Sladmore Gallery

Chihuly first filled boats with glass in Nuutajärvi, Finland, during the 1995 Chihuly Over Venice project. After several days of glassblowing, Chihuly started tossing glass forms into the Nuutajoki river to see how they would look in the environment. As the glass floated downstream it was retrieved in wooden boats by local teenagers, inspiring Chihuly to begin massing forms into wooden boats, for installations in museums and gardens. Chihuly’s Blue and Purple Boat comprises free-flowing, organic forms he calls Fiori (Italian for flowers), which often evoke the natural world.

Created in 2006, Blue and Purple Boat has been featured in Chihuly exhibitions including Chihuly at The New York Botanical Garden (2006), and Dale Chihuly: Glass in Bloom at Gardens by the Bay, Singapore (2021).
Dale Chihuly is an American artist who transforms spaces with experiments in color, light, transparency, and form. He is known for his exhibitions and large-scale architectural installations around the world and for revolutionizing the studio glass movement. Chihuly works with a variety of media including glass, paint, charcoal, neon, ice, and Polyvitro, and his work is included in more than 200 museum collections worldwide, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Corning Museum of Glass. Major exhibitions include Chihuly Over Venice (1995-96), Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem (1999), de Young Museum in San Francisco (2008), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2011), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2012), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada (2013), Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada (2016), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (2017), Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands (2018), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, U.K (2019), and Gardens by the Bay, Singapore (2021). Chihuly Garden and Glass, a long-term exhibition located at the Seattle Center, opened in 2012.