Listening to the Master of Glass: Chihuly Smartphone Walking Tour (review)

Standing alone on a pedestrian bridge under a full moon, gazing at enormous sculpted turquoise towers while listening to the artist's voice coming through your ear phones—well, this is more impactful art appreciation than you get from reading a book. The city of Tacoma, Washington, offers this experience free to locals and visitors through a downloadable iPhone app.

Twenty-six miles south of Seattle, Tacoma has often been overshadowed by the larger city. The Puget Sound city has shed its 1980s reputation for the "Tacoma Aroma" (a ripe mix of pulp mills and animal waste) and become known for much more favorable aspects, such as glass art. Famous son Dale Chihuly has leveraged his success to uplift his hometown. Now Tacoma boasts the Tacoma Art Museum, the Museum of Glass, and Chihuly's Bridge of Glass. There is even an upscale glass-themed hotel—the Hotel Murano—with a world-class glass collection on display.

The Minneapolis-based company Museum 411 produced the Chihuly smart-phone walking tour, which works best on a free smartphone app called STQRY. However, you can also stream audio from nonmobile devices at the Tacoma Art Museum's website.

The tour features nineteen stops at five locations within Tacoma's Museum District. At first glance, the tour seems more extensive than it actually is, since ten of those stops are inside the Tacoma Art Museum. Five are within Union Station, two on the Bridge of Glass, one at the University of Washington, Tacoma campus, and the last inside the Swiss Restaurant and Pub. Identification is required to enter Union Station, as it is now a federal courthouse.

Chihuly was born in Tacoma in 1941 and started working in glass in 1963. His career built rapidly. In 1966 he studied glass art with Harvey Littleton at the University of Wisconsin, then went to Rhode Island School of Design for his MFA. In 1969, he established a glass program at RISD. Two years later, he opened the Pilchuck Glass School in the foothills of Washington's Cascade Mountains. Thousands of glass artists have since studied at this alternative art school that encourages radical experimentation.

When listening to the audio tour, you quickly get up to speed on Chihuly lingo. He works in series to explore variations, and the same shapes come up over and over in slightly different ways. His major series are cylinders, sea forms, Macchia (which look like patterned, upside down skirts with crinkly edges), Persians, Venetians (vases and bottles), Ikebana (inspired by Japanese flower arrangement), Niijima floats, Putti (little Italian children, like cherubs) and chandeliers. From the narrator and excerpts of interviews with Chihuly, you learn about the artist's inspirations, techniques, materials, and challenges.

Historians will be intrigued by how much history influenced Chihuly's work. He describes an epiphany he had while visiting the Washington State Historical Society in 1977 and looking at the American Indian basket collection. "And it dawns on me that hey, wouldn't it be interesting to try to make these baskets out of glass. And a lot of the baskets were old and kind of crumply, they're not always straight and firm. So I got it in my mind that somehow I wanted to make them asymmetrical." Back at Pilchuck, he began experimenting. "That was really the breakthrough series for me, probably the most innovational thing I'd ever done in glass was to begin to form glass with fire, with gravity, with heat, with centrifugal force. I was using just the human breath going down into this miraculous material. Blowing it up and then blowing it more and more, pushing its limits, making it as thin as I could. And then putting it back in the furnace and making it so hot that it would almost collapse and begin to move. So I was pushing the edge of thinness and collapsibility and making new forms."

The audio tracks are nicely timed, with most under three minutes...