This weekend, the opening of the Chihuly Collection — a 10,000-square-foot exhibition facility devoted to glimmering glass sculpture by Seattle artist Dale Chihuly — is sure to jam the Tampa Bay media airwaves with no shortage of buzz. But while the gallery space opens its doors on the ground floor of a swanky condominium on St. Petersburg's waterfront, another development is already underway at the Morean Arts Center itself, the organization responsible for bringing the Chihuly showcase to St. Pete. Behind the Morean's home base on Central Avenue, an open-air glassblowing hotshop that opened last weekend spotlights the process behind blown glass, giving some of the Bay area's biggest glassblowing talents a chance to shine in front of a live audience.
Though the Chihuly name lends star power to the Morean's endeavor — the ultimate in glass art star power, to be sure — the more modest hotshop (in a 4,000-sq.-ft. building formerly devoted to ceramic art) deserves equal billing as a catalyst for change in the community. After visitors go gaga for Chihuly's trademark handiwork — an eye-popping, ruby red chandelier; rustic boats overflowing with glass spheres; a tower of pink glass rock candy outside the collection's entrance — they can head to the hotshop to watch local artists take turns performing half-hour demos, crafting a vessel or other shape from molten glass. (Those for whom a brief glimpse of the process is not enough can enroll in a multi-session glassblowing class or pay $50 for a one-time hands-on session with an artist.)
Helping visitors make the connection between Chihuly's deservedly renowned art and Bay area practice elevates the Morean's two-pronged glass project from a tourist attraction (albeit, an important one) to a foundation for the launch of St. Pete's nascent glass community.
"Everything will shift at the core when this hotshop gets open at the Morean," says Owen Pach, a Gulfport-based artist who has been blowing glass for 25 years. "I don't think people really understand what this is going to mean for the city and the region — even the whole Southeast."
At the hotshop's public debut, Pach occupies center stage for the final demo of the day. As for the earlier half-hour performances, there's more demand than seats available; after about 50 spectators climb into the hotshop's stadium-style bleachers, a less fortunate dozen queue up along the chain link fence that encloses the studio, peering in to watch Pach work his magic. The artist is clearly in his element: despite having only a small glory hole to work with, he churns out a wide-mouthed blue bowl with wavy sides that perches delicately on five legs, evoking a spider or a crab — a "super-creeper," Pach calls it. As he crafts the vessel with the help of an assistant, Pach peppers the audience with glassblowing terminology and a play-by-play of what he's doing with various tools from a bench in full view of the curious onlookers, who burst into applause as he finishes.
Pach, whom the Morean contracted to design and build the hotshop equipment, could be the poster child for the area's undersung glass scene. A native of Tampa, he lived until a few years ago in Philadelphia, where he ran a major glass studio of his own. His blown glass sculpture has been exhibited internationally and currently adorns a gallery at Tampa International Airport. He's trained with the best (e.g., masters at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina), and he's taught for years. If you haven't heard his name or seen his work yet, that's likely to change with glass art's new visibility in the Bay area.
That visibility starts on the floor of the hotshop, designed by Pach and Morean staff to function as a "performance studio," where the audience enjoys an unobstructed view of the process. A large glory hole will be set at an angle, to offer a view of sculpture in progress as it is flashed in the oven; a second, portable glory hole can be moved around the studio as needed and angled toward the audience. Glassblowing artists will wear wireless microphones and narrate the process for visitors, and rather than the gaffer's back as he works, spectators should have a clear view of the hot glass being worked at a central bench angled to maximize audience view.
"I've never seen that anywhere in a glassblowing studio," Pach says.
Witnessing hot glass in action, with its fiery furnaces and taffy-like substance, is a must for understanding the art, says Douglas "Firebug" Taylor, Jr., one of the hotshop demo artists and glassblowing instructors.
"You can watch [glassblowing] on TV, and you can be told about it," Taylor says, "but people just don't understand it until you're there and you feel the heat and hear the noises."
The effect is so seductive that Russ Gustafson-Hilton, an established clay artist and longtime head of the Morean's educational programs in clay, now tasked with managing the hotshop and glass classes, has adopted the medium as his own.
"Glass is very much like clay in a sense — it's very, very plastic, and you can shape it and move it, and the color and different textures," he says. "It's addictive, almost."
