In this time line I pull quotes to illustrate a thread in popular and scholarly writing and criticism about glass. Here we will see current glass artists defending their art against the accusations and separating themselves from these stereotypes and, hopefully, find out how and where the now-common opinion was born. Fundamentally, the general thesis seems to be born of the question, What Is Art? This question I will leave to others to answer, here I am only documenting the written history of a popular way of thinking and a popular taste.1992 Livio Seguso:
"Livio Seguso" Hakone Glass Forest-Ukai Museum, Japan; Venetian Glass Museum booklet, shown April 21-October 31, 2001, printed in Venice, Italy, April 2001.
1992 Marsha Miro:
“Glass is everywhere this month. Open the door to any of 23 galleries in the area, and there it will be, on pedestals, in display cases, on desks, ledges and tables. Another pink and turquoise vase. Another stained glass window of pretty colors. Another bowl that isn’t really a bowl, but a decorative trinket made out of bands of woven glass.
There is more glass on display in Michigan galleries this month than there is untainted whitefish in Lake Superior. But at least you can eat the whitefish; there is too much glass to do anything with.
In other words: Michigan Glass Month has gotten out of hand. It’s become a month where the great and good can be lost amid the mediocre. And anything is called “art.”
But don’t despair. Even though you will see a lot of works overly affected by fads—this year they include postmodern colors, picture-like forms and too many elements—you can still find much to please the eye. This year, Michigan Glass Month brings a range of different places, periods and artists that make the viewing situation unparalleled.
And it all began 20 years ago at Habatat Galleries in Farmington Hills.
Habatat’s International Glass Invitational demonstrates the foresight of co-owners Ferdinand Hampson and his sister, Linda Boone, who have more than proven their understanding of what glass art was, is and could be.
This year’s International includes mini-shows of the work of some 55 artists…
…Early on, Howard Ben Tre…proved that tall architectural elements, like columns, could capture glass’ history and explore its properties, and still be provocative art.
…Dan Dailey…and Ricky Bernstein married pop art ideas to glass.
The appeal of Dale Chihuly’s art goes beyond the glass audience, touching those who know about culture, painting, and other art forms. With his prolific output and his corner on beautiful natural forms and colors, Chihuly makes far more than the expected pretty glass.”
“Sea of Glass: works of art can still be found amid the galleries’ glitter glut”
4/3/92 by Marsha Miro. Publication Unknown. Found at http:www.habatat.com/article_detail.asp?id=4
Accessed April 14, 2009.
1992 Jon Krakauer:
"Born in fire, his fragile forms are in demand by museums and collectors-and the founder of the Pilchuck School i's just getting warmed up
From the street, the studio known as the Boathouse doesn't look like much. A sprawling waterfront structure sheathed in corrugated metal, its outward appearance suggests a welding shop or perhaps an abandoned cannery. But the building's humble exterior, dripping forlornly in the Seattle rain, is mere camouflage. In fact the Boathouse shelters a rollicking, hyperkinetic hive of art in the making, a scene so charged with heat and noise and unbridled energy that it makes the average MTV video clip look soporific by comparison.
The heart and soul of the studio is a high-ceilinged inferno called the hot shop. Along the perimeter of the 30-by-65-foot room, white-hot flames lick from the open doors of a half-dozen blast furnaces and a like number of propane torches. The roar from all that fire, though considerable, is nearly drowned out by the rap music pulsing from a bank of massive loudspeakers. A swarm of young people dressed in regulation artist garb-faded jeans, funky berets, T-shirts, sunglasses-rock and shimmy to the tune's insistent throb as they tend the furnaces and swing long steel pipes, at the end of which hang dripping gathers of molten glass.
Presiding over the action is a thick, stubby barrel of a man with fleshy features, a natty black eye patch and an unruly thatch of frizzy brown curls. Behold Dale Chihuly, one of only three American artists ever to have held a solo show at the Louvre. His stock- in-trade is blown glass-big, flamboyant, astonishingly sensuous works. Hailed far and wide as a virtuoso, perhaps the greatest glass artist of the 20th century, he also happens to be endowed with a Warholesque genius for self-promotion, and an accelerator that always seems to be jammed to the floor. In the words of Seattle arts writer Bruce Barcott, Chihuly "plays a song of himself at a breathless pace."
