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Glass magician Dale Chihuly sees the third dimension

by Heather Joyner

The name Chihuly (pronounced chuh-WHO-lee) sounds like it could be Chinook—native to the region of Washington State where the world renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly grew up. But it's not. You'd maybe assume that Chihuly, given the grace and fragility of his chosen material, is an unassuming loner. That he's certainly not. The Tacoma-born, 58-year-old of Eastern European and Scandinavian extraction is instead a whirlwind of a man who's often referred to as the most successful and intriguing glass artist in the world today.

Tomorrow the KMA unveils Dale Chihuly: Installations, an exhibit that should prove to be one of the museum's best ever. With works spanning 30 years, it includes pieces crafted specifically for the Knoxville venue and assembled by Chihuly's entourage of a dozen cohorts (arriving from Seattle more than a week before the show's opening). The hoopla surrounding this event and the übermensch behind it might well make the recent Escher show look like an opening act. No wonder—despite Escher's brilliant allusion to a third dimension, Chihuly's work is the third dimension. Beyond "seeing" it, one enters into it. Says KMA Curator Stephen Wicks, "The exhibition is not merely looking at small, precious objects. It is experiencing glass as a magical and beautiful medium on an environmental scale." That scale in the form of installations now appears inevitable; after all, Superman cannot remain in the phone booth forever.

A funky cheerleader of sorts when managing his team of assistants, Chihuly possesses a supremely confident voice that echoes a hippie era youth as he bellows, "All right, this'll blow your mind!" or "Wow...look at these babies." He asserts, "Spontaneity is key...it's natural. You just go with it. Boom." One of only three Americans granted a solo exhibition at the Louvre, Chihuly has pieces in over 170 museums worldwide. Recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, he also has a dossier-to-die-for and a lifestyle in Seattle that's centered around a spectacular 40,000-square-foot Lake Union abode and workplace known as "The Boathouse." There he spends time with his 2-year-old son Jackson, collects cars and boats, and entertains guests at an 87-foot dining table.

Among other things, museum-goers can revel in an astonishing grouping of glass from Chihuly's "Persian" series. First designed for Manhattan's Rainbow Room, that installation foretells the artist's "Persian Pergola," herein making its first appearance. An entire ceiling illuminated from above, the pergola features blown glass forms that bathe viewers in colored light. To pass through Chihuly's "Macchia Forest" ("macchia" being Italian for "spotted") is to plunge oneself into some 300 different colors. And that's just what's inside. The South Garden boasts "Water Reeds," originally placed along Venice's Grand Canal.

Speaking of Venice, one of PBS' more inspiring broadcasts of late was Director Gary Gibson's Chihuly Over Venice, a program documenting the artist's working methods creating enormous "chandeliers" for approximately 15 sites throughout incomparable Venezia. The presentation follows Chihuly to glass factory "hot shops" and small-scale installations in Finland, Ireland, and Mexico, returning at intervals to developments in Italy. An effort employing countless pieces shipped from the above places, the Venetian project represents a kind of artist's homecoming.

In 1968, after living on a kibbutz in the Negev Desert, traveling, working as a fisherman in Alaska and an interior designer in Seattle, and earning an M.F.A. in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (alongside a University of Washington B.A. and an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin), Chihuly was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship that enabled him to go abroad and become the first American glassblower on Venice's island of Murano. Once cloaked in so much secrecy that "escapees" risked being killed, Murano became the 13th century site for the revival of fine glassmaking. Its establishment was to guard against possible fire in Venice as well as conceal trade secrets.

Focused on the Venice Chihuly so loves (and connects with his own Seattle), the program finds him sporting chartreuse pants and a pager, enthusiastically directing assistants to hoist "walla-wallas"—onion-like orbs—onto giant four-legged structures over canals. Hair tousled above an eyepatch he wears following a 1976 automobile accident, Chihuly seems larger than life. Former Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator Henry Geldzahler once remarked, "Chihuly looks like a pirate and sometimes he acts like a pirate; perhaps it's partly a disguise, an attitude, a way of getting through life....With one eye you can't see properly in the third dimension. When he relinquished his position as gaffer, or head of [a glassmaking] team...he found he could see the process better and have more control over it." Chihuly himself says that the gaffer "has to keep the team tuned. I'm lucky. I don't have to run the team. I just have to have a rapport with the gaffer so that [he/she] understands what I want to make."

A child of the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest, Chihuly is drawn to water and to a medium that is technically 'super-cooled liquid' (given that glass passes from a liquid to a solid state without rearrangement of molecules or crystallization). His "Niijima Floats" in the KMA's North Gallery—the largest known glass spheres ever created—are named for their Japanese fishing net counterparts. Alongside "Seaforms," they pull us into Chihuly's ocean world, into the sea of his imagination—no less tangible than the sound of wind when you hold a seashell to your ear. You can hear it if you try.