A recent exhibition by UW–Madison alumnus Dale Chihuly was featured on PBS News Weekend in a segment that is headlined, “Glass artist Dale Chihuly’s exhibit takes inspiration from Arizona’s desert landscape.”
Chihuly earned his MFA from the School of Education’s Art Department in 1967.
The episode spotlights installations by Chihuly at Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic winter home, Taliesin West, in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, and at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona. Chihuly’s work was on view from December 2021 until June 19, 2022.
Chihuly is the first artist who had been allowed to display his work at Taliesin West. “It’s a dream come true,” says Chihuly in the segment. “Taliesin West is such an incredible complex, and it’s really a great honor to be able to make (this) installation.”
The segment explains that it took four years of working and reworking the designs between the Taliesin team in Arizona and Chihuly’s studio in Seattle — where thousands of hand-blown glass pieces were made — to bring the exhibition to life.
Entitled “Chihuly in the Desert,” the exhibition aimed to combine art and architecture in an unparalleled experience. Like Wright, Chihuly draws inspiration from the natural world.
“The idea was to really work in concert with nature, to first notice the nature, appreciate the surroundings, and site works and site architecture in a way that was complementary to and not dissonant to the beautiful natural surroundings,” explains Leslie Chihuly, who is Dale’s wife and the head of his studio and workshop.
“I think it’s very much a dance of heat and light and it’s a dance of vision,” she adds. “And it’s a dance of experimentation, playfulness, building on ideas.”
To learn more about “Chihuly in the Desert” at Taliesin West and the Desert Botanical Garden, check out the full segment on PBS News Weekend here.