"No, no, let's do something kind of crazy with it!" master glass artist Dale Chihuly, 58, instructs the three teenagers. He tells them to keep turning, cooling, shaping and coloring the orb for 15 minutes until it finally emerges as a stunning, 3-ft.-tall, Persian-blue vase with a crenellated neck. "That is some piece of work!" says Chihuly, issuing high fives to the apprentice artists. "Never toss something because it isn't perfect," he tells them. "Don't be afraid to see if you can make something wonderful, even if it started out wrong."
The guys listen up. After all, Chihuly, the most famous glass artist since Louis Comfort Tiffany, has helped them and hundreds of others do the same with their lives. In 1994 he and close friend Kathy Kaperick, 41, created the Hilltop Artists-in-Residence Program, an artistic alternative to the sometimes violent streets of their Tacoma, Wash., Hilltop neighborhood. Chihuly goes beyond slogans like Just Say No: He teaches at-risk kids to blow.
On Oct. 26, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in Washington, D.C., gave Chihuly's Hilltop program a Coming Up Taller Award and a check for $10,000. The honors are welcome, but, says Chihuly, "I am getting from the kids at least as much as they are getting from me."
They respectfully disagree. Whether it's in the "hot shop" or "glass class," the teenagers credit the program, located at Jason Lee Middle School, with providing the hope and education it takes to fashion a future. The No. 1 rule: Nobody gets to take part who isn't in school or a high school equivalency program.
"Without glass class, I'd be lost," says Kinnard, 19, who discovered the program in 1996 when he ducked through its doors to evade police after throwing a cherry bomb into a passing car. "My homies and I go to the hot shop to have fun. Doing things like blowing glass and making mosaics keeps us busy." Lucas Lowery, 20, agrees. He used to get up at dawn to teach glass-blowing to younger kids while earning a high school diploma. "Chances like this don't come around that often," says Lowery, who now plans to go to college.
Chihuly knows about second chances. The Seattle resident grew up in Tacoma, where his father, George, was a butcher and union organizer and his mother, Viola, was a homemaker. When Chihuly was 15, his 21-year-old brother, George Jr., died in a naval training accident. Six months later, George Sr. also died, at 51, of a heart attack. "That," Chihuly says, "was a terrible time." His mother took a job as a waitress to support them. She made her son promise to go to college. He studied interior design at the nearby University of Puget Sound, but attended more toga parties than class lectures.
Chihuly buckled down a bit after he transferred to the University of Washington in Seattle and discovered the magic of glass. "One night I melted some stained glass between four bricks and blew a bubble," he says. That was it, Chihuly says. "I wanted to be a glassblower." But first he quit school and headed for Europe, immersing himself in art and architecture—and growing up in the process. "I went from being a boy to a man," he says.
He returned to school and graduated in 1965, then worked at a Seattle architectural firm and as a fisherman in Alaska before earning master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin (then the only U.S. school with a glass program) and, in 1971, the Rhode Island School of Design. That same year, he and a Seattle couple created the Pilchuck Glass School, which would influence nearly every glass artist of the time.
Just as his career was taking off in 1976, Chihuly was reminded that life, like glass, can be fragile. Traveling in England, he barely survived a car crash that cost him the sight in his left eye. With it went his depth perception, crucial for an art form that requires working with materials heated to 2,500 degrees. His glassblowing days were over. But not his career. He became a master artist, directing a devoted staff of 30 glassblowers who execute his visions.
With his wild hair, black eye patch and ubiquitous paint-splattered boots, Chihuly not only looks the part of an artist, he has become a celebrity, counting among his friends and collectors actor Robin Williams and painter David Hockney. (Chihuly's original work sells for between $20,000 to several million dollars.) Opening a new wing of London's Victoria and Albert Museum in October, Queen Elizabeth herself showed up to meet Chihuly and admire his chandelier gracing the rotunda. "She had on this great, bright-yellow dress with matching coat," he recalls, "and I was in my usual crazy colors, and photographers were going crazy!"
"His pieces are absolutely extraordinary artistic creations—ravishing," says Jeremy Adamson, senior curator of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, one of 160 museums to boast Chihulys in their collections.
Some of Chihuly's most spectacular creations have been outside museums. On Oct. 3, he unveiled a 40-ft.-long, 8-ft.-high, 3-ft.-thick wall of ice in front of the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem. His gigantic sculpture signified, Chihuly says, "the melting of tensions" and was visited by some tens of thousands.
Chihuly will disrupt his jet-set travels on a dime if Kaperick—whom he credits with making him see that glassblowing could alter the course of young lives—calls. "Kathy had the concept of how this could be done," he says. "I was there to help out." He still is, generously lending his name and energy to fund-raising and teaching. Last year the kids asked Chihuly to help them make a chandelier they could sell to raise money for their program and a new one in a Pueblo Indian community in Taos, N.Mex. "We wanted to do it, but we didn't know how," says Lucas Lowery. "So Dale got us started, and we all had fun doing it."
Nobody's having more fun than Chihuly himself. Though his first marriage ended in the early '90s, he is now a doting father to Jackson, his 19-month-old son with Leslie Jackson. The toddler has the run of Chihuly's converted 40,000-sq.-ft. former racing-boat factory in Seattle. The living space includes an indoor lap pool and an 87-ft. dining table carved from a single Douglas fir tree, and Chihuly's personal hot shop is downstairs. But his heart is in the hot shop at Hilltop. "How could you not want to help young people?" he says. "It gives me joy."
Christina Cheakalos
Karen Grigsby Bates in Seattle and Macon Morehouse in Washington, D.C.
- Contributors:
- Karen Grigsby Bates,
- Macon Morehouse.
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