One might wonder just how to address an artist who, in 1992, was named the United States’ first National Living Treasure.
But the sight of the burly guy ambling through the Ritz Carlton Hotel lobby in spattered work shoes knocks Dale Chihuly’s colorful feet off any imagined pedestal and plants them firmly on common ground.
Jacketless among men suited by the world’s top tailors, the preeminent glass artist, who was awarded his auspicious title by the nation’s governors, wears a dark blue shirt and black khaki pants. Sporting dribbles from markers he designs with, his work shoes look like a Jackson Pollock painting.
The shoes, a black eye-patch and a wild corona of curly hair have become the 55-year-old Chihuly’s signature look–as much as bold patterns, colors and forms and unprecedented size have become the signature of his glass art.
“I always liked glass,” says Chihuly, who credits his mother’s extraordinary garden as inspiration for many of his forms. (“That was one of the colorful aspects of my childhood.”) “You see, glass has a magical quality that attracts people.”
And for years, Chihuly’s pieces have been attracting people to exhibitions like the one that is currently at River North’s Habatat Galleries.
Whether vessellike as is his Seaforms series or mold-breaking like his colossal “chandeliers,” Chihuly’s work reflects his pioneering and collaborative approach to art and his against-all-odds spirit.
He actually has not blown glass for some years, since a car accident in England cost him the sight in his left eye (and his depth perception). Instead, he exuberantly draws his glass designs in primary colors and oversees assistants who bring his ideas to life.
What would have killed another artist’s career served to feed Chihuly’s.
Currently his career has reached a new zenith with “Chihuly Over Venice,” an international project that opened at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Kansas City, Mo., last month to a national media frenzy.
The show ceremonially underscores Chihuly’s achievement of taking a medium considered craft and elevating it to contemporary sculpture, says Karen Echt, director of Habatat Galleries.
“Glass could be very limited, but he did something with it that is incredible,” adds Italo Scanga of Chihuly’s work. Scanga, a professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, has, for 30 years, known the artist who “pushed the limits and went beyond containers.”
Though Chihuly has worked his way through many series–including “Pilchuck Baskets,” “Seaforms,” “Blanket Cylinders” and “Persians”–most of them were vessellike.
The “chandeliers” of “Chihuly Over Venice,” however, make Chihuly “utterly unique in the glass medium–in all media,” says Dana Self, curator of Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design.
The 15 chandeliers–made of many individual pieces of handblown glass wired to an armature–vary from a 12-foot-high bunch of red chili peppers made in Mexico to an elegant waterfall of abstract birds’ heads in clear etched glass, which was created in Ireland’s famed Waterford factory.
The chandeliers, some weighing as much as a ton, appear to be galactic globules of light, flowers from the heart of a volcano–so gravity-free one expects them to lift the room in which they are hung.
“There’s a visceral response,” says Cara McCarthy, curator of decorative arts at the St. Louis Art Museum, where a Chihuly exhibit that included two chandeliers brought in unprecedented crowds last summer. “We’ve never had an exhibit before where people would gasp as they walked in.”
Roving ambassador
Chicagoans got a sneak preview of “Chihuly Over Venice” a few weeks before the Kansas City premiere when Chihuly was in town for his opening at Habatat. During that visit, he gave a lecture to a sold-out audience at the Art Institute of Chicago and showed tapes of his 1995 trips to Finland, Ireland, Mexico and Italy–countries with strong glass-blowing traditions.
In each, he and his team of American glass blowers created a series of handblown chandeliers working hand-in-hand with native glass blowers.
Historically, glass blowing is an occupation surrounded by secrecy. With this project, Chihuly broke through those barriers as a roving ambassador of the art, promoting a cooperative spirit.
He has created as many as 30 original pieces in one day, working with teams of highly skilled assistants, a ploy initiated to defeat limitations imposed by his accident.
Over coffee, Chihuly tells “the strange story” of how he came to be synonymous with class glass.
It began on the beaches of Tacoma, Wash., where he was born in 1941. Walking along the water’s edge, most kids would pick up the seashells, he says. Instead he picked up the beach glass, small, wave-worn fragments of broken bottles the ocean had strewn along the water’s edge.
It continued at the University of Washington in Seattle where he was studying interior architecture. In a required weaving course, while most students would explore patterns and texture in threads, Chihuly found himself weaving little bits of glass into tapestries. Wiring each piece in led him to explore glass fusion.
“It might have always been my destiny,” Chihuly says of his work with glass. He recalls his immediate success when, as a student melting stained glass in a tiny oven in a basement, he picked up a pipe and blew. Though he’d never seen anyone blow glass, he created a bubble on his first try–no easy feat.
“Soon as I blew that piece of glass,” he says, “I wanted to become a glass blower.”
A “seminal point,” he says, was a Fulbright fellowship he received in 1968 to study weaving in Finland. When the host country turned him down, he switched to glass blowing in Venice.
After writing to 100 glass factories, one replied–Venini, the most important, located since 1292 on the island of Murano to protect the secrecy of Venetian techniques. Told he could come for a couple of weeks, he stayed for seven months–the first American glass blower to work on the island.
Salute to Venice
The techniques he uses today still are based on his Venetian experience, and the “Chihuly Over Venice” project is a salute to that early influence.
Another influence: students at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. “I headed the sculpture department during the ’70s when there were a lot of great students,” he says. “Half of them are the best-known glass artists of today. I’m sure they had an influence on me.”
But ultimately it was the courage to take chances that elevated him to where he is today.
“In 1977, I became obsessed with the (glass-blowing) process,” he says. “Instead of using the traditional glass-blowing tools, I began to use fire, gravity, centrifugal force and chance to form the glass.
“I think this was the most important discovery I made. I thought it was the hot glass that was so mysterious, but then I realized it was the air that went into it that was so miraculous.”
The result, says Echt, is “work that exudes such life and mystery.
“Sometimes sitting at my desk, I look up at the glass and it seems to be moving in here. It’s very fluid, very aquatic. I feel like I’m submerged in water,” she says. It’s an ironic effect of an art born of fire, earth and air.
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A 15-piece exhibit of Dale Chihuly’s work will continue until Saturday at Habatat Galleries, 325 W. Huron St. Prices range from $8,000 for some of Chihuly’s smaller glass baskets and pieces from his Persian series to $125,000 for a chandelier or wall installation. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. For more information, call 312-440-0288.
