Dale Chihuly: Glass, Loss, and the City That Made Him
Near Tacoma, Washington
Dale Chihuly was born in Tacoma on September twentieth, nineteen forty-one, the younger of two brothers. When he was sixteen, his father died of a heart attack. The year before, his older brother George had been killed in a Navy aviation training accident.
Within two years, the family that had raised him was reduced to himself and his mother. He enrolled briefly at the College of Puget Sound before eventually finding his way to the University of Washington, where he studied interior design and discovered a relationship with materials that would define the rest of his life. His serious study of glass began at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, under Harvey Littleton, who was then establishing studio glass as a legitimate art form rather than a craft practice.
Chihuly received a Fulbright Fellowship and went to Venice in nineteen sixty-eight to study with the glassblowers on Murano. He co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State in nineteen seventy-one, a summer program in a field above the Cascade foothills that became one of the most influential glass art schools in the world. In nineteen seventy-six, a car accident in England damaged his left eye so severely that he permanently lost the sight in it.
In nineteen seventy-nine, a bodysurfing accident dislocated his shoulder and made it impossible for him to blow glass with the physical control the process requires. He adapted by stepping back from the gaffer's role and becoming a director, describing what he wanted, orchestrating teams of glassblowers who executed his vision. He described the shift as moving from dancer to choreographer.
The Museum of Glass, which opened in Tacoma in two thousand and two, is anchored by a steel cone structure that houses a working hot shop where artists blow glass in public view. The pedestrian Bridge of Glass connecting the museum to the rest of downtown is covered with Chihuly's work. Tacoma gave him a difficult early life and then reclaimed him as its most celebrated native.
He became one of the most recognized glass artists in the history of the medium, and the city he left at eighteen was eventually transformed, in part, by what he made.
