The Wanderers: Chihuly, Glass Sculptures, Desert

Five years after his record-setting first exhibition at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Dale Chihuly is back with new and re-imagined glass sculptures.

"Chihuly in the Garden" is the title of the display, which is part of Garden's winter celebration, Los Noches de las Luminarias.

The trails among the cacti and desert plants are lined with luminarias, trees decorated with strings of lights, and many lighted sculptures by Chihuly and his team.

Since he enrolled in the country’s first blown-glass program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1965, Chihuly has built a fine-glass-art empire, sharing his unique works in intriguing ways across the globe. A car accident in 1976 and body-surfing incident in 1979 permanently sidelined Chihuly from blowing glass himself, leading him to hire and teach an elite team of artists, designers and installers to help him realize his vision.

The 12 artists on the installation team arrived Oct. 24 with six 53-foot trailer trucks filled with the boxes of glass, armatures, tools and everything necessary for the enormous task.

Tom Lind, the studio’s project manager for exhibitions, is in charge of keeping the hectic production schedule in order. He’s also a lighting expert tasked with enhancing the artwork at night.

“Meeting the deadline is the biggest challenge,” Lind said. “We have 10 to 12 days to do all the installations. Some take four and a half days, some only take two hours.”

Each of the six or seven major installations is made up of thousands of pieces; the smallest sculptures consist of just eight to 10. For example, "Summer Sun" (three photos below) consists of 2000 red, yellow and orange hand-blown glass elements.

The preparation and installation processes are meticulous, and there are no blueprints. Like Chihuly’s artwork, it’s all very organic.

“All the sculptures are assembled once in the studio,” Lind said, “and then Dale looks at it. Do we make it bigger? Do we add red to it? Do we make changes to it? Improve it? Once Dale’s happy with it, we disassemble it, piece by piece, and pack it up.... (I)t’s pretty well-planned-out once it leaves the studio.”

The pieces are packed with some order, but it isn’t exact. The installation team uses photos of the completed sculptures as a guide, and members have the freedom to make changes on the spot.

Chihuly works with only a few materials, but he always pushes the boundaries of what those materials can do. Years ago, Chihuly and his team created a new type of polymer material to mimic glass.

“That really started because a few projects that we did, glass was too heavy, the structure couldn’t support it,” he said. “Plastic is transparent like glass, one of the few materials other than glass that is transparent.”

Chihuly dubbed the material Polyvitro, and it can be seen in “Polyvitro Chandelier & Tower” (below), a major sculpture in the middle of the garden’s cactus and succulent galleries. The silver globes decorated with metallic designs come in a variety of shapes and are lightweight.

This sculpture must be a little over fifteen feet tall. The white speck in the lower right corner of the photo below is from the screen of a person's phone while taking a photograph.