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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Internationally acclaimed artist Dale Chihuly has created some of his most magnificent glass sculptures to date for the Museum of Fine Arts. Chihuly Across Florida: Masterworks in Glass, January 18-May 30, is one of the most ambitious and exciting exhibitions ever presented at the Museum. Chihuly has created and selected works that respond to the architecture of the MFA's Palladian-style building and its galleries and two gardens. Chihuly has crafted other works for a concurrent exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art that complement and enhance the OMA building and space. These exhibitions combined are the largest presentation ever of Chihuly's glass and represent the first time two major art museums have collaborated to show his work at the same time. Our goal is to help build a cultural corridor across our state, which is becoming increasingly known not only for its beaches, but also as an arts destination. Chihuly's glass fills and transforms the entire Museum, and for the first part of the exhibition, the Chihuly Steinway will produce beautiful music in the Marly Room. Selections from some of Chihuly's best known series–the Persians, Baskets, and Macchia–will be on view. An imposing, glistening Tower will welcome visitors to the Great Hall and the exhibition, and a Boat Installation, the perfect touch for Florida and for a waterfront museum, will overflow with Chihuly's glass. During his career, Chihuly has delighted in placing his glass forms within nature. Thus, he has transformed the MFA's two courtyards into a garden of glass. Chihuly's work always wins new audiences for art and museums and impresses regular patrons with its scale, inventiveness, and sheer beauty. His use of color and the responsiveness of his work to light are tailor-made for Florida. With these two exhibitions, Chihuly will leave an indelible mark on the state. For more information, please visit www.chihuly.com. All photographs copyright Dale Chihuly. Photos throughout insert by:
DON'T MISS! In addition to the monumental glass works and installations by Dale Chihuly, the Museum itself houses its own captivating collection of Steuben and Tiffany Glass, located in the Helen Harper Brown Gallery, and earlier examples of Egyptian and Roman Glass in the Miriam Acheson Gallery. BASKETS Lee Malone Gallery
MACCHIA Smith Gallery
When you look at the Macchia, notice that the interior and exterior of the vessel are different colors. A layer of white opaque glass separates them so that each one is distinct. PERSIANS Stuart Society Gallery
The pieces with their gently fluted edges are delicate, yet powerful. The jewel-like colors and sensuous curving forms of the Persians make these some of Chihuly's most glorious work. Georgia O' Keeffe's Poppy (1927), one of the Museum's stellar and most popular paintings, was the inspiration for the inclusion of Chihuly's Spanish Orange Persian Set with Black Lip Wraps. PERSIAN WALL Mackey Gallery
Howard Acheson Gallery The Persian Pergola is a magnificent installation. Many different glass forms rest on a glass ceiling, creating an immersive environment– an entire room of vibrant glowing hues. IKEBANA Poynter Gallery
CHANDELIER Sculpture Garden
The MFA's End of the Day Chandelier follows the first of its kind, also from Venice, when it was made from parts left over from other sculptures. TOWER Great Hall
SCONCE Mackey Gallery
ANEMONE WALL Focardi Gallery
REEDS Membership Garden
HERONS Howard Acheson Gallery
Chihuly often names his glass parts after words he uses with his glassblowers, as they attempt to describe the shapes they've come up through experimentation. BOAT INSTALLATION Bank of America Gallery
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS GARDEN INSTALLATION Membership Garden
In 2001, Chihuly was able to unite these interests in the exhibit "Chihuly in the Park: A Garden of Glass" at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago. For the Museum of Fine Arts Garden Installation, Chihuly continues to push his liking of organic, plant-like glass by juxtaposing his forms against a garden setting. DRAWINGS Marly Room Drawing is an essential artistic outlet for Dale Chihuly. He draws with a great deal of energy, and has used markers, chalk, and fistfuls of pencils. Now he most often uses acrylic paints in squeezable bottles. He lays the background colors with a mop or a broom, and draws with large gestures using the squeeze bottle paint. DRAWINGS ON PLEXIGLAS Mackey Gallery
PIANO Marly Room (limited engagement)
