"Chihuly at RISD," the first show in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum's Special Exhibitions Gallery at the new Chace Center, makes loud visual statements but fails to say anything new.
On Wednesday, glass artist Dale Chihuly, a 1968 RISD graduate, led some 50 museum officials and members of the press on a preview tour of the show, which officially opens Saturday.
This superficially entertaining but ultimately unexciting exhibition features both older and more recent pieces in dramatic installations tailored to the characteristic flamboyance of Chihuly's work.
Chihuly's immediately identifiable style emphasizes the visual pleasure of fluid, color-saturated forms. The exhibition begins with a showy "Persian Ceiling" installation, as Chihuly calls it - a short passageway whose clear roof supports a chaotic assemblage of vibrant glass pieces. Light shines through the ceiling from above, filling the space with color.
The show is mostly organized into small groups of work sampling the many series that Chihuly has developed throughout his 40-year career, including his aptly-named "Cylinders," the undulating "Baskets," and the fanciful "Venetians." Unfortunately, this classifying format only highlights the fact that Chihuly's "series" might just as well be called "product lines." His style has had decades to saturate the market, and even the newest works in the show feel tired and familiar, an effect that is exacerbated by the space's darkly painted walls and intensely focused floor-show lighting. The pieces might as well have their price tags on them. This sort of blatant commercialism, though acceptable for an auction house, leaves a sour taste when the space belongs to an academic institution.
The show also features a handful of larger installation works and some 70 of Chihuly's paintings, mostly in acrylics scarred with a blowtorch. The paintings, aside from their purely expressive function, often serve as blueprints for the team of artisans in Chihuly's studio who actually produce his work. In a way, they give the viewer a certain insight into Chihuly's creative process, though they are not inherently of much visual interest.
After earning a master's degree in sculpture at the University of Wisconsin in 1967, Chihuly enrolled in RISD's graduate program in ceramics. At that time, a small furnace at a professor's farm was the extent of RISD's glass program, according to Chihuly. After earning his second master's, he joined the RISD faculty and taught there for 11 years, helping to build the school's glass department. During that period, he also founded the Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle, which he said helped make that city "the place where glass really took off." He estimates that Seattle now hosts over 100 glassmaking studios.
Chihuly's pervasive influence on the art glassmaking climate is illustrated by a companion exhibition, "Studio Glass in Rhode Island: The Chihuly Years," also on view in the Chace Center. Works by Chihuly's students and colleagues, including Howard Ben Tré, James Watkins and Toots Zynsky, show that Chihuly's preoccupations - the appropriation of natural forms, the exploration of volumetric space and the creative use of color - were a source of inspiration.
RISD Museum Director Hope Alswang, in her introduction to Chihuly's tour, said that the artist had the appropriate "gravitas" to inaugurate the new Chace Center space. But by deciding to play it safe and presenting an unimaginative crowd-pleaser, the RISD Museum missed a valuable opportunity to open the Chace Center's doors with something truly innovative.
