At the beginning of one of his many videos, the artist is exhorting a group of assistants. “This is important,” he says, with a cheerleader’s enthusiasm. “Make ’em as big as we can — the bigger the better.”
Dale Chihuly will never be accused of not thinking big. His Fiore di Como, a 2,000-piece assemblage of blown-glass flowers, covers the 2,000-sqare-foot ceiling of the lobby of Steve Wynn’s extravagant Bellagio Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London commissioned a 30-foot high Chihuly chandelier for its rotunda. And an entire city became the installation space for Chihuly Over Venice. This 1998 project not only brought together five tons of chandeliers from major glassworking regions — his own Seattle, Finland, Ireland, Mexico, and Venice itself — to hang over the famous canals, it served as the subject of a documentary which became the first program broadcast by PBS in HD format.