Of course, there would be no concept of glass as a medium for contemporary fine art without Dale Chihuly (bracketing for a moment debates over terms like "art" versus "craft" and the dubious distinction hinted at by the word "fine"). In 1971, Chihuly, then teaching sculpture at the esteemed Rhode Island School of Design, founded the now-famous Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle. Fluent in the criteria of contemporary, post-minimalist art (with its emphasis on unconventional materials and environmental interventions) and trained in Italian glassblowing technique, he electrified the domestic glass world by bringing sophisticated sculptural ambitions to the medium; museum shows followed. During the 1990s, with splashy commissions at the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas and Atlantis resort in the Bahamas, he reached rock star status — an icon instantly recognizable by his eyepatch and curly hair.
Beyond a colorful art and an equally colorful persona, Chihuly has pioneered an industry, says Morean executive director Katee Tully — not just in Seattle but in west central Florida, which already boasts the third-largest collector base of glass art in the U.S., she says. Tapping into the existing market of collectors, cultivating new ones and providing a foundation for jobs associated with a vibrant glass community (and arts community, more generally) like instructors, gallery owners, art handlers and shippers, is part of the Morean's aim. So is stimulating synergy between arts institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts (where St. Pete's Chihuly mania began with a blockbuster exhibition in 2004) and the Dalí Museum, which is scheduled to move to a new building at the base of Bay Shore Drive next year, creating a "museum row" down the city's waterfront with the Chihuly Collection at its northern end. Similarly, the hotshop provides another lure for visitors to Central Avenue, where the burgeoning "600 block" of independent businesses, Crislip Arcade artists' studios and Florida Craftsmen are located. If Seattle history is any indication, the attraction of hot glass will create new jobs and bolster neighboring businesses and service industries.
"We're calling it the Chihuly effect," she says.
That economic opportunity has already enticed Christian Zvonik and his wife, Kendra, to relocate from Seattle, where he worked for an established glass artist. After the Zvoniks heard about the Morean's plans during a trip to visit family in the Bay area, they decided to take a leap of faith, moving to St. Petersburg a year ago. Now, he'll teach and lead demos in the hotshop; Kendra, a paper artist and painter with a full-time business selling her work on Etsy, also blows glass and may eventually lead a "ladies' night" glassblowing demo at the Morean.
"I thought 'Wow, I can live on the beach and blow glass — let's do it,'" Christian Zvonik says. Next, the couple hopes to lure other friends and colleagues from Seattle.
Owners of established businesses and artists say the hotshop, rather than competition, is likely to boost their fortunes. Josh Poll and David Walker, co-owners of Zen Glass Studio in midtown St. Pete, have signed on as studio assistants. (The two practice lampworking, which the Morean will offer classes in, and showcase their own work at Zen Glass.) Likewise, Susan Gott, one of the best-known glass artists in Tampa Bay, who operates her own production studio with glass casting and blowing and a gallery (both open to the public) in Seminole Heights, sees the Morean endeavor as a long-awaited step forward for the local glass community. Gott, who will teach casting at the Morean, admits she wishes she were closer to the new critical mass of glass across the Bay.
If money were no object, "I would love to pick up my studio and move it to St. Pete," she says.
That's just what Duncan McClellan, arguably the "mac daddy" (Owen Pach's term) of the Bay area glass community, did earlier this year. Widely known and celebrated for his vividly colored glass vessels incised with ebony figures and alchemical symbols, McClellan packed up his former space in Tampa — a decision he first made, by coincidence, around the same time the Morean first announced its partnership with Chihuly — and relocated to a rehabilitated warehouse south of downtown, where he plans to start hosting public exhibitions of glass art in the fall. At the warehouse — painstakingly converted into an immersive aesthetic experience more reminiscent of a renaissance palazzo than a former fish-packing plant — McClellan showcases his own work in spotlit vitrines, in furniture (like a custom-built wet bar made of carved stone and glass) and architectural details (bathroom tiles, a sink basin) made of art glass.
The massive investment includes plans for a "phase two" that will involve the construction of a hotshop on adjacent space. Above the doors to his gallery, a glass disc decorated with an inscription advertises McClellan's philosophy: "The greatest risk is not taking one."
The same could be said of the Morean, where, under Tully's leadership, plans for a Chihuly partnership that began as a vision of an enormous condominium and arts complex in the pre-recession atmosphere of 2005 have nonetheless come to fruition in 2010, albeit in scaled-back form. This weekend, as the Chihuly Collection opens amid glitz and glamour and the hotshop eases into its new routine, the Morean is sitting pretty on having taken a very smart risk.
You know what else seems crystalline?
"It's been clear for many years that St. Pete is the bigger arts city over Tampa," Pach says, reflecting on the bigger picture.
Now it just got a little clearer.
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2010.