Oklahoma City.- The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is proud to reopen its collection of glass by American artist Dale Chihuly on New Year’s Eve. Exhibited on the third floor, “ILLUMINATIONS: Rediscovering the Art of Dale Chihuly” presents a fresh look at the Museum’s popular Chihuly collection. Redesigned in collaboration with Chihuly Studio, the newly installed galleries will incorporate a unique design that features a three-dimensional approach to viewing some objects in the collection. The presentation will allow visitors to explore the large Float Boat and Ikebana Boat installations from all sides as well as includes viewing slots for the Reeds. “ILLUMINATIONS” will be accompanied by a special exhibition on the third floor titled “Chihuly: Northwest”. On view through April 8, 2012, this exhibition will include glass sculptures by Chihuly inspired by Native American baskets; Chihuly’s personal collection of textiles as well as photographs by Edward S. Curtis from The North American Indian Portfolio; and recent examples of Chihuly’s White series.
In 2002, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art inaugurated its new home in the Donald W. Reynolds Visual Arts Center with an exhibition of glass and drawings by Dale Chihuly. Bolstered by enormous public support, the Museum purchased the exhibition, which included works from Chihuly’s best-known series and was anchored by the 55-foot Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower in the Museum’s atrium.”Illuminations: Rediscovering the Art of Dale Chihuly Collection” and “Chihuly: Northwest” celebrate the Museum’s 10th anniversary in the Donald W. Reynolds Visual Arts Center. Both exhibitions will open on New Year’s Eve, in conjunction with the Arts Council of Oklahoma City’s Opening Night. Dale Chihuly’s well-grounded academic and practical background includes a B.A. in interior design from the University of Washington, a M.S. in sculpture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a M.F.A. in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, and honorary doctorates from the University of Puget Sound and the Rhode Island School of Design. He also was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant for work in glass and studied at Italy’s prestigious Venini glass factory on a Fulbright Fellowship. Chihuly’s work is included in over 200 museum collections, including the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and he has received world renown for his extensive glass series, international projects, and large architectural installations such as the Museum’s Eleanor Blake Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower. The Museum’s collection represents over three decades of Chihuly’s finest work and heralds this brilliant luminist as the most important artist working in glass since Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Accredited by the American Association of Museums, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art serves over 125,000 visitors annually from all fifty states and over thirty foreign countries and hosts special exhibitions drawn from throughout the world. The Museum’s collection covers a period of five centuries with strengths in American and European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and includes a comprehensive collection of glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly. The Museum’s collection of American art includes paintings and sculptures by artists from the colonial era through 1960. Highlights include works by Hans Hofmann, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Willson Peale. The collection includes twenty-eight works donated by the Works Progress Administration in 1942. This gift formed the core collection of the Oklahoma Art Center, the predecessor of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. The American Art collection includes numerous examples by artists who were active in Oklahoma, such as Oscar Brousse Jacobson, Doel Reed, Nellie Shepherd, and Nan Sheets. Also represented are later examples by artists such as Isabel Bishop, Jack Levine, and Moses Soyer, who came to prominence during the interwar decades. The European art collection contains examples from the Baroque-era through the early twentieth-century. Highlights of the European art collection include English genre painting of the nineteenth-century as well as examples of French post-Impressionistic painting from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Key artists in the European art collection are Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Gustave Courbet, André Derain, Francis Hayman, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Paintings and sculptures created from 1945 to the present include works by Alexander Calder, Don Eddy, Eric Fischl, Ellsworth Kelly, Alfonso Ossorio, and Philip Pearlstein. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.okcmoa.com