Virginia Museum Show Features Glass Art Pioneer Dale Chihuly

November 16, 2012

A 1982 work by Dale Chihuly

Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC in VOA Special English.

I’m June Simms.

On our show this week, we play music from a new boy band and an old one.

We also tell about the increasing number of Chinese students in the United States…

But first, we look at and through the glass work of Dale Chihuly.

Art of Glass

Dale Chihuly says he knew he wanted to be an artist from the time he blew his first glass bubble. That was in nineteen sixty-five -- in the early years of America’s studio glass movement. The movement has helped turn glass from a useful industrial material into works of art.

The studio glass effort is in its fiftieth year now. Dale Chihuly is marking the anniversary with a show in Richmond, Virginia. Shirley Griffith tells about it.

The show is called “Chihuly at the Museum of Fine Arts.” It takes up about ninety-three square meters of exhibition space.

Dale Chihuly’s works can be extremely large. “Laguna Torcello,” for example, is about twenty meters long and more than six meters wide. He made “Laguna Torcello” from fifteen hundred individual pieces of glass. The work was designed especially for the museum in Richmond and is being shown for the first time. “Laguna Torcello” is named after the oldest continuously populated island in Italy’s Venetian Lagoon.