The exhibit marks the inauguration of the Chace Center, a new gallery for the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, which opens Sept. 27.
Academic Background
A native of Tacoma, Chihuly had initially worked with glass as an interior-design major at the University of Washington (BA 1965). He went on to enroll in the first glass program in the country and was awarded an MS in Sculpture (1967). This was at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with Harvey K. Littleton, who had founded the program and with it the Studio Glass movement.
Chihuly then went on to the Rhode Island School of Design (RSID). He was already employing blown-glass forms often lit with neon or argon to fill rooms. Dale Chihuly received his MFA at RISD in 1968 from the ceramics department, predating the glass program. After earning his degree, he was asked to help establish a glass department at the school.
A Life of Glass
After graduation here and time spent in Venice on a Fulbright Fellowship at the famed Venini glass factory in Murano (1968), Chihuly stayed on in Providence, where the studio glass movement was beginning to take hold through the program that he had helped to establish at RISD. This department now boasts an outstanding percentage of world-class glass artists among its ranks, some of whose work will be on view in the inaugural exhibition.
In 1971, Chihuly co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School (near Stanwood, outside Seattle) while still continuing to teach at RISD sporadically until the late 1980s. Chihuly was Pilchuck’s first artistic director (1971-89). Under his leadership it rapidly became a world center for and proponent of glass as fine art and as a medium in installation and environmental art, as well as for a multidisciplinary approach.
After losing an eye following a 1976 car accident, Chihuly began to refine the team approach to glassblowing that he had observed years earlier in Venice. Portland Press publishes Chihuly’s books, videos, DVDs, and notices of limited editions by the artist. He now oversees Chihuly Studio, which includes a hotshop at The Boathouse, a mockup team, and other assistants including several glassblowers.
Chihuly has created many well-known series of tabletop-size works that are technically brilliant, richly colored, and voluptuously shaped and grouped, among them the Cylinders, Baskets, Macchia, Seaforms, Persians, and Venetians, but he is also celebrated for large-scale architectural installations. He has been quoted as saying, “I don’t know why I work so large. I very often push a series to its maximum size — just to keep the glassblowers at the very edge of their technical abilities, to keep the tension high, to make it exciting”; and also, “If you know exactly what you’re doing and you can make it every time, it’s not going to be very interesting.”
In 1995, he embarked on the major project Chihuly Over Venice, which involved glass factories in Finland, Ireland, and Mexico with the resultant sculptures installed over the canals and plazas of Venice. In 1999, Chihuly mounted a most ambitious installation in the Tower of David Museum, Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem, which was attended by over a million visitors. In 2001, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, curated the exhibition Chihuly at the V & A.
Chihuly's Fascination with Nature
Chihuly’s lifelong affinity for greenhouses began to grow during this period into a series of exhibitions within botanical settings. His abiding love of flower forms refers back to his mother’s garden in Tacoma, just as his love of sea themes harks back to his childhood there on the shores of Puget Sound.
His first garden presentation was at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago (2001). Chihuly has exhibited at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, near London (2005) and its more than 300 acres and several greenhouses. Another popular presentation at the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh opened in May and runs through November 11, 2007.
Chihuly’s work is included in more than 200 museum collections worldwide and has been exhibited at countless national and international venues. He has received numerous awards, including ten honorary doctorates, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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