On one level

On one level, Dale Chihuly can be lauded for moving the Studio Glass movement from its original premise of the solitary artist working in a studio environment to embracing the more established modus operandus within the art world of collaborative endeavors and a division of labor within the creative process. However, Chihuly's contribution to the field extends well beyond this. His practice of putting together teams of artists with exceptional glassblowing skills has led to the development of complex, multipart sculptures of dramatic beauty and scale that place him in the leadership role of moving blown glass out of the confines of the small, precious object and into the realm of large-scale sculpture and environmental art. In fact, Chihuly deserves much of the credit for establishing the blown glass form as an accepted medium for installation art and, hence, for contemporary expression in late twentieth and twenty-first century art generally.

A prodigiously prolific artist whose work balances content with an investigation of the material's properties of translucency and transparency, Chihuly began working with glass at a time when reverence for the medium and for technique was paramount. A student of interior design and architecture in the early 1960s, by 1965 he had become captivated by the process of glassblowing. He enrolled in the University of Wisconsin's hot glass program, the first of its kind in the United States, established by Studio Glass movement founder Harvey K. Littleton. While the literature has always attributed Chihuly’s interest in employing teams of glassblowers to a three-week visit to the Venini glass factory in Murano in 1968, it is now believed that his first collaborations date from his days in Madison where he worked with fellow graduate student and second generation Studio Glass artist Fritz Dreisbach. After receiving a degree in sculpture, Chihuly was admitted to the ceramics program at the Rhode Island School of Design, only to establish its renowned glass program, turning out a generation of recognized artists.

Influenced by an environment that fostered the blurring of boundaries separating all the arts, as early as 1967 Chihuly was using neon, argon, and blown glass forms to create room-sized installations of organic, freestanding, plantlike imagery. He brought this interdisciplinary approach to the arts to the legendary Pilchuck School in Stanwood, Washington, which he cofounded in 1971 and served as its first artistic director until 1989. Under Chihuly's guidance, Pilchuck has become a gathering place for international artists with diverse backgrounds. Over the years his studios, which include an old racing shell factory in Seattle called The Boathouse and now buildings in the Ballard section of the city and Tacoma, have become a mecca for artists, collectors, and museum professionals involved in all media. Beyond being working environments, they house the diverse and massive collections ranging from Pendleton blankets to chalk ware figurines that in their quantities as well as formal qualities may have provided additional inspiration to the artist over time.

Stylistically over the past forty years, Chihuly's sculptures in glass have explored color, line, and assemblage. Although his work ranges from the single vessel to indoor/outdoor site-specific installations, he is best known for his multipart blown compositions. These works fall into categories of mini-environments designed for the tabletop as well as large, often serialized forms that are innovatively displayed in groupings on a wide variety of surfaces ranging from pedestals to bodies of natural water. Masses of these blown forms also have been affixed to specially engineered structures that dominate large exterior or interior spaces. In recent years, Chihuly has experimented with the plastic Polyvitro to create forms that he could not safely have made in glass that are then installed in outdoor environments.

Chihuly and his teams have created a wide vocabulary of blown forms, revisiting and refining earlier shapes while at the same time creating exciting new elements. His Fiori, beginning in the early to mid-1990s, continue to demonstrate his desire to take advantage of the glassblowing skills of his teams, which include gaffers William Morris, Rich Royal, Martin Blank, Joey Kirkpatrick, Flora Mace, Joey DeCamp, Benjamin Moore, Jim Mongrain, Lino Tagliapietra, and Pino Signoretto. The Baskets, Cylinders, Seaforms, Macchia, Persians, Venetians, Niijima Floats, and Chandeliers have now been joined by newer blown elements with exotic names: Reeds, Saguaros, Herons, Seal Pups, and Belugas. The array demonstrates that Chihuly is, first and foremost, a colorist.

While he continues to draw upon all these forms for his more monumental compositions, in 2006 Chihuly returned to the Baskets and Cylinders to explore the color black. Whether black was chosen to enhance the other colors of his palette or has some private meaning for the artist is unclear. Chihuly simply explains it as a response to memory: a reminder of early museum installations of his work and of images of earlier works that were photographed on black Plexiglas. To date, the sculptures of the Black Series utilize much of his established vocabulary of blown forms: broad expanses of black are juxtaposed against vibrant reds, greens, yellows, and white. Even the works on paper reflect this new interest: globs of silver, gold, or iridescent acrylic paint streak or spatter across the black backgrounds.

