With each breath, molten glass expands with vibrant colors dancing to life. Dale Patrick Chihuly experimented with a new glassblowing style by creating asymmetrical forms, influenced by gravity, resulting in large-scale, expansive works of art.
Chihuly, born Sept. 20, 1941, in Tacoma, Washington, first melted glass in an oven and blew a bubble from it during his youth. The moment he saw what he had created, his passion for glassblowing ignited.
Chihuly lost both his older brother and only sibling and his father a year apart. He wasn’t interested in pursuing higher education. However, in 1959, he enrolled at the College of Puget Sound at his mother’s urging. A year later, he was studying interior design at the University of Washington in Seattle when he learned how to melt and fuse glass.
After dropping out of school to study art in Florence, he began incorporating glass shards into tapestries and experimented with glassblowing. By 1966, he returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied under Harvey Littleton at the first glass program in the U.S. His education continued with both a Tiffany Foundation grant and Fulbright Fellowship.
Chihuly moved to Italy to work at the Venini glass factory in Murano, where he learned about the team approach to glassblowing. From this lesson—that creative expression could come from uniting with a team—he co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington.
His iconic eyepatch was the result of a car accident in England, in which, he was propelled through the windshield, the glass cutting and blinding his left eye. Then after dislocating his right shoulder while bodysurfing, his team took over the physical work, allowing him to step back and view the process with more perspective.
Speaking on one of his most famous glass works, a chandelier at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Chihuly said: “I want people to be overwhelmed with light and color in some way that they’ve never experienced.”[1]
Following the SGI-USA’s 50,000 Lions of Justice Festival in September 2018, Ikeda Sensei gifted a stunning eight-piece Chihuly glass sculpture to the SGI-USA youth and asked that it be displayed as a symbol of the “shared triumph of mentor and disciple.”
The work, now displayed at the FNCC’s Ikeda Hall, is reminiscent of a starburst, which Sensei described in an essay.
He writes: “In the beautiful swirling galaxies found throughout space, there is an astronomical phenomenon known as a starburst, during which thousands or hundreds of thousands of massive stars are all born at once … This event is one of the great dramas of the universe.
There are also periods in the momentous advance of kosen-rufu when great numbers of capable people suddenly burst on the scene. And this is what we are presently seeing” (Oct. 31, 2014, World Tribune, p. 4).
—Prepared by the World Tribune staff
September 19, 2025 World Tribune, p. 12
References
- https://www.chihuly.com/life<accessed on Sept. 5, 2025>. ↩︎
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