Dale Chihuly’s Towering Glass Sculptures Return to Venice
The Seattle-based artist celebrates the 30th anniversary of “Chihuly Over Venice” with new glassworks and a monumental exhibition
In Venice, in the garden of the historic Palazzo Franchetti, a column of hundreds of delicately curling blown glass tendrils stands 30 feet tall. Titled Gold Tower (2025) for its tones ranging from translucent honey to deeper amber, it’s unmistakably the work of Dale Chihuly, the Seattle-based American artist who for the last several decades has stretched the limits of glassblowing as a fine art. With two additional new Chihuly works, Blue Green Tower (2025) and End of the Day Chandelier (2025), Gold Tower graces the banks of Venice’s Grand Canal as the centerpiece to “Chihuly: Venice 2026,” an exhibition honoring the city’s formative influence on Chihuly’s practice.
“For us, coming back to Venice is just necessary,” Leslie Jackson Chihuly, Chihuly’s wife and the president and CEO of Chihuly Studio, said last week as she inaugurated the new works. “It’s our home.” Chihuly, 84, plans to travel to Venice in September to attend Glass Week.
Presented by Pilchuck Glass School and Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, “Chihuly: Venice 2026” is a 30th anniversary celebration of “Chihuly Over Venice,” an ambitious 1996 project that in many ways was a defining moment in Chihuly’s career. With a team of 25, including Jackson as project director, he installed 14 monumental glass chandeliers across the different canals and architectural corners of his favorite city. Composed of hundreds of individually organically shaped elements, they were the culmination of two years of cross-pollination, as he took members with artists and craftspeople in Finland, Mexico, and Ireland, pushing the limits of color, form, and how it could be exhibited. “It was, I think, a foundation for so much of the work Dale has done since,” said Jackson Chihuly.
“This was not a solitary studio practice,” added Suzanne Geiss, curator of the accompanying “Chihuly: Venice 2026” archival exhibition at the nearby Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. “This was a choreography of making across time, people, and geographies.”
Simultaneously delicate and monumental, often weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds, Chihuly’s works are well-known around the world, gracing such iconic ceilings as the Bellagio in Las Vegas and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. His particular connection to Venice, a centuries-old capital of glassmaking, dates back to 1968, when he spent a year working at the storied Venini glass factory on Murano Island during a Fulbright fellowship. Afterwards, Chihuly traveled back to the U.S., where he began pushing those centuries-old European craft traditions toward organic fluid forms shaped by the force of gravity, chance, and collaboration, ever-larger and ever-thinner. “‘Push it further, make it bigger,’” said Geiss, quoting a phrase Chihuly had said. “That stayed with me as foundational to Dale’s approach to making art.”
A pivotal force in the American studio glass movement, he co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School in his native Washington state in 1971. “What Dale was offering was a freedom from the technical stricture of old glass-blowing and the freedom to explore and push the material,” said Jackson Chihuly. His recruiting Italian glass maestros to teach their technical knowledge to American artists was in a spirit of “cross-pollination,” said Pilchuck executive director Donna Davies. “What you see at Pilchuck on a daily basis is that artists come and they lean into that idea of experimentation.”
The accompanying exhibition to “Chihuly: Venice 2026” features hundreds of vivid, backlit photographic slides documenting “Chihuly Over Venice,” where the artist’s colorful chandeliers occupy the city’s bridges and float in its canals. “I’ve been lucky enough to come along at the right time, at the right place, to be able to expand many of the forms that were made throughout this 2,000-year history [of glass-blowing],” Chihuly explains in a documentary video. After all, “Who wants to make things that people have seen before?”
“Chihuly: Venice 2026” is on view in Venice through November 14, 2026