Beginning with his neon installations, Chihuly’s work has been marked by the prominence of line. His Blanket Cylinders of the mid-1970s, for example, were unique within the history of glass because of the composed glass-thread “drawings” fused into the surface. Later, the Seaforms were blown in optic molds, resulting in surfaces decorated with repeating ribbed motifs. He explored in the Macchia series bold, colorful lip wraps that contrast sharply with the brilliant body colors of the vessels. Finally, beginning with the Venetians of the early 1990s, the elongated, linear blown forms, that are a product of the glassblowing process, became significant parts of his vocabulary. These highly baroque, sometimes writhing elements are especially effective in the more recent Chandeliers, Towers, and Boats. The works on paper, begun in the late 1970s as an activity to occupy his time while working with the teams in the hot shop and as a means of communicating ideas to the team, demonstrate that same linear quality. Whether they are executed with pencil, mixed media or acrylic paint, attenuated lines dominate these compositions.

Chihuly’s work is strongly autobiographical. Recently, the artist has become more forthcoming about the impact of his family on his work. He attributes his success with teamwork to his father, who was a union organizer. His well-documented close relationship with his mother is now understood to have been strengthened by the death of his older brother in 1957 and then his father a year later. One of her most lasting influences has been in his longstanding fascination with abstracted flower forms—an allusion to her lush gardens in Tacoma. Likewise, series such as his Seaforms, Niijima Floats, and even the Chandeliers allude to his childhood in Tacoma, Washington, marked by his love of the sea and his recognition of its importance to the economy of the Pacific Northwest. Even in the few instances in which the artist has chosen to respond to earlier historical decorative arts forms, the imagery has personal significance. The Basket series, for instance, developed out of the woven Northwest Coast Indian baskets that Chihuly saw in 1977 with his late friend the sculptor Italo Scanga and sculptor James Carpenter at the Tacoma Historical Society.

Over the years the artist has created a number of memorable installation exhibitions, including “Chihuly Over Venice” (1995 – 96), “Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem 2000” at the Tower of David Museum of the History of Jerusalem (2000), “Chihuly in the Park: A Garden of Glass” at Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory (2001 – 2002), and the “Chihuly Bridge of Glass” in Tacoma (2002). These installations confirm the artist’s sensitivity to architectural context and his interest in the interplay of natural light on the glass that exploits its translucency and transparency.

While elements of the earlier installations allude to natural phenomena such as icicles and vegetation, gardens provide the dominant theme in Chihuly’s more recent ones. Sites that include Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory (2001), the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (2005), the New York Botanical Garden (2006), and Pittsburgh’s Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens (2007) enable the artist to juxtapose monumental, organically shaped sculptural forms with beautiful landscaping, establishing a direct and immediate interaction between nature, art, and environmental light.

Moreover, Chihuly’s installations at the Tacoma Art Museum (2003), at the Kunstmuseum Luzern (2005), and more recently at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum (2008) reveal the artist’s progression toward a logical next direction: installations that are gardens themselves. While these gardens have largely been masses of churning forms and vibrant colors, the artist has also executed others that use a more limited single color palette. In a sense, Chihuly has come full circle; now using his mature vocabulary, he captures in these installations the joie de vivre of the plantlike forms of his early neon environments.

A dominant presence in the art world, Dale Chihuly and his work has long provoked considerable controversy as part of the art/craft debate. However, with exhibitions such as his recent show at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, there can be little doubt that his lasting contribution to art of our times is an established fact.

Davira S. Taragin
Formerly Director of Exhibitions and Programs, Racine Art Museum;
Curator, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Toledo Museum of Art

DALE CHIHULY:
A SELECTIVE BIOGRAPHY

Tina Oldknow

Dale Chihuly, who was born in Tacoma, Washington in 1941, has become an internationally celebrated personality in contemporary art and design whose prominence in the field of contemporary studio glass is unmatched. He is a generous and charismatic individual with a forceful personality, who ceaselessly promotes himself and his material—glass—to audiences around the world. For those who might question the influence of a single artist on what has become a sizable international community, try imagining what the early American studio glass movement—or international glass today—would be without Chihuly. It is impossible to deny the magnitude and pervasiveness of his influence.

During his many years as a teacher, Chihuly made a point of gathering artists from all media to work with him and with glass, with the aim of introducing new points of view and infusing new energy into the process of glassworking. In 1969, he established an important glass program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, and two years later, he founded Pilchuck Glass School, the premier international school for glass artists, with the Seattle art patrons Anne Gould Hauberg and John Hauberg. Students combined glass and other media in both glassblowing and installation work—often compensating in creative presentation for what they lacked in technique—and they were always encouraged by Chihuly to approach the material in unorthodox ways. With these achievements alone, Chihuly would be recognized for his enduring impact on the American studio glass movement, but he has been able to pursue a prolific and successful career as an artist as well.