Chihuly, perhaps more than any other individual, has given blown glass the respectability of fine art. As recently as the mid- 1970s there was n-0 market to speak of for contemporary art glass in this country. Today Chihuly's pieces command as much as $60,000 each, with multipiece works selling for six-figure sums; and his creations reside in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery and some 80 other museums here and abroad.
Among Chihuly's various quirks, perhaps the quirkiest is that the master glassblower has only rarely blown any glass himself since 1976, when an automobile accident robbed him of sight in his left eye. The ensuing loss of depth perception made it all but impossible for him to safely manipulate the five-foot-long blow-pipe and other arcane tools of his trade. Chihuly had been collaborating with other glass artists for some time to produce his elaborate designs. After the accident, undaunted, he simply trained a cadre of apprentices to shape the glass to his specifications. He continually fine-tunes this approach. The team that presently toils in the hot shop-numbering 14 on this particular morning-gives form to the artist's vision with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine. "We're like an orchestra," explains one of Chihuly's gaffers, or head glassblowers. "Dale doesn't play an instrument, but he's the guy up front with the baton."
The symphony begins with Chihuly standing at a cluttered drafting table, chin in hand, lost in thought as his assistants scurry to and fro preparing a batch of glass. The contemplative lull is over in a matter of seconds. He grabs a stick of charcoal and abruptly puts line to paper in bold, slashing strokes as ideas bubble to the surface of his consciousness like trout rising to a hatch of mayflies. Exchanging charcoal for a paintbrush, he then daubs on a wash of color that might be concocted from ink, watercolors, wine, coffee dregs, or a glass of bitters and soda water-any tinted liquid within reach is fair game. Two minutes after starting the sketch, Chihuly's wool slacks are spattered with paint, and the blueprint for the first piece is completed: a rough-edged rendering of a sleek, voluptuous cylinder wrapped in vinelike tendrils.
After tossing the sketch onto the concrete floor to dry-a somewhat irreverent way to treat a painting that will itself have a price tag of $3,000-Chihuly starts another one, completes it just as quickly and then dashes off renderings of two more pieces. When the color can be trusted not to run, an assistant affixes the paintings to a nearby blast furnace with refrigerator magnets, where the team can consult them as they work.
Transforming these flat sketches into three-dimensional pieces of glass is a trickier, more labor-intensive task, imbued with a degree of drama seldom associated with the making of art. If nothing else, a Chihuly blow is usually pretty good theater. Today, a tall, loose-limbed former student of Chihuly's, Richard Royal, is acting as guest gaffer. To start the process, Royal sticks a blowpipe into a furnace containing a pool of clear glass heated to 2,500 degrees E By repeatedly dipping the pipe into the syrupy liquid, Royal builds up a 30-pound, watermelon-size bubble of glass on the business end of the pipe. Next, the bubble-still colorless save for a menacing orange glow-is given a sheen of deep, brilliant turquoise by rolling it across a steel plate sprinkled with tinted glass dust, after which it is thrust into a second furnace, the "glory hole," which fuses the color to the piece.
A second layer of color--a leopardlike pattern of purple splotches-is similarly applied, and then the blowpipe is laid horizontally across a nearby workbench, where the shaping of the piece begins in earnest. Spinning the wobbly, semimolten bubble so that it doesn't droop off the end of the pipe, Royal begins by cooling the surface of the glass with a sponge of wet newspaper to give it a "skin"; as he does this, one assistant screens Royal's hands with a pair of fruitwood paddles to block the heat radiating from the glass, while another assistant kneels at the far end of the pipe and blows with all his might through its hollow core. His face flushed from his exertions, he slowly inflates the nascent objet d'art like a kid blowing up a gigantic wad of bubble gum.
Over the next hour, the pace of creation becomes increasingly frenetic, the dramatic tension more acute. The tiniest mistake can destroy the piece at any point during the complex process. Sweat dripping from their brows, Royal and his comrades carefully push and pull and carve away at the searing bubble to coax it into the desired shape, resorting to gravity and an arsenal of ingenious tools-some of them invented by Venetian glassblowers more than a thousand years ago, others devised only recently by Chihuly's crew.
