Dale ChihulyBy: Cris Hess and Sarah Neville

About Dale Chihuly

• Chihuly enrolled in the first glass program in the country, at the University of Wisconsin.

• He later established a glass program at the Rhode Island School of Design and taught there for more than 10 years.

• In 1968, work at the Venini glass factory in Venice. • 1971, Chihuly cofounded Pilchuck Glass School in

Washington State. • Chihuly has led the avant-garde in the development of

glass as a fine art.

About Dale Chihuly• His work is included in more than 200 hundred museum

collections worldwide. • He has received many awards, including 10 honorary

doctorates and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

• Chihuly has created more than a dozen well-known series of works, among them Cylinders and Baskets in the 1970s; Seaforms, Venetians, and Persians in the 1980s;

• In 1999, Chihuly mounted a challenging exhibition, Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem; more than 1 million visitors attended the Tower of David Museum to view his installations.

Persians

Persians• Geometric shapes, changing forms, sea forms• Persians suggest found treasure• The works relate to ancient Greek pots in Etruscan tombs• The Persians started out as a search for new forms• From the exhibition catalog Chihuly Persians, Dia Art

Foundation, Bridgehampton, New York, 1988.

Baskets

Baskets “I had seen some beautiful Indian baskets at the Washington State Historical Society, and I was struck by the grace of their slumped, sagging forms. I wanted to capture this in glass. The breakthrough for me was recognizing that heat and gravity were the tools to be used to make these forms.” —Chihuly

• inspired by different cultures• Now, for the first time, I really felt I was breaking new ground with an ancient

technique.

• The Life of forms: Dale Chihuly's glass basketsLinda NordenChihuly Baskets, Portland Press

• Baskets: Holders of SecretsMurray MorganChihuly Baskets, Portland Press

• Baskets and Cylinders: Dale ChihulyLee HallCraft Horizons, March/April 1979, p. 24-29.

Seaform• The Seaforms seemed to come about by accident, as much of my work does—by

chance. We were experimenting with some ribbed molds when I was doing the Basket series. By blowing the pieces into ribbed molds, it gave them more strength. It's sort of like corrugated cardboard—or actually, like sea shells themselves, which are very often ribbed. Then the Baskets started looking like sea forms, so I changed the name of the series to Seaforms, which suited me just fine in that I love to walk along the beach and go to the ocean. And glass itself, of course, is so much like water. If you let it go on its own, it almost ends up looking like something that came from the sea.—Chihuly

Sea Forms Chihuly and the SeaSylvia Earle, former Chief Scientist of the National Oceanicand Atmospheric AdministrationChihuly Seaforms, Portland Press, 1995Chihuly SeaformsJoan Seeman RobinsonChihuly Seaforms, Portland Press, 1995Swept away by a show of beautyWilliam ZimmerNew York Times, November 15, 1998Dale Chihuly: Shell FormsLinda NordenArts Magazine, June 1981

Blanket Cylinders • In 1974 we came up with a way to pull colored glass rods into long, thin threads. This allowed us to make drawings out of

glass that we could then pick up onto the outside of a gather of glass. We knew right away that drawing on glass was a breakthrough idea. . . .—Chihuly

• The early trade blanket designers probably didn’t truly understand what many Indian designs meant or symbolized, or how the blankets functioned.

• Pendletons trade blankets The Indians were willing to trade their extraordinary hand-woven blankets for the trade blankets because they found these commercially produced pieces to be more colorful and warmer than their own blankets. They also valued the beauty of the trade blankets. From an economic point of view, one of the Indian hand-woven blankets was worth several machine-made Pendletons.

• Navajo Indian blankets: A very important design feature that made the trade blanket totally different from the hand-woven Indian blanket was the double weave that reversed the design of the blanket from one side to the other.

• Jacquard loom: The designs could be (and at times were) extremely complicated, but once the cards were programmed and placed in the proper order of threading, the entire weaving of the blanket was totally automated with very little labor involved. Hundreds of blankets a day could be made on each Jacquard loom.

• Published in Chihuly's Pendletons, Portland Press, 2000• Also from Chihuly's Pendletons: Colorful Exchange: American Indian Trade Blankets, Charles J. Lohrmann

The Indian Influences Upon My Work, Dale Chihuly