Gardening Articles
Dale Chihuly Exhibit - New York City
by Chris Gray
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The day after our September garden club meeting, my husband and I made a trip to New York City to attend a wedding. While there, we went to see the Dale Chihuly exhibition at the New York Botanical Gardens.
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Many of the installations for this exhibition were specifically designed for the Botanical Garden’s plant collections, vistas and the historic Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. The day we chose to visit the New York Botanical Gardens was a beautiful sunny day so that the vivid colors in the exhibits could be seen at their very best. I loved seeing this exhibition so much that I wanted to share some information about the artist and also wanted to share some of the pictures we took at the botanical gardens with all of you.
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Dale Chihuly was born in 1941 at Tacoma, WA. His family’s ancestry was Hungarian, Czech and Slavic on his Dad’s side and Swedish and Norwegian on his Mom’s side. It was his mother who was an avid gardener and it was from his Mom that he learned, at a very early age, to appreciate nature with all its beauty.
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During the past forty years, Chihuly has revolutionized the Studio Glass movement by developing complex multi part sculptures of dramatic beauty. He uses neon, argon and blown glass forms to create room-sized installations of freestanding plant like imagery. His works fall into the categories of mini-environments designed for the tabletop to large forms that are innovatively displayed in groupings on a wide variety of surfaces ranging from pedestals to bodies of natural water. It was Chihuly who began the practice of using teams of people to develop large complex contemporary multipart sculptures of dramatic beauty.
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All of this information on Dale Chihuly I found on the Dale Chihuly web site. If you would like to learn more about this artist, go to the Dale Chihuly website and an abundance of information will be at your finger tips.