Making art in glass

His 55-foot-tall glass sculpture paying tribute to one of the founders of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art greets visitors as they enter the new facility in downtown Oklahoma City.

The Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower (right) is the tallest creation ever made by world-renowned artist Dale Chihuly. He was commissioned to create the new art center's signature piece, which stands in the three-story atrium at the main entrance. It was funded by the museum's Beaux Arts Acquisitions Fund.

The tower, made of 2,400 hand-blown glass parts, rests in a 14 x 14 foot black granite reflecting pool. The tower's multiple colors of yellow, orange, green, blue-greens and cobalt can be seen from both inside and outside the museum.

Chihuly has been committed to making art in glass since he was a student back in the 1960s, and he has never stopped learning from the medium's traditions and innovations. Through the `70s and `80s, he tended to work in series, exploring the possibilities of his chosen medium and stretching the limits. In the `90s, the artist's interest grew in creating large works for placement in architectural or natural settings. The Chandeliers and the Towers are two forms that he developed.

The first Chandelier appeared in 1992 in a solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum observing 18 years of work. In 1996, Chihuly created a series of Chandeliers for outdoor settings around the city of Venice. The works graced piazzas, wharves, street settings, bridges and canals.

Functional chandeliers, like vases or drinking glasses, are traditionally made of glass and the Venetian glass factories have been making them for centuries. The colored glass of the Venetian chandelier sparkles and glows in the light of the candle or in electric light.

Chihuly's Chandeliers in Venice took the traditional object out- of-doors, made it monumental in size, turning it from a functional and decorative item into a work of public art. Functional chandeliers hang from ceilings, but outside, Chihuly's Chandeliers required structures to support them.

The Towers, built upon armatures that are free-standing, adopted a practical solution to the problem of supporting a large sculpture composed of many elements. Now the artist makes both Chandeliers that hang, and the Towers that stand free. The monumental Chandelier, hung in 1999 in the domed main entrance of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, was designed for that setting and is a classic example of Chihuly's chandelier form.

The Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick Tower is one of the many tower-type sculptures the artist has made since he began. He has created such works of art in Japan, Israel, Iceland, the Bahamas, Monte Carlo, Monaco and London. Some of the installations have been temporary, for exhibitions or projects, and others are permanently placed.

In addition to the memorial tower that will permanently occupy the atrium of Oklahoma City's new museum, the Seattle-based artist's show "Dale Chihuly: An Inaugural Exhibition" kicked off the museum's renewed exhibition program.

Chihuly designed the show, which runs through Aug. 4, especially for the museum's new 6,000-square-foot exhibition gallery. It will present a wide range of his work in glass, from series of single objects to mural sculpture, large-scale sculpture and installations. The exhibition will also include mural-like ensembles of Chihuly's drawings, reflecting the close relationship of his activity as a draughtsman with his innovative uses of blown glass as a medium.

Chihuly uses the forces of nature and the mastery of his medium to arrive at forms in glass that often have a strong organic look and recall natural shapes. On entering the exhibition, the visitor will encounter a sculpture from the Seaforms series, a mass of pale- colored shapes in delicate, patterned glass, recalling anemones, jellyfish, shells or marine plant life. Farther in the show, the overhead installation Seaform Ceiling, from the same series, uses similar forms to suggest a fantastic, intensely colored, immersed underwater environment.

Other parts of the show include the Niijima Floats, which look like renditions of glass fisherman's floats, and Boat Installation, where a Finnish rowboat is filled with a mass of colored glass forms.

Chihuly also presents plant forms in the exhibit like the formal arrangements of the Ikebana series or colorful Tiger Lilies. More abstract are a suspended Chandelier and a Persian Wall. He enjoys placing his works in natural settings -- the gnarled logs that support the Spears installation, for example, present an interesting contrast to the smooth, brightly colored spear shapes that seem to grow out of them.

Born in Tacoma, Wash., in 1941, he became interested in becoming an artist through his studies in interior design at the University of Washington and further study at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied glass. He also studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he established a program of study for glass. And in 1971, the artist co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Wash.

His present studio located in Seattle, called The Boathouse, consists of a research lab, exhibition space, living quarters and a production facility.

Among Chihuly's major exhibitions are Chihuly Over Venice (1995- '96 and tour) first shown at various sites around Venice, Italy. Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem 2000 (1999-2000), installed in an ancient fortress in Jerusalem and Chihuly at the V&A (2001) at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He has exhibited throughout the United States and in many other countries, including Japan, Australia and Taiwan as well as most European countries. His work is included in museum, public, private and corporate collections worldwide.

Copyright 2002
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