From 500 foam-lined cardboard boxes, thousands of individually blown pieces of glass are being assembled into a precedent-setting Dale Chihuly exhibit at St. Petersburg's Museum of Fine Art.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published January 4, 2004
[Times photo: Jamie Francis]
Raven Gerber of Dale Chihuly Studios installs pieces of Persian Pergola for display at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg on Saturday. The work is mounted on a glass ceiling. A team of installers will spend a week assembling Chihuly works for an exhibit opening Jan. 18.
[Times photo: Jamie Francis]
Silhouetted against Dale Chihuly drawings done on plexiglass, installer Thomas Gray holds one of the final pieces to a tower of clear glass, which is just inside the museum entrance.
[Times photo: Jamie Francis]
Jeff Bender of Dale Chihuly Studios steps carefully through a room at the Museum of Fine Arts packed with pieces of Chihuly's glass work ready for installation.
[AP photo (2001)]
Besides his artwork, Dale Chihuly is known for his unruly mane of hair and his eye patch, which he began wearing in 1976 after losing his eye in a car accident.
ST. PETERSBURG - Glass tendrils spill by the hundreds like elongated bubbles, almost as delicate and perhaps as ephemeral, ready to be positioned onto a metal armature rising 20 feet in the Great Hall of the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.
In a nearby gallery, workers arrange hundreds more pieces of glass, glowing and variously shaped, for a false ceiling that will be downlit to cast technicolor shadows on visitors who walk under it.
Spikes and spirals are being laid out to position like firebursts from a 13-foot "chandelier" placed among the genteel beds of coleus and ginger in a courtyard garden.
Dale Chihuly's celebrated and anticipated glass installations have arrived. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that St. Petersburg has arrived.
Whether you consider studio glass high art or overrated craft, the exhibition, ambitious even by Chihuly's standards, is a precedent-setting event by its most famous practitioner.
The exhibition opens to the public on Jan. 18, simultaneously with a Chihuly installation at the Orlando Museum of Art. The two are not duplications but meant to complement each other, designed for the architecture of each institution. It's the first such collaboration by Chihuly, 62, the man credited with defining the studio glass movement in the late 1970s and and elevating it over the last three decades to international prominence. Taken together, they are the largest museum showing ever presented by the artist known for his flamboyant installations in locations as diverse as the Bellagio, a luxury resort in Las Vegas, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
But grandness and precedent-setting were not the concerns on Saturday, as a team of nine workers from Chihuly's Seattle studio unpacked and sorted through thousands of individually blown glass components. They were shipped two weeks ago from Seattle in almost 500 boxes and weigh, along with the armatures that will hold some of them up, about 30,000 pounds. A team that will grow to about a dozen workers will spend a week assembling the sculptures in galleries and gardens throughout the museum, located on the city's downtown waterfront. Then the crew travels to the Orlando Museum for that installation.
Chihuly will not be present for either one, which is not uncommon. He has long been a proponent of workshop collaboration.
"Everything was mocked up in the (Seattle) studio for Dale to look at," said Jennifer Lewis, who heads the installation team and has worked for Chihuly for 10 years.
"He changed some things there," she said, "and then we come with templates that allow us to work quickly. But Dale has always appreciated the randomness and teamwork of an installation and that gives us some flexibility when we get here."
Lewis said the two shows "are like nothing we've ever done. We're having to do in 13 days what would normally take 18. It's also unusual for us to work among museum collections; we usually work in empty spaces, but it gives us a wonderful opportunity to respond to the art."
Examples from Chihuly's most famous series will be on display, including the tower that will greet visitors as they enter the museum; the Persians, Seaforms and Macchia, oversized, fluid vessels dotted and swirled with color; and a Chihuly "ceiling" placed in an enclosed pergola constructed within a large gallery.
Some are reworkings of previous sculptures, such as the tower of clear glass laced with gold and silver leaf, which first appeared in a slightly different configuration in the Doge's Palace in Venice in 1996.
Others are new. A Persian tabletop sculpture, for example, took its inspiration from Georgia O'Keeffe's Poppy, a painting that hangs nearby. A group of linear glass pieces, called Herons, will reflect the cool blue tones of a Monet painting in the museum's gallery of Impressionist works.
Four huge drawings on plexiglass, abstract schematics for some of his sculptures, have been hung in a gallery on a light-infused wall. One of the most eccentric pieces is Chihuly's Steinway piano with a painted plexiglass top, fully operational, being set up in the Marly Room for concerts.
The last exhibition of Chihuly's work locally was at the Tampa Museum of Art in 1993, but it was much smaller, with none of the dramatic, multipiece glass constructions at the Museum of Fine Arts.
At the end of the show's run in May, everything will be dismantled and repacked in foam-lined cardboard boxes like precious Christmas ornaments and shipped back to Seattle. Lewis said breakage is never a problem.
"Nothing was damaged in transit and it rarely is," she said.
Even so, Chihuly always sends plenty of extra components "just in case."
"Chihuly Across Florida: Masterworks in Glass" opens Jan. 18 at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE in St. Petersburg, and the Orlando Museum of Art, 2416 N Mills Ave. The exhibitions run through May 30. Beginning Jan. 18, the Museum of Fine Arts' hours expand to 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Friday; and 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $12 for adults, $10 for seniors and college students, $5 for children ages 7-18 and free for children younger than 6. For more information, call 727 896-2667 or visit www.fine-arts.org For information about the Orlando Museum of Art, call (407) 896-4231 or visit www.OMArt.org
Besides his artwork, Dale Chihuly is known for his unruly mane of hair and his eye patch, which he began wearing in 1976 after a car accident in England.
Dale Chihuly
Born: 1941 in Tacoma, Wash.
Education: Received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Washington, where he studied textiles and interior design; a master's of science from the first glass program in the United States, at the University of Wisconsin; and a master's of fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he established a glass program. Studied glassmaking at the famed Venini factory in Venice under a Fulbright fellowship in 1968. Established the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, where he now lives, in 1971.
Professional highlights: His work is in the permanent collections of more than 200 museums and institutions worldwide. Among his most famous projects are permanent architectural additions at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas, the Bellagio resort in Las Vegas and the Bridge of Glass and Seaform Pavilion in Tacoma. Large-scale temporary installations include "In the Light of Jerusalem 2000," featuring a crystal "mountain," Israel; "Niijima Floats," using hundreds of freeform glass orbs launched at sea and placed on beaches, 1997, Japan; and "Chihuly Over Venice," suspending 14 massive "chandeliers" in palaces and over canals, 1996.
