POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Vassar will be the first U.S. college to present Ulysses Cylinders by Dale Chihuly and Seaver Leslie with Flora C. Mace & Joey Kirkpatrick. This collaborative exhibition combines magnificent glass sculptures created by renowned artist Dale Chihuly, with pen and ink drawings by painter Seaver Leslie. Ulysses Cylinders premiered at Dublin Castle in Ireland during the summer of 2014. These blown glass vessels were created with imagery inspired by James Joyce’s famed novel Ulysses. The work explores themes pertinent to a recounting of occurrences of a single day in Dublin as described in Joyce’s materpiece. They follow the novel’s timeline while describing the principal characters of Leopold and Molly Bloom, and Stephen Daedalus, in vignettes of their escapades around Dublin. This exhibition, scheduled for October 11-November 22, 2015 in the Frederick Ferris Thompson Memorial Library, will also be the first to present Chihuly works in New York’s Hudson Valley.
The Cylinders, first created in 1975, were among the first in Chihuly’s oeuvre. A new technique was developed to fuse glass thread “drawings” on to cylindrical vessels in while in their molten state. In 2013 Chihuly and painter Seaver Leslie, together with artists Flora C. Mace and Joey Kirkpatrick, decided to revisit this body of work, focusing on Joyce’s Ulysses as the sole inspiration. Working with Leslie’s pen and ink drawings, Mace and Kirkpatrick created fragile glass drawings which Chihuly and his team then fused onto forty-five individual cylinders speckled with gold leaf —many as tall as fifteen or sixteen inches.
The Cylinders will be installed on custom-designed pedestals in the North and South reading rooms of the college’s Thompson Memorial Library, and will be arranged according to the chronology of Joyce’s novel. The exhibition will include an explanatory video and wall text, as well as a brochure that ties the Ulysses Cylindersto the long tradition of artists inspired by the famous novel.
A related exhibit will also be presented on the main floor of the Thompson Library,James Joyce’s Ulysses: Text and Art, spotlighting editions of the novel illustrated by such acclaimed artists as Eric Gill, Henri Matisse, and Robert Motherwell (and held in the college’s Special Collections). Together these books outline the history of Joyce’s text and demonstrate the role of artistic interpretation to provide further context to Ulysses.
Chihuly is credited with revolutionizing the Studio Glass movement and elevating the perception of the glass medium from the realm of craft to fine art. He is renowned for his ambitious architectural installations around the world, in historic cities, museums and gardens. Chihuly’s work is included in more than 200 museum collections worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Corning Museum of Glass. Major exhibitions includeChihuly Over Venice (1995-96), Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem (1999), Garden Cycle (2001–present), de Young Museum in San Francisco (2008), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2011), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2012) and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada (2013.) Chihuly Garden and Glass opened at Seattle Center in 2012.
