Sculpture

Chihuly Glass: Oklahoma City, OK and Las Vegas, NV

I was recently in Oklahoma City with my long-time friend, Brian Nixon. Whenever we are together, museums and galleries are on the itinerary. 

Oklahoma City Museum of Art has an extensive Dale Chihuly Glass collection and was showing the Chihuly Then and Now: The Collection at Twenty  exhibit, featuring five decades of Chihuly works and celebrating the 20th anniversary of the museum’s collection of Chihuly glass and paintings.

Chihuly’s innovative and intricate glasswork is inspired by organic shapes of nature, colorfully intense, world-renowned. The Oklahoma collection exhibits works ranging from small glass bowls and vases to more extensive, complex installations that fill entire rooms. Some notable artworks are the “Persian Ceiling” installation, composed of hundreds of hand-blown glass pieces arranged in an array of colors and shapes, “Mille Fiori,” a massive, colorful chandelier comprising thousands of individual glass pieces, “Macchia,” a series of vibrant, abstract glass vessels, and the enchanting: “Ikebana Boat” and “Float Boat,” two actual rowboats filled with Chihuly Glass.

Of course, I took some iPhone photos, and some are presented below.

For more information on the show at Oklahoma, here is a link about the collection:

https://www.okcmoa.com/collections/dale-chihuly/

As a new blog about creativity and art making, I have also decided to highlight the museum-quality art hidden around Las Vegas for those who wonder where the Las Vegas Museum of Art is located: it is hidden in plain sight around the Hotels and Casinos. I will tag these as “Art Reviews.”

The first place I want to mention is the Bellagio’s famous Dale Chihuly Glass ceiling, which looks like a sky of glass flowers (or jellyfish if you are ‘tripping’)—”Fiori di Como.” It is a showpiece and perhaps the most famous of glass artworks by Dale Chihuly. 

The 1998 glass sculpture “Fiori di Como” hangs from the ceiling in Bellagio’s lobby and took two years to complete with the help of 100 artisans under the direction of Chihuly and in collaboration with Steve Wynn. The sculpture consists of 2,000 hand-blown glass blossoms that weigh about 40,000 pounds and are supported by a 10,000-pound steel armature. That’s all overhead. The piece covers 2,100 square feet and is seen by over 15,000 people daily. Every morning between 2 and 5 a.m., a team of engineers cleans and maintains the sculpture, which answers the question of dust and bugs.

But there is another beautiful Chihuly “fiora,” and most people never notice this. Yet, it is rich and seductive with its blue glass flowers and yellow twisty horns. It sits middle square in the lounge of the Baccarat Bar under a gold-leafed ceiling. Beautiful. Stop in and have a drink while drinking in the beauty to be found around the Bellagio. More to come on that. 

I will highlight where in Vegas you can find museum-caliber art by Blue Chip artists, so art lovers can easily find them. In the meantime, here are some pics of the Chihuly glass mentioned above.