Evan Snyderman (MFA ’94) never expected to run a gallery, despite an upbringing inside his parents’ Philadelphia-based gallery, Snyderman-Works. There, in a space that for more than 50 years played a significant role in the American craft movement, he moved between behind-the-scenes tasks and early encounters with artists, all without imagining he would one day work in the field himself. That proximity, however, quietly set the stage for what would follow. 

After building a career as a glass artist, performer and educator, Snyderman became the principal, co-founder and creative director of R & Company, a New York–based collectible design gallery that he has run with business partner Zesty Meyers for nearly 30 years. The gallery has become a defining force in design, known for bridging historical and contemporary practices and for its long-term stewardship of 20th- and 21st-century design scholarship.  

First Encounters with Glass 

Through his parents’ network, Snyderman spent his childhood being introduced to woodworkers, ceramicists and glass artists, traveling regularly to visit studios across the Northeast. A formative moment came when he was 13, during a visit to glass artist Therman Statom's Los Angeles studio, where he was invited to try blowing glass for the first time. “It’s like an athletic sport,” Snyderman said. “You’re doing three things at once, and when you start the process, you can’t stop until it’s finished—you can’t take a break, you can’t overthink it, it’s just continuous motion, and half the time it breaks.”  

The experience—equal parts spectacle and physical challenge—stuck.  

“We were fortunate enough to be able to have access to glass because my parents represented glass artists, and before I knew it, I was taking classes at Tyler on the weekends,” he said. 

At the time, Tyler offered Saturday programs for high school students at its Elkins Park campus, and he commuted nearly two hours by subway and bus to access the studio classes. What began as a supplementary art class quickly became more serious: he moved from student to studio assistant, working after school in a professional glass studio and gaining hands-on experience that extended far beyond the classroom. 

Snyderman went on to study glass at Rochester Institute of Technology, where his undergraduate curriculum emphasized technical rigor and precision. He later returned to Tyler for his MFA. “Tyler was mostly focused on conceptual work, and at RIT I’d really focused on technique and learned how to make anything,” he said. “My first year in the MFA program was really hard but it was exciting, being thrown into the fire and thrown into this world of conceptual work.”   

Training, Transition, and Early Collaboration 

It was during his years as a student that Snyderman was first introduced to his future business partner, Zesty Meyers, through the close-knit glass community.  

“The glass world is pretty small, and it was even smaller in the ’90s. We’d crossed paths at Pilchuck and Haystack and I knew he had started this group called the B Team at MassArt,” explained Snyderman.  

Founded in 1990, the B Team was a performance collective composed of glass artists, driven by a punk rock ethos and desire to push the bounds of the material. They used the molten glass in dynamic, choreographed performances. When the B Team toured East Coast schools and visited Tyler during Snyderman's days as a graduate student, he hosted them. “They did a day or two of performances and they crashed at my house. We sort of bonded and became friends after that,” he said.  

After completing his MFA, Snyderman split his time between Philadelphia and New York, eventually reconnecting with Meyers at UrbanGlass, a nonprofit public-access glass studio in Brooklyn. There, he moved fluidly between roles as teaching assistant, instructor, fabricator and independent artist. The experimental and collaborative environment expanded his understanding of what a glass practice could be.  

Around this time, Meyers invited him to join the B Team, and the group received a Biennial Competition Award from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. They devoted the grant funding entirely to a single large-scale performance at UrbanGlass titled “Spontaneous Combustion 2.” The project went on to win a Bessie Award for “Performance Installation and New Media,” which led to an international tour in Japan. 

Accidental Beginnings of a Business 

The period that followed was defined by creative momentum and financial precarity, as Snyderman balanced teaching, fabrication work, performance and independent projects across two cities. To simplify the constant travel, he began selling work at flea markets to fund a move to New York. Meyers joined him at a shared table, and the collaboration that emerged became the foundation of what would eventually become R & Company, established in 1997.  

“Whether in a flea market or at an art fair, presentation is everything,” Snyderman said. “We’ve been able to build our entire business around the idea of presentation and talking about things in a way that tells a story, which I really learned to do in art school.”  

Positioned at the intersection of contemporary art, craft, and design, the gallery has built a reputation for presenting work that moves between disciplines. This hybrid approach is intentional. Rather than focusing on technical mastery alone, the emphasis is on supporting artists who break barriers.  

A decades-long business partnership brings with it both reward and challenge. The two bring different perspectives and working styles, often approaching problems from opposite directions. What has sustained the partnership is a shared set of goals and a consistent work ethic, coupled with a willingness to adapt. “If something isn’t working, we shift gears,” he said.  

Snyderman attributes some of their success to their shared experience as artists who have pushed the boundaries of their medium, particularly through their performance art with the B Team.  

“That ability to talk frankly with the artists we represent has given us a big advantage. We weren’t following the traditions in our own work. We’ve always pushed our artists to take chances. We’re looking for someone who’s going to take their work and turn it on its head, mix it with something unexpected and tell a story, which is hard to find,” said Snyderman.  

Leaving a Legacy 

R & Company’s stewardship isn’t limited to the artists and designers in their current roster (an impressive lineup including the Haas Brothers, Roberto Lugo, and Jolie Ngo, among others). It also extends to preserving the history of artists whose work wasn’t properly recognized or celebrated in its time. The gallery has published more than 20 books and holds an extensive library and archival collection covering the history of art, design and architecture from the 1900s to the present. Exhibitions, research projects and documentary films extend this work, positioning the gallery as something closer to a cultural institution than a commercial space.  

This aspect of the work, fueled by personal passion, has helped to reinvigorate public interest in artists like American sculptor and furniture icon Wendell Castle and Swedish-American designer and architect Greta Magnussen Grossman.  

Snyderman views this work as what really sets R & Company apart from anyone else in the business. “We’ve helped preserve the history of a lot of artists that were left out of the major conversations and weren’t in the history books, but who we felt were important. We set out to try and tell their stories, and that has been very rewarding,” he said.  

In a full-circle moment, reconnecting to his own history, Snyderman will reunite with the B Team this summer. The group will perform at this year’s Glass Art Society conference held at the Corning Museum of Glass, which is producing a feature-length documentary on the B Team featuring interviews and rare archival materials. The last time the group performed together was in the late 1990s.  

“It’s been a long time,” Snyderman said. “We’re figuring out how to do it again.”