From the beginning of his involvement with glass in the 1960s, Dale Chihuly has championed the use of blown glass as a vehicle for sculpture, focusing on the vessel in his explorations of color and form. Setting aside complex techniques in favor of letting the hot glass naturally find its own shape, he has produced work that is characterized by its large, gravity-influenced forms and minimal tooling as much as by its striking palette of colors. Drawing from the unconscious, he infuses his ambiguous forms with passionate colors, creating vessels that communicate a range of aesthetic experience—from the ephemeral moods represented by a single Macchia or nested Seaform to the highly emotional, transformational environments realized in large-scale installations such as the Persians or Chandeliers.

While Chihuly’s work has changed dramatically throughout his 35-year career, certain preferences have remained the same. He has always worked glass in a variety of sizes, from small vessels to room-size installations. He has always been interested in sculpture, and in outdoor projects where the landscape may be used as a point of departure. Color, on the other hand, has been a gradual acquisition, from the muted, relatively monochromatic 1970s works, such as the Blanket Cylinders and early Seaforms, to the brilliant colors of the Macchias and Venetians in the 1980s.

Chihuly was introduced to glass in 1964, when, as a weaving student, he made large and small tapestries incorporating strips of fused glass and metal. He did not begin blowing glass until a year or so later. During the latter half of the 1960s, Chihuly studied with Harvey Littleton at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, finished his graduate work at RISD, worked in Murano, and then began teaching at RISD in 1969. While his first students at RISD and Pilchuck focused on the type of expressionistic blobs that were so popular in the early 1970s, "the idea of making goblets and vases was not what we were really interested in doing," Chihuly says. "We did a lot of experimental, temporary projects. It was a time when you didn't think about permanency in any way."

Beginning in the summer of 1971, temporary outdoor projects were undertaken at Pilchuck that included hot glass “events” as well as sculptural “installations” in different locales. In one project, Chihuly blew and then floated a series of glass bubbles on the water of a small pond. When the water dried up a couple of weeks later, the bubbles disappeared along with the pond. In 1995, as part of his ambitious “Chihuly over Venice” project, Chihuly and a team of 30 workers made chandeliers at the Iittala Glassworks in Nuutajärvi, Finland. During their time there, Chihuly devised a performance in which he took chandelier elements and tossed them into the river. He also made ephemeral outdoor installations of sculptural glass elements along the river. These events directly recalled the work that Chihuly had done at Pilchuck some 25 years earlier, and they emphasized his continued interest in this type of artistic activity.

Chihuly is better known, however, for his vessels, which he began to develop in the mid-1970s. From this period until well into the 1980s, he focused all of his interest in sculpture on the vessel, making individual pieces as well as installations that gradually increased in size as the technical capabilities of his team and his facilities grew. The Navajo Blanket Cylinders and Baskets of the mid- and late 1970s were inspired by Native American art, specifically Navajo textiles and a display of ancient, sagged Native American baskets that the artist had seen in a Tacoma museum. From this direction, Chihuly turned, in the early 1980s, to his Seaforms and Macchias, his glass vessels aggressively gaining in size and color. By the late 1980s, he had begun his Persians series, which gradually evolved from nested Seaform-like groupings to more dramatic groupings of large and small forms, and then to monumental wall, ceiling, and floor installations.

The Persians were Chihuly’s first works to incorporate forms based on ancient and historical glass prototypes. This new interest in tooled, articulated, and decorated form was later exploited in the Venetians, a series Chihuly began in 1988 with Lino Tagliapietra. Although Chihuly had known Tagliapietra for many years, he had not considered collaborating with him, knowing that his freer style had nothing in common with the technically intensive Venetian one. However, Chihuly had begun to look at Italian glass of the 1920s to 1940s by designers such as Napoleone Martinuzzi and Carlo Scarpa, and he was intrigued by these works. With Tagliapietra, Chihuly entered a new phase of intensely decorated, elaborately worked, and brilliantly colored vessels whose decorations, rather than forms, became the focus of Chihuly’s sculptural expression. In the 1990s, Chihuly would continue in this vein with a series of Putti vessels made in collaboration with another Muranese master, Pino Signoretto.

In reviewing Chihuly’s prolific and varied oeuvre, his most daring and important works are his architectural and outdoor installations. In the 1970s, he collaborated with James Carpenter on a number of installations using neon and ice, as well as sculptural glass elements, to create environments. Chihuly did not focus again on this type of activity until the later 1980s, when he gradually developed his Persians to interact with architectural settings, making all sorts of wall and window installations before moving to ceilings and floors. The Persian ceilings are particularly remarkable for their transformational and transcendent qualities, and they have become a kind of symbolic, ceremonial architecture.