Gathers of molten glass are repeatedly brought from the furnace, pulled like incandescent taffy into fragile coils and other embellishments, and bonded to the surface of the emerging sculpture. The crew is now in constant motion, working in alarmingly close proximity with flaring propane torches and blobs of dripping, red-hot glass; at times a dozen hands are flying over the piece at once. Each move is tightly choreographed, and the crew performs as smoothly as a crack team of cardiac surgeons. Nobody is burned.
"Glassblowing is tricky-a lot can go wrong"
Every two minutes throughout the entire process the piece must be carried from the workbench to the glory hole for reheating, lest the glass grow overly cool and become too brittle to work-or worse: the previous day, as it was nearing completion, an elaborate vaselike form worth tens of thousands of dollars cooled a little too much while being shaped at the bench, and consequently exploded when it was returned to the glory hole. It was the third piece that had bitten the dust that day. "Glassblowing is a tricky business, especially when you're pushing the edge of the envelope, when you're trying things this big and intricate," Royal explains philosophically. "A lot can go wrong. Some days everything you do turns out like magic and you're a hero; other days you lose most of the pieces you attempt.
While his craftsmen labor to transform molten glass into lasting art, Chihuly hovers nearby, offering words of advice and encouragement, cranking up the stereo to a window-rattling volume to stimulate the flow of creative juices. The rap music has been replaced by a Beatles CD. As the speakers blare, "Baby you can drive my car / Yes, I'm gonna be a star,"* the artist lip-syncs the lyrics, pumps the air with a raised fist, and executes a slick little dance step that would do Ickey Woods or Michael Jackson proud. "Oh boy, we've got ourselves a big unit here!" Chihuly calls out to Royal, admiring the three-foot-high piece. "We've got ourselves a nice one!"
Chihuly directs the work in the hot shop with a light touch.
Indeed, once his sketches are tacked to the furnace wall and the blow is under way, the artist gives his team surprisingly free rein to interpret his ideas as they see fit. "I rely heavily on the intuition of my craftsmen," says Chihuly. It would be a mistake to try to exert too much control, I think it would kill the vital spark. Chance is a crucial ingredient-the unpredictability of the glass, of the colorist, of the gaffers. My ob is to be a catalyst-to set the wheels in motion, keep the energy level high, and let things happen. I love how every time these oven doors open you're presented with another surprise." Chihuly doesn't apologize for the fact that he no longer blows the glass that bears his name. Louis Comfort Tiffany didn't craft his own pieces in the 19th century, nor, after his early years, did Tiffany's brilliant contemporary, the Frenchman Rene Lalique. A number of history's most hallowed painters and sculptors, including Michelangelo, Bernini and Rubens, relied on large teams of craftsmen or apprentices to assist in the execution of their art. The car crash that blinded Chihuly in one eye nearly killed him. "I went through the windshield in a bad way," he says. "A doctor put 250 stitches in my face. It took me six months to recuperate. The accident forced me to hand the blowpipe over to others, but you know, I think maybe I was ready to give it up anyway. You lose the big picture when you're sitting at the bench all day-"
Were Chihuly still sitting at the bench all day, he would also find it difficult to juggle the countless other affairs that absorb him intermittently throughout the course of the blow. In addition to the hot shop and the artist's palatial living quarters, the Boathouse shelters a gallery, a mock-up room (where the floor plans of distant galleries are replicated before every, show, so that pieces can be selected and arranged for optimal effect), a photography studio (Chihuly believes that pictures of his work are as important as the objects themselves, because so many more people can be exposed to the former), an extensive slide library and a bustling business office.