The piano is almost nine feet long and approximately five feet wide, weighs nearly a ton, and is comprised of 12,000 components. It took 450 people a year to craft the Chihuly Steinway. NIIJIMA FLOATS Stavros Gallery
VENETIAN IKEBANA Bishop Gallery
Chihuly has worked and mentored many glassblowers trained in Italian technique, and has created many series founded upon it. The Venetian Ikebana are his most recent fusion of American exuberance and Italian bravura in glass. JERUSALEM CYLINDERS Cannova Gallery
HOT GLASS AT THE ARTS CENTERJANUARY 17 – MAY 23, 2004 Visit Hot Glass! - live glassblowing demonstrations at The Arts Center. Hot Glass!, in a specially constructed outdoor studio in the Center's back parking lot, allows visitors to watch as glass artists play with fire to melt and blow the molten glass into goblets, vases, pitchers and other objects. This project is produced in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is the major educational component of Chihuly Across Florida: Masterworks in Glass. THE ART AND SCIENCE OF GLASS BLOWING Artists begin by melting silica (a pure form of sand) with a flux such as soda or potash (which lowers the melting temperature) and a stabilizer, usually lime. They heat these molten components in a furnace to 2300 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the mixture, known as the batch, reaches this temperature, it becomes glass and is taken from the furnace and worked.
When working glass, speed and timing are critical. The glass blower collects molten glass on the end of a long iron pipe with a mouthpiece on one end, rolls it on a paddle or metal plate to give it shape, and then blows into the pipe. The glassblower inflates the glass into a bubble, gradually enlarges it, and frequently reheats it at the furnace opening to keep it malleable. The artist then works the form and thickness of the glass by blowing into the pipe. In addition, the molten glass is often shaped with tools. Because glass contracts when it loses heat, artists are faced with the danger that their pieces will crack if cooled too quickly. Even at room temperature, a hot piece of glass cools rapidly and will often shatter. To protect against this, glassblowers place finished pieces in a pre-heated chamber, called an annealing oven, which gradually lowers the temperature. Showing the extraordinary range of possibilities in glass art, Glass: A View Within will be on view January 16 – February 27 at The Arts Center. Noted glass artist Duncan McClellan is curator of this exhibition and it includes glass artists from all over the world. Jonathan Andersson from England, Miroslaw Stankiewicz and Rafal Galazka from Poland, Nick Mount from Australia, Hitoshi Kakisaki from Japan, and Steven Powell, Sam Stang, Mark Sudduth, and Sally Rodgers from the US, are a few of the forty extraordinary artists in the exhibition. Numerous aspects of glass will be explored including carving, flame-working, electro-forming, casting, laminating, and sculpting. |
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THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS
A special thank you to The Arts Center for partnering with us as the major educational component of the Dale Chihuly exhibition. An additional thanks to The Music Gallery, Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, Reliant Interactive Media Corp, Ceridian, and Southwest Airlines for their generous donations to the Chihuly Across Florida exhibition. For more information on the Orlando Museum of Art, please call 407-896-4231 or visit www.omart.org. All objects pictured in this exhibition guide are representative of, but not necessarily identical to, the works that will be on view at Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg during Chihuly Across Florida: Masterworks in Glass. All objects pictured, except the Drawings and the Steinway Piano, are blown glass. All objects pictured are by Dale Chihuly. The MFA is accredited by the American Association of Museums and sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Division of Cultural Affairs, and Pinellas County Arts Council.
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Chihuly started making his Baskets at Pilchuck. First, he made single Baskets, but later he began to group the individual elements into nested compositions, which he called "sets". Chihuly chose to display his Baskets within the Museum's own Native American Collection.
Chihuly's Macchia (pronounced mock' kia) are speckled with colors. Chihuly couldn't think of what to call this series of works when he began it in 1981, so he called an artist friend, Italo Scanga, and asked what the Italian word for "spotted" would be. Spotted in Italian is "macchia."