Chihuly has always been interested in architecture, landscape, and glass of super-heroic scale, and when he moves his attention from object to environment, the result is nothing less than spectacular. Temporary outdoor projects such as the 1996 “Chihuly over Venice,” or “Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem 2000,” are unheard of in the craft-associated media to which glass belongs. Chihuly's singular mixture of ambition, vision, and enchantment comes closest to that of contemporary Land artists, such as Christo. These types of projects not only involve the temporary transformation of architecture and landscape, but also engage a diverse group of people—including artists and fabricators, builders, landowners, city officials, media, and members of the public—who participate with the artist in the artistic activity/performance.

The energetic masses of color and light that are known as the Towers and Chandeliers, which Chihuly has produced in a constellation of colors, are now the artist’s most widely known works. Chihuly introduced this sculptural form in his solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in 1992, and he further developed it for his Venice project. Exuberant in spirit and ambitious in scope, these large-scale glass sculptures are housed in museums, concert halls, corporate offices, public spaces, and private residences around the world.

Chihuly’s most recent installations have focused on the idea of the garden, which stems from his first outdoor works at Pilchuck and his later, monumental Persians installations. The garden is a place of physical and spiritual delight that represents the perfect world, or paradise, and Chihuly’s installations at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago (2001) and “Mille Fiori” (A Thousand Flowers) at the Tacoma Museum of Art (2003) are truly spaces in which physical and spiritual delights reign. The resounding popularity of the gardens and other Chihuly environments demonstrates the importance of, and need for, the aesthetic experience—the experience of moments of beauty, revelation, and transcendence that are the antithesis of the everyday.

Although Chihuly’s objects are much discussed and sought after by collectors and museums, it is the large-scale installations and outdoor works that best reflect his expansive vision. Public projects, such as the Chandeliers adorning the canals of Venice, the Towers emerging from the ruins of the Temple of David in Jerusalem, and the Gardens of glass, are testaments to Chihuly’s extraordinary energy and passion. Throughout his career, Chihuly has played the roles of glass heretic, auteur, catalyst, and magus: he is a demanding artist for whom glass, a demanding medium, has performed its radiant and enchanting best.

"Dale Chihuly: A Selective Biography" has been reprinted from the Glass Art Society Journal, 2003, pp. 12–15. It is an abridged and updated version of the article “Dale Chihuly, maestro americano/Dale Chihuly, American Maestro,” that was published in Vetro (Vol. III, no. 7), April–June, 2000, pp. 10–17.

Also by Tina Oldknow:
Chihuly Over Venice: Dale Chihuly's Shining Legacy, 1996
An Ancient Legacy, Chihuly Persians, 1996.

More biographies:
Dale Chihuly 2002, Davira S. Taragin, 2002
Chihuly, Dale, Current Biography, 1995

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Voluptuous shapes in luscious color, Dale Chihuly's large-scale glass sculptures are all about immediate sensory experience. It's likely no book could capture the intoxication of being in the presence of clusters of glass forms that look like undersea life or tropical forests, hanging overhead or rising up from the floor in fabulous splendor.

Chihuly Projects offers 200 full-page photographs (in supersaturated color) of 34 installations the Seattle artist created over a 30-year span for public and private clients, plus chatty comments by the artist and members of his staff. A fine essay by the art writer Barbara Rose places Chihuly's work in the context of contemporary art and his own life. (An eye injury in the mid-'70s precipitated his shift from blowing individual tabletop glass pieces to becoming the director of a team effort.) But the photographs tend to flatten out Chihuly's generous shapes, and the real-world settings of the sculptures are often so busy visually that, seen from the fixed vantage point of a still photo, they compete distractingly with the art. Although some pieces are shown in different stages of completion, it's hard to grasp how any given project actually comes together from start to finish.

A splashy book that seems to be trying to match the brio and outsized vision of its artist, Chihuly Projects serves primarily as an eye-popping general tour of work that ranges from a 70-by-30-foot ceiling for the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas to an outdoor "chandelier" (for a retreat in Washington State) with 1,200 handblown glass icicles--and an attached heater for melting snow to add hanging pendants of real ice. --Cathy Curtis

From Library Journal
Chihuly's large-scale glass installations are described by art critic Rose as "an incredibly generous and spectacular public art that can delight and amaze, transport and stimulate." The same can be said for the brightly colored full-page photographs of 33 projects from Chihuly's workshop that form the bulk of this book. Photographs of both finished installations and various stages in their creation, as well as written comments by Chihuly and members of his workshop, give readers a sense of how these works were created. Essays by Rose and Lanzone make references to so many artists and critics that they will not be meaningful to readers who do not already have wide knowledge of art, but most of the book can be enjoyed by general readers, though Donald Kuspit and Jack Cowart's Chihuly (Abrams, 1999. 2d ed.) provides a fuller overview of Chihuly's glass art.AKathryn Wekselman, M.Ln., Cincinnati
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.