A stream of people trickles constantly through the hot shop with matters that require Chihuly's attention. Page proofs for a catalog need to be checked. A caller from Japan is on the line with a question about an upcoming installation in Kyoto. A fax from a museum in Czechoslovakia requires a reply. A mechanic wanders in with a progress report on a vintage Aston Martin DBII that Chihuly is having restored. An assistant hands Chihuly a finished, soon-to-be-shipped piece that needs the artist's signature. "I know it looks like I'm doing ten things simultaneously," Chihuly mutters somewhat defensively, "but actually I never do more than one thing at a time. I'm just good at shifting my focus quickly." With that, he picks up a mechanical engraving pencil, scrawls his John Henry on the proffered artwork, then scrutinizes the famous signature for a meditative beat before returning his attention to the steamy, clamorous act of creation now building toward a climax a few feet away.
At the workbench, Rich Royal is brandishing a propane torch, applying finishing touches to the work, which has been transferred from the blowpipe to an equally long steel rod called a punty. The air is thick with tension; to lose the piece now would be crushing. Somebody yells, "OK, let's do it!" and a worker named Brian Brenno hurries into a silvery fireproof suit, a matching plastic-faced hood and heavily insulated leather mittens. Walking up to the roaring maw of the glory hole, he shoves his gloved hands into the fire to scorch away all traces of moisture. Royal hefts the punty rod from the bench and rests the big, disturbingly fragile creation on a chest-high brace. Brenno, wearing an anxious expression, positions himself under it, hands raised, while Royal uses a pair of oversize metal forceps to score the base of the piece where it's joined to the punty. Royal taps the rod lightly once, twice, three times, and the 40-pound sculpture breaks free from the steel and drops into Brenno's waiting arms.
Grimacing from the heat and weight of the glass, Brenno wrestles the unwieldy object into a computer-controlled annealing oven. There, over a period of 36 hours, the temperature of the glass will gradually be brought down from 2,000 degrees to room temperature in order to reduce the likelihood that it will shatter as it cools. As the piece is laid safely inside and the oven door is shut, loud applause and cries of "Bravo!" erupt spontaneously from the 30-odd spectators who have gathered to witness the event. The tired crew then heads upstairs for a lunch of pasta washed down with shots of caffe correcto-high-octane espresso "corrected" with Sambuca, a potent licorice-flavored liqueur-to fortify themselves for the afternoon blow, when the whole demanding process begins again.
Thirty years ago it was all but impossible to find a serious artist or sculptor who worked in blown glass. Glassblowing was an industrialized craft; the medium had become the exclusive province of immense, highly mechanized factories dedicated to the mass production of utilitarian objects like kitchenware, wineglasses and laboratory flasks. There was a widely held belief in both art and industrial circles that high-quality glass simply could not be melted and blown without resorting to huge, superheated blast furnaces manned by a small army of technicians in a factory environment-a setting not overly conducive to spontaneous, unfettered artistic expression.
Enter Harvey Littleton, who in 1962 sparked a renaissance in art glass christened the "studio glass movement." A professor of ceramics at the University of Wisconsin, Littleton had grown up in the glass-making community of Corning, New York (his father was the director of research at the Corning Glass Works), and had long nurtured a stubborn conviction that blown glass held great potential as a medium for fine art. To demonstrate that potential, in March 1962, Littleton convened a glassblowing workshop in Ohio on the grounds of the Toledo Museum of Art.
Unfortunately, nobody at the workshop really knew what they were doing. The first batch of glass they cooked up wouldn't melt into a workable consistency, and the stoneware container in which it was being heated cracked in two. The prospects looked bleak until a friend of Littleton's named Dominick Labino came to the rescue. Labino, a brilliant industrial glass researcher whose glass-fiber developments would one day be used in the tiles on the exterior of the space shuttle, suggested changes to Littleton's furnace and donated a supply of "No. 475" marbles, a special glass he'd formulated that had an unusually low melting temperature. The marbles melted easily in the refurbished furnace and turned out to have a perfect consistency for glassblowing.
In the beginning, pitiful, lumpy shapes
Thanks to Labino, the Toledo workshop was a success, "probably as significant a moment in the history of glass as the time when glass was first blown," according to the art writer Paul Hollister. The fruits of that initial workshop were predictably crude and were described by various critics as "pitiful," "lumpy globby shapes ... .. heavy, thick vessels" and "numerous variations on the paperweight"-but Littleton had shown that glass could indeed be blown by independent artists working in small studios.
