Artist Dale Chihuly

Dale Chihuly, whose medium is glass, says, “I call myself an artist for lack of a better word, I’m an artist, a designer, a craftsman, interior designer, half-architect. There’s no one name that fits me very well.” The difficulty of categorizing him notwithstanding, Chihuly is universally labeled a glass artist, and in the domain of contemporary glass art, he is probably unsurpassed in his artistic and technical in ventiveness and boldness, pro fessional success, and influence. “An unquestioned genius,” as Robert T. Buck, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, has called him, he has become

the most celebrated glassmaker in the United States since the turn of the century, when Louis Comfort Tiffany made stained glass a prominent feature of American interior design.

Dale Chihuly, who was born in Tacoma, Washington in 1941, has become an internationally celebrated personality in contemporary art and design whose prominence in the field of contemporary studio glass is unmatched.

He is a generous and charismatic individual with a forceful personality, who ceaselessly promotes himself and his material—glass—to audiences around the world. For those who might question the influence of a single artist on what has become a sizable international community, try imagining what the early American studio glass movement—or international glass today—would be without Chihuly. It is impossible to deny the magnitude and pervasiveness of his influence.