A Chihuly "Glass Forest" grows at his alma mater

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — In the heart of this historic city, where stately brick homes line treed avenues and the soft gurgle of rivers fills the air, a forest stands. It is made of glass, and its delicate, curved shapes are filled with neon, creating an ethereal, almost eerie scene.

The glass forest is part of "Chihuly at RISD," the inaugural exhibition at the new Chace Center at the Rhode Island School of Design. The center opened Saturday.

The Chihuly installation fills the largest gallery, a plum-colored, S-shaped, 4,000-square-foot space on the third floor with striking views of downtown Providence through floor-to-ceiling windows. In addition, nearly 200 of Dale Chihuly's signature charcoal process drawings spread across a 50-foot-long wall offer a peek into the mind of the artist.

The Chace Center, which the school calls "a new front door to RISD," is a bold and stunningly executed addition to the college's Museum of Art. The challenge for Josi Rafael Moneo, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect and Harvard faculty member, was to design a modern structure on a site bordered on three sides by historical buildings. The resulting 43,000-square-foot structure, clad in glass and brick, not only welcomes visitors to the college, but also opens onto Market Square and downtown.

One of the world's pre-eminent glass artists, Seattle-based Chihuly earned a master's degree in fine arts at RISD in 1968 from the ceramics department and helped build a glass department there.

"I spent such a long time at RISD, including a lot of time in the museum, and I still know a lot of people in Providence," Chihuly said. "All that made me want to return and do something there."

A companion exhibit to the Chihuly installation, "Studio Glass in Rhode Island: The Chihuly Years," will feature works by nine groundbreaking artists who were students of Chihuly when he taught at RISD.

The Chace Center not only doubles the exhibition space at the RISD Museum, it also creates a crossroads where academic, museum and public activities come together. A new auditorium on the first floor, done in spare, light wood, will be used for talks by artists and curators, poetry readings, film screenings, and music and dance performances. RISD/Works, the school's shop/gallery/showroom with all wares designed or created by RISD alumni or faculty, has relocated from a bank building on the other side of Market Square to the Chace Center lobby and added a cafe.

The second floor houses student galleries, which will give the public more chances to see work created by the college's up-and-coming artists and designers.

On the third floor, a glass bridge links the Chace Center to the museum complex, offering a light-washed view of downtown Providence on the way.

After graduating from RISD and spending time in Venice on a Fulbright Fellowship at the Venini glass factory in Murano, Chihuly stayed on in Providence, where the studio glass movement was beginning to take hold through the program he had helped establish at the school. In 1971, he cofounded the Pilchuck Glass School outside Seattle and continued to teach at RISD sporadically until the late 1980s.

Chihuly has created many well-known series of tabletop-size works that are technically brilliant, richly colored, and voluptuously shaped and grouped, among them the Cylinders, Baskets, Macchia, Seaforms, Persians and Venetians. But he is also celebrated for large-scale architectural installations, including "Chihuly Over Venice," "Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem" and "Chihuly at the V&A," at London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

His work is included in more than 200 museum collections worldwide and has been exhibited at countless national and international venues.