This series' title hints at associations with ancient glass styles, and reflects the fusion of East and West. Historically, Venice showed an assimilation of
Persian, Byzantine, and eastern ideas. When Chihuly worked at the Venini factory in Venice, his awareness of these historical ties and
stylistic influences in Venetian art grew.
In 1987,
Chihuly received a commission
for the Rainbow Room in New York, and brought his pieces off the pedestal and onto the wall. His Persian Wall consists of an arrangement of glass
rondells interspersed with their own vivid
projections of light and color.
PERSIAN PERGOLA
After visiting Japan in 1990, Chihuly created a series of elongated stems and blossoms, called Ikebana, after the stylized beauty of Japanese floral arrangements and reminiscent of the carved wood, gilt lotus blossoms that he admired on visits to Buddhist temples in Japan. Ikebana, similar to ones pictured here, are arranged to beautifully accent the Museum's own Asian Collection.
Dale Chihuly started a series of Chandeliers in 1992 when he created the first one for the Seattle Art Museum.
In the years that
followed, he continued to experiment with the form, most notably in the 1995-1996 project "Chihuly Over Venice." For that endeavor,
Chihuly developed the "quadpod" armature, which allowed him to suspend his sculptures above the canals and piazzas of Venice without overhead support.
Chihuly realized that if he turned the Chandelier form upside down he could create a Tower. The largest Tower Chihuly ever built is 55 feet high! MFA's Tower is made from hundreds of pieces of glass attached to an armature, or steel support, making an impressive mass that shimmers in the light. The glass weighs almost 1,000 pounds. The armature on which the glass is attached weighs about 2,200 pounds.
In 1996 Chihuly began using parts, originally meant for Chandeliers, in sculptures that project from the wall.
Anemones are wall-mounted, tentacled clusters of parts that cling to walls and appear to be animated, as if caught in the motion of waves. Chihuly often groups these sculptures in response to a
specific environment, a hallmark approach of his career.
Chihuly made the first Reeds in Finland in 1995. To make the Reeds
(Chihuly sometimes
calls them Spears), one glassblower holding the gather of glass on the blowpipe climbs into a mechanical lift and blows into the glass while another person on the ground pulls it up from below. Some Reeds are longer than 10 feet!
The Herons are another form that came from Chihuly's experimentation with blowing different shapes and using new techniques in Finland. After many days, the team made pieces that looked to them like herons, which are wading birds found along shorelines and lakes.
Chihuly first filled boats with glass in Nuutajärvi, Finland, during the "Chihuly Over Venice" project in 1995. After several days of glassblowing, Chihuly and his team made temporary installations along the Nuutajoki, the river nearby. He often tossed glass into the river, letting it float downstream. When the team found a partially submerged wooden rowboat, Chihuly filled it so that it was overflowing with glass.
Chihuly was inspired
by his mother's love of flowers and plants.
As an adult, Chihuly was fascinated by conservatories, also known as "glass houses." He loved to think of architecture based on elements made from glass.
The Drawings on Plexiglas were made using acrylic paints
coloring a polyurethane base. In this unique installation, Chihuly takes advantage of the translucency of the Plexiglas to make maximum use of light.
This wonderful instrument has a clear glass piano desk and a
Plexiglas top,
the first ever designed for a Steinway.
On the tiny island of Niijima, Japan, Osamu and Yumiko Noda, former students at Pilchuck, created a glass school perched on a cliff looking out to sea. It was there in 1991 that Chihuly started this series. Named for both the island and the traditional Japanese fishing floats, his "Floats" reminded him of the oceans and the ocean's currents.
In the late 1980's,
Chihuly was integral to bringing Venetian glass masters to teach in Seattle. These
maestros awed
American glassblowers with their virtuosity and were instrumental in increasing
Americans' skill.
In 1999, Dale Chihuly created an outdoor
exhibition within the walls of an ancient citadel in the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel. It was on view for over a year and was seen by over a million people. While Chihuly was thinking about the large installations for his exhibition, he also created a smaller series of work, the Jerusalem Cylinders. 
