Clarifying a Vision

This is glass country and Dale Chihuly is king. The renowned artist whose prodigious energy and charisma spawned the Northwest’s art glass culture actually lives in nearby Seattle, but he was born in Tacoma and the city wants everyone to know it.

At the hub of Tacoma’s downtown redevelopment district, the federal courthouse boasts a Chihuly chandelier in its dome and displays his glass sculpture in massive arched windows. Next door, the Tacoma Art Museum is building a new home that will include a permanent exhibition space for its collection of Chihuly glass. Not to be left out, the Washington State History Museum--on the opposite side of the courthouse--offers another view of the artist: an exhibition from his vast collection of American Indian trade blankets.

And now comes the Bridge of Glass--a $6.8-million, publicly funded pedestrian bridge that opened Saturday. Billed as a gateway to Tacoma, the 500-foot-long, 20-foot-wide bridge spans Interstate 705, connecting Pacific Avenue’s burgeoning cultural corridor to Tacoma’s waterfront. Not incidentally, it’s also an outdoor gallery of Chihuly’s work, featuring two 40-foot towers of giant blue crystals, a walk-through pavilion with a ceiling of 1,500 glass “Seaforms” and a wall of 109 Venetian-style vessels displayed on glass-encased shelves. Arthur Andersson, of Andersson-Wise Architects in Austin, Texas, designed the bridge in collaboration with Chihuly.

Spectacular as the bridge may be, it leads to a much bigger temple of glass--which also opened Saturday--conceived as the anchor of an ambitious plan to convert deserted industrial property along Thea Foss Waterway into a thriving cultural and residential center. Here’s the surprise: The new institution was originally envisioned as a Chihuly-driven glass production and exhibition center, but it has opened with a much broader mission.

Neither named for Chihuly nor devoted to his work, the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art is “dedicated to the presentation and interpretation of contemporary art with a sustained concentration on the medium of glass.” Designed by Canadian architect Arthur Erickson, the $48-million building--built on city land, mostly with private funds--is an exhibition and education center intended to involve artists of many different persuasions.

A 90-foot-tall tilted cone, sheathed in diamond shapes of stainless steel, towers above the three-story building. Inspired by the timber industry’s wood burners that once dotted the Northwest’s landscape, the cone has already conferred landmark status on the new museum. Inside is a glass production center, known to the trade as a hot shop, that’s open to the public during the museum’s regular hours. The drama of blowing and shaping molten glass will probably make the hot shop the museum’s biggest draw, but the museum will offer a variety of programs designed to attract a broad audience and keep people coming back.

Visiting artists, including some who have no previous experience with glass, will work with experienced glass-makers in the hot shop--in full public view. Exhibitions in the galleries will present works made entirely of glass along with pieces that incorporate glass with other materials or have a vague relationship to the field.

“I view glass as just one more medium in the spectrum of contemporary art,” says Josi Callan, who became the museum’s director in January 2000, after nine years as head of the San Jose Museum of Art. “We don’t use the terms ‘glass artist’ or ‘glass art.’ My feeling is that you are either an artist or you aren’t, and what you make is either art or it isn’t.”

Talks about establishing some sort of center for glass began seven years ago and architectural plans were underway before Callan arrived in Tacoma, but she has played a leading role in shaping the mission and the physical plant. “As the project went on, the name changed several times, old people left and new people came in. It just evolved, as these things do,” she says. “Dale decided he didn’t want his name on a museum, which was probably the right thing for him and for this institution.”

Chihuly puts it this way: “As I got more involved in the bridge, I got less involved with the museum.”

Not that he will be completely absent from the museum. As hot shop director Charlie Parriott notes, Chihuly will be the first visiting artist. But the fact that the museum is not a one-man show and that it will embrace a wide range of glass-related art reflects the museum leaders’ effort to create a cultural destination that is much more than a regional shrine.

Visitors who walk across the bridge arrive on the roof of the museum; those who take a glass elevator from the first-floor parking area land on the second-floor plaza. Either way, they discover a long, low concrete-and-glass structure that reveals itself on the exterior as a series of ramps, grand stairways and shallow ponds. Along the way are five large outdoor artworks.

Howard Ben Tre’s “Water Forest,” a permanent installation funded by the city, features two concentric circles of bronze and glass cylinders filled with water that perpetually overflows and runs down the sides into drains. The idea was to “take water from the waterway and bring it to you” in a piece that “creates a sense of community,” says Ben Tre, who lives in Providence, R.I.

The other outdoor pieces were commissioned by the museum as yearlong installations. “Incidence” by Buster Simpson, who lives in Seattle, consists of 36 panels of tempered glass, arranged as a series of peaked structures above a rectangular pond on the rooftop plaza. One level down, “Blackbird in a Red Sky (a.k.a. Fall of the Blood House)” by Bay Area artist Mildred Howard is composed of a walk-in red glass house beside a pond filled with oversize glass apples.

On the plaza near the museum’s entrance, “Call of the Wild” by Patrick Dougherty, also from the Bay Area, is situated on another pond. Fashioned of twisted masses of willow branches and other wood found near Tacoma, it is a monumental still life that pays homage to the region’s natural beauty. The largest component is a huge pitcher-shaped enclosure that invites visitors to enter through open doors. They can also walk into a gigantic jar, but four smaller vessels strewn across the water must be viewed from the edge of the pond.

In addition to its involvement with professional artists, the museum is committed to community outreach through projects overseen by Susan Warner, director of education. One product of the program, installed on an outdoor plaza, is a pair of painted wood houses created by young women incarcerated at Remann Hall, a detention center in Tacoma. Poetic writings on the walls of one house recount their fears and allude to experiences that landed them in jail. The other structure is more hopeful. “It started with the question ‘What would I be if I could transform myself?’ ” Warner says, and led to musings about rebirth and change.

With its broad plazas and a sweeping staircase that winds around the cone, the museum has an unusually large amount of public space that can be used for outdoor programs and artworks--or as a panoramic viewpoint of Mt. Rainier and activities on the waterway. But there’s a lot going on inside as well.

The 75,000-square-foot building encompasses 13,000 square feet of gallery space--about half the size of the exhibition space at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s California Plaza facility in downtown Los Angeles--a 180-seat theater, an experimental studio for educational programs, a shop and a cafe. The lobby displays a two-level mural, “The Kingdom of Glass,” by Los Angeles painter Gronk. In the hot shop, visitors can take a seat in the amphitheater, walk around an observation deck above the furnaces or check out different views of the ongoing action, filmed by three cameras and projected on a big screen. The images also appear on monitors in the lobby of the museum.

The inaugural exhibitions are “The Inner Light,” a show of cast glass sculptures and drawings by the late Czech artist Stanislav Libensky and his widow, Jaroslava Brychtova, and “Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey and Morris Graves.”

“The Inner Light,” organized by the museum, is a “no-brainer” that celebrates the achievement of “premier artists who have had more influence on the medium of glass that anyone else in the world,” Callan says. In sharp contrast, “Sounds of the Inner Eye,” organized by the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany, has almost nothing to do with glass. Instead, it explores little known connections among three prominent artists who met and became friends in Seattle in the mid-1930s. Although they developed distinctive styles, they all embraced spiritual and cross-cultural influences, and wrote texts and poems for one another’s work. Also on view is “Die Falle,” a sculpture by Gregory Barsamian, who uses 3-D animation techniques and synchronized strobe lights to create the illusion of motion.

“What we open with is not what we are; it’s just what we open with,” says curator Neil Watson. Glass will be on view most of the time, but sometimes in subtle or surprising