This past weekend, we went to Bentonville, Arkansas, to meet Emily and go to Crystal Bridges’ Dale Chihuly exhibition. We are all Chihuly fans; Emily even met his wife one evening in Little Rock, and after their conversation, she gave Emily a free pass to his lecture the next night. For those of you who might not know, Dale Chihuly is a glass sculptor. He began his career blowing glass, but he lost the sight of his left eye in a car accident, and so now, according to the information at the exhibit, he works with a team of glass blowers to bring his designs to life as glass sculptures.
We had been to Crystal Bridges a year and a half ago at Christmas, hoping to see the Frank Lloyd Wright house that the museum bought from the owner in New Jersey, took apart piece by piece, transferred to Bentonville, and reassembled in the woods on the museum property. Having toured the Dana Thomas House in Springfield, Illinois, we were eager to see another of Wright’s designs. But it was not to be. That Christmas, it rained cats and dogs, and we didn’t really ever leave our hotel.
I was beginning to think that we were cursed as far as special exhibitions at Crystal Bridges, because this time, we planned to go to the Chihuly exhibition on Sunday morning a little after 10, then see the Wright house, then have brunch, and then Libby would leave because Monday was a workday for her. Well, we got to Crystal Bridges about 10:45 and stood in line to buy tickets and found that the first available time for the Chihuly exhibition (who knew the tickets would be for a specific time?) was 12:30. And the Wright house tour was sold out for the day.
We glared at each other, and then discovered that the Chihuly exhibition was in two parts – in a gallery and out on the grounds. The part on the grounds did not require a ticket. So we followed the path into the woods and began our trek through the forest, stopping to see magnificent, colorful glass objets d’art, except these objets were not small. I cannot imagine how this exhibition was installed. We were sure that a couple of the sculptures would have required a crane, and several pieces were actually in the ground. Each sculpture was a different color and a different shape. One resembled Medusa’s hair in neon pinks, greens, yellows, and blues. Sole D’Oro looked like a swirling two-ton sun on a stick. And my favorite was a red canoe filled with glass figures of all shapes and sizes and colors.
We still had an hour to wait, and so we went to Eleven, Crystal Bridges’ cafeteria and restaurant. What better to fill the time than food? While we were waiting, I happened to look up and saw some friends from Sedalia walk in! We had a nice visit, and then it was time to go to the gallery to see the remaining part of the exhibition.
This part surprised me. Not only did we see the glass art pieces, but we saw Dale Chihuly’s artist’s studies and renderings of what the glass pieces would look like when they were finished. For instance, we saw a collection of pink glass cylinders of different sizes, and on the wall hung the paintings that inspired the cylinders. The gallery also posted information about how the pieces are created, including the process that goes into creating the glass colors and patterns, and three videos tracked the artist’s creative process and the physical creating process.
We left wanting to take a piece home, but unfortunately, the pieces for sale were more than a little out of our price range.
If you can make it to Bentonville for this exhibit, do so. Be smarter than we were, and go to http://crystalbridges.org/exhibitions/chihuly/ to find tickets and times. If you can’t go, you can see a Chihuly piece at our own Daum Museum on the State Fair Community College campus. The lavender chandelier is breathtaking!
And by the way, we saw the Frank Lloyd Wright house the next day. But that’s another story.