Giddy with excitement over the vast and unexploited creative terrain that suddenly beckoned as a consequence, that fall Littleton initiated a pilot program in glassblowing at the University of Wisconsin. By 1965, freshly minted alumni of that program had established similar courses of study at San Jose State University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Iowa, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine.
Twenty-five-year-old Dale Chihuly, a butcher's son from Tacoma, Washington, appeared on Littleton's Wisconsin doorstep in 1966. A year earlier, Chihuly had graduated from the University of Washington where he had experimented with weaving glass, and had gone to work as an interior designer for the largest architectural firm in Seattle. The Chihuly temperament, however, was ill-suited to being a small cog in a large corporate machine, and he already knew that he wanted to study glass. So he quit the firm, spent six months baiting hooks in the stern of an Alaska salmon troller, then used the stake he'd earned at sea to enroll in Littleton's postgraduate glass program. Chihuly realized that he'd found his calling, and proceeded to rearrange the embryonic landscape of glassblowing.
Chihuly was good, but nobody was interested in purchasing his art at the time, nor would they be for another nine or ten years. After obtaining his MS degree at Wisconsin, he went for an MFA at RISD, subsisting on a series of teaching assignments and foundation grants, including a Fulbright Fellowship that sent him to Italy in 1968, where he talked his way into an apprenticeship at the centuries-old Venini Glass Factory on the island of Murano in Venice, the first time an American had been granted such access. Following his Italian sojourn, Chihuly spent the winter months as the head of the glass program at RISD, and his summers teaching at the Haystack Mountain School in Maine.
Haystack was a spirited, free-thinking community where artisans from many different disciplines worked together against a backdrop of spectacular natural beauty. Chihuly loved the heady atmosphere, the constant stimulation, the creative sparks that flew from the convergence of so much talent in a single place. He began to hatch a scheme to found a similar school devoted exclusively to glass.
Armed with a $2,000 grant from the Union of Independent Colleges of Art, in the summer of 1971 he drove out to his childhood stamping grounds in Washington State to scout out a site. A friend introduced him to a timber baron named John Hauberg and his wife, Anne Gould Hauberg, who were looking for a way to contribute to the arts in the Northwest. Chihuly became enamored of their misty hilltop, 50 miles north of Seattle, with an expansive view of Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands and the craggy summits of the Olympic Mountains. It took little time for the Haubergs to be convinced that a glass art colony and their land were a perfect match and, later, to provide major financial support as well. It was decided to name the school-to-be for Pilchuck Creek, which crosses the property. A few days after the Haubergs approved the location, the charter class of 16 students arrived. They were informed that their first assignment was to build a hot shop. At the time, Pilchuck was nothing more than a clearing in the woods and a fire in Chihuly's belly: there were no buildings, no electricity, no facilities of any kind. "Many of the students wondered what they'd gotten themselves into," Chihuly confesses with a grin, "but we all pulled together and worked 20 hours a day. We built a nice little furnace under a canvas tarp hung from poles, sort of like a circus tent. Fourteen days after we started construction, we lit the shop and blew glass."
For the first two summers, Pilchuck was as much an Aquarian-age experiment in communal living as an art school. Students set up house in the forest under primitive-if imaginatively designed-shelters and cooked over open fires. According to Kate Elliott, who first attended Pilchuck in 1972 and has worked there as an administrator, "When I arrived I had no idea how to build any kind of shelter, and it rained the entire summer. Basically, I lived under a plastic bag. There were huge, disgusting slugs everywhere; we used to hold slug races." By all accounts it was an amazing experience, nonetheless. There was a tremendous esprit de corps, a sense that one was part of something momentous. Romances blossomed, wine flowed freely, people talked art and blew glass all day and all night.
Two decades later, Pilchuck has grown into a bona fide institution. The social life is somewhat less saturnalian, the stands of fir are noticeably taller, the flimsy shacks and tepees of yore have been replaced by striking clusters of glass-and-cedar buildings. Each summer 250 students currently attend the school in five sessions of 50 students each, and the faculty is drawn from the biggest names in glass worldwide. Indeed, Pilchuck has become the hub of the vast and continually expanding art-glass universe. With some 40 glass studios, the Puget Sound area boasts the greatest concentration of glassblowers this side of Murano.
As Pilchuck has matured, so have the artists who cut their teeth at the school. A number of them have emerged from Chihuly's shadow to share the limelight, among them Richard Royal, Ginny Ruffner, Curtiss Brock, Ann Gardner, Paul Marioni, Flora Mace and Joey Kirkpatrick, Benjamin Moore and, most notably, a sinewy 33-year-old glassblower named William Morris, who landed a job at Pilchuck as a truck driver in 1978 and is presently pegged by many as Chihuly's heir apparent. Now that there is money to be made in glass, the naivete and youthful exuberance of Pilchuck's early years have given way to increasingly commercial concerns. The Scattle art-glass community remains remarkably close-knit, but according to Elliott, "Things have definitely changed. The scene is getting too big to have everyone over for dinner anymore. You still see a lot of cooperation and mutual support-but only up to a point. Now that everybody's competing for a limited number of dollars, jealousles are starting to flare up. I think it's going to get even worse if the recession in the art market deepens."
But so far, demand for Chihuly's work continues to grow. Over the years, his creations have undergone several significant transformations of style. The Navajo Blanket Cylinders evolved into the more sophisticated Pilchuck Baskets, which were supplanted by the hugely popular Sea Forms-graceful, organic shapes in translucent hues, reminiscent of delicate scallop shells and rippling jellyfish-and then the fluid, garishly colored Macchias and Persians. Then came Chihuly's boldest series, the Venetians and the Putti: loud, shockingly voluptuous, completely over-the-top vases and jars adorned with kitschy gold cherubs and all manner of exotic glass flora. He is currently working on the Niijima Floats, huge inflated balls of glass. Chihuly's new works are challenging": even their fans admit that they have "a certain vulgarity that can put you off initially." Many glass collectors, in fact, privately wish he would go on making Sea Forms forever. But for his part, Chihuly really only cares about pushing the boundaries of glassblowing. And where that's going to take him nobody knows. Not even Chihuly.
Krakauer, J. "Dale Chihuly has turned art glass into a red-hot item." The Smithsonian. February 1, 1992.
1992 Betty Freudenheim:
"In the eyes of the organizers of the striking exhibition of glass at the Morris Museum, 30 years ago seems to be ancient history. The show, titled "Glass From Ancient Craft to Contemporary Art: 1962-1992 and Beyond," illustrates the many approaches that glass artists have actively explored in the last three decades.
It is all there. All the outstanding artists, all the innovative techniques and even predictions for the future. The glass glows with rich colors; the surfaces scintillate and reflect.
In the landmark year 1962, Harvey Littleton set up a workshop in a maintenance garage of the Toledo Museum of Art. His objective was to prove that glass could be blown in an artist's studio, without an expensive factory furnace. Dominick Labino, a glass scientist, provided technical expertise and glass with a low melting point.
The invited participants, who were all potters, blew glass around the clock for nine days. Although Otto Wittmann, who was then the director of the Toledo Museum, referred to the results as "pitifully few and inept," the workshop is eulogized as the starting point of the studio glass movement.
Karen S. Chambers, a curator of the Morris Museum show, describes an introductory display of early work as "naive" and "awkward." Some would disagree. A 1969 bottle by Sam Herman, one of Mr. Littleton's students, possesses the pure sensibility of truly ancient glass. It compares well with the Roman examples in the museum's permanent collection on the second floor.
Ms. Chambers, a writer-curator, and Ferdinand Hampson, founder of Habatat Galleries in Farmington Hills, Mich., and Boca Raton, Fla., selected nearly 100 examples by 67 artists. For the serious viewer, the all-inclusive aspect of the main gallery may add up to too much of a good thing. But the large installations can be studied as isolated works, and each one is worth the visit.
The first stop should be Mr. Littleton's "Pair of Ruby Blue Sliced Descending Forms," dated 1988. These elegantly arched ribbons of color resemble taffy after it has been pulled and twisted and pulled again. The analogy is correct; this is the very process he uses when the molten glass is taken from the furnace. "The twist is frozen in glass," he said.
Dale Chihuly, one of Mr. Littleton's best-known students, contributed five of his "Niijima Floats." These blown-glass spheres, in grays, black and gold, are flecked with bright hues. They are each more than 36 inches in diameter and weigh about 60 pounds. The name refers to the glass balls that Japanese fishermen use to keep their nets afloat. Mr. Chihuly's works are set on a 12-foot-square "sea" made from shards of broken bottles.
"The Power of Creativity," by Ginny Ruffner, has the dramatic urgency of a cyclone. A long swirl of aluminum wire, hung with glass droplets, appears to move like a strong wind blowing heavy rain across the gallery.
By contrast, Mary Van Cline's "Communication Waiting" provides a quiet respite, a few moments of silent meditation in a shadowy corner. She has set up a nearly life-sized photograph that is laminated onto glass. The scene shows a white-robed male figure seated facing the sun among the pebbles and rocks of a barren land. A sheet of black plate glass, lying on the floor, acts as a reflecting pool. There is an almost magnetic pull that attracts the viewer's eye across and through the transparent images. Yet the mind's eye turns inward.
Clifford Rainey's work also invites personal interpretations, but its title, "The Man Who Married the Moon," provides no obvious clues. Three heads of cast glass, which recall African sculpture, are set atop posts. One is red, the next black, the last gray. Oddly, their chins are all indented on the right side. The background is an Abstract Expressionist painting of crimson red and mottled gray. The large red circle on the canvas unifies the motifs and imbues the work with an enigmatic power.
A group of Mary Shaffer's clear glass tubes, which hangs from the ceiling, presents a delightful surprise. Look carefully for the thin strands of optic fiber hidden inside each one. The tips flicker on and off like fireflies on a warm summer's eve.
Bertil Vallien's seven-foot-tall "Pendulum" is suspended like an archaic symbol of the passage of time. The back surface, which is still coated with sand from the cast, implies that this is an artifact, dug up from the depths of the sea or a desert. There are always haunting mysteries to the work of this Swedish artist.
Some of the pieces seem much grander than their actual size. Steven Weinberg's 10-inch-square block of glass contains off-white platforms and stairs that lead nowhere. A tenuous fog seems to cling to every surface. This could be a mystical island setting for Shakespeare's "Tempest." A silver bubble, like the North Star, glows above this enchanted void.
Niyoko Ikuta creates seductive, undulating forms by stacking up layer upon layer of flat shapes cut from plate glass. The sides are striated with fine lines, like a loaf of sliced bread. If it were possible to look straight down into the core of this construction, the view would reveal an interior as clear as a pool of spring water.
There are also small works in a lighter vein. Richard Marquis's miniature "Crazy Quilt Teapot" looks just like its name. The glass lid, handle and spout are all in place. And what designs cover the surface? Tiny motifs of elephants, stars, stripes, polka dots and a cat.
"Pyramid III," by Marian Karel, is the ultimate illusion. It is simply an upright sheet of glass, held in place with two metal cables. The cables stretch from the corners of the platform to a center point at the top of the glass. Voila, the profile of a pyramid. A shadow on the wall reinforces the stark silhouette.
The final section predicting the future includes working drawings for large architectural commissions.
The exhibition continues through Nov. 22 and will then travel for two years to five museums in Oklahoma, Alabama, Texas and Arizona. The Morris Museum is at 6 Normandy Heights Road in Morristown. Hours are 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. Monday through Saturday and 1 to 5 P.M. Sunday. Admission is $4 for adults, or $2 for children and the elderly."
Freudenheim, B. "CRAFTS; Celebrating a Milestone In Glass Artistry" November 1, 1992. The New York Times. website accessed May 28, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/01/nyregion/crafts-celebrating-a-milestone-in-glass-artistry.html?pagewanted=2
1992 Rita Reif:
"There've never been so many finger marks to remove from our front window," said Joan McDonald, a spokeswoman for the American Craft Museum. The reason? The exhibition of Dale Chihuly's giant glass spheres, arranged on a bed of broken bottles.
Since early this year, when the Seattle glass artist installed the shimmering scene behind the museum's 20-foot-high window, a steady parade of people have been peering in, their hands and noses pressed against the panes. The 24 opaque balls -- half of them black, half milk-white -- are among the largest blown-glass bubbles ever made, ranging from a foot to a yard or more in diameter.
By day, washed by the sun, they look coolly elegant. At night, their iridescent surfaces glow in an eerie light, which gives them the look of color-splashed moon rocks. The environment remains at the Manhattan museum through Aug. 2.
Mr. Chihuly (pronounced chi-HOO-ly) calls the environment "Niijima Floats." He named it after the island near Tokyo where glass artisans once produced green floats, some as large as basketballs, that Japanese fishermen used to keep their nets afloat at sea. Mr. Chihuly, who is 50 years old, said he remembered finding such floats as a boy on beaches near his home in Tacoma, Wash.
"I liked the way the bed of broken bottles caught the light," Mr. Chihuly said of "Niijima Floats." "The clear glass fragments went perfectly with the black and white spheres and formed a natural barrier to keep people away."
The work, which was commissioned two years ago by the museum, changed several times. "Originally, Dale was going to stack the spheres," said Janet Kardon, director of the museum. But he decided not to after the gaffer and the glass team finished the first one. "I told Rich Royal and the team," Mr. Chihuly said, "to blow as big a ball as they could and to put a dimple in the end so we could stick a smaller ball on top of it and maybe attach some glass flowers. When it came out of the oven, I realized it looked pretty good on its own."
Making the largest of these glass objects requires the skills of 10 strong men at Mr. Chihuly's workshop in Seattle. The balls weigh up to 80 pounds apiece and are all slightly different in shape, size and color. "When you get up to these huge forms," Mr. Chihuly said, "you feel their strength and the breath that went into them."
An even larger grouping of Chihuly spheres -- about 40 -- is exhibited in "Dale Chihuly: Installations 1964-1992," at the Seattle Art Museum, through Aug. 16. These spheres comprise one of the glass environments in a show of 250 works that fill a space the size of a football field. The exhibition, which represents the largest survey of Chihuly work ever held, was financed by the Safeco Insurance Companies of Seattle.
"We wanted to celebrate a local artist whose work is known nationally," said Patterson Sims, the museum's curator of modern art and author of the catalogue ($19.95). "These are the longest days of the year, and the exhibition goes from natural light to pitch darkness."
The Seattle show documents the designer's lifelong explorations of the fluid capabilities of glass. Mr. Chihuly's undulating vases and sculptures, with their ruffled edges, biomorphic forms and variegated colorings, are reminiscent of tropical shells and flowers. Some of the larger works seem alive, changing as one watches. The most dramatic was an assemblage of neon-lighted towers in which the artist used not glass but 20,000 pounds of ice that melted slowly on a sidewalk in front of the museum during the first week of the show.
A more permanent creation of colorful glass pinwheels seems to cling like so many butterflies to the mullions of a window. And a huge chandelier -- eight feet high and five feet wide -- looks like a barrage of balloons at liftoff.
The exhibition includes not only actual works of art but also photographs of Mr. Chihuly's creations. Among the oversized color images is one depicting a work called "Glass Forest," which he created in 1971 when he was an assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.
The fragile construction, which he made with James Carpenter, one of his students, combined white glass stalks and pretzel-twists of neon tubing. It was exhibited that year at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, now the American Craft Museum. Mr. Chihuly still teaches occasionally, but at the Pilchuk Glass School, which he founded near Seattle in 1971. Last year, students from 25 countries attended.
What's next? "More spheres," the artist said. "But the setting is different." The spheres will stand out of doors in a courtyard at the Honolulu Academy of Art, placed downward on the grass so water cannot collect in them.
Mr. Chihuly is not saying what the colors will be and whether the shapes will change as the project proceeds. "We just like making something you've never seen before."
Reif, R. "Chihuly's Glass Spheres Are Worlds Unto Themselves" July 5, 1992. website accessed June 2, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/05/arts/arts-artifacts-chihuly-s-glass-spheres-are-worlds-unto-themselves.html
