the Boston conference in retrospect?
Koss: Much of it was out of our control. The things that we thought were in place, weren’t.
Page: To address the whole fundraising issue, we have a development committee at the GAS board. We have hired a consultant to develop a plan, we’re laying more groundwork there, to have means to assist cities in doing these conference.
Koss: That is something that we will be a helpful tool to cities, applying to GAS, have a plan going forward, as the conference gets bigger and bigger, the fundraising element becomes larger. All of those critical places, the auction and overall sponsorship itself are critical to how this goes forward. I think this development plan will assist cities in going forward, and how we approach cities too and their capacity.
Page: All of us are volunteers and so are the co-chairs for the conference. Since none of us are living in the city, you have to depend on what they’re telling you. You would think that they are connected into the wider arts community, like we had in Toledo. But if there isn’t this kind of direct and intense connection to that community, it’s very difficult to gauge from the outside.
Koss: You are going by the information you are getting from the co-chairs, that is your connection. It’s hard for me to know that because I’m not there, until the dominoes start to fall. That being said, we so appreciate the work that everybody has done in Boston, all the volunteers. This is not a sign that the economy is terrible. We had pieces of it in place, we just ran out of time to provide the product we needed to do. People worked hard, there’s no lack of appreciation on our part because of that. We are very disappointed as well.
GLASS: What’s next for GAS?
Koss: We’re just looking forward , and we’re making an announcement soon about what’s happening in 2014. Plan for that. It’ll be huge.
Page: It looks very promising for 2014. This [the Boston conference] is really an exception. People should understand, this is not a pattern. People should stay engaged, visit the Website regularly for updates.
Koss: People will have other opportunities to connect with GAS throughout this year. There might not be the big conference in 2013, but there will be many other ways. Stay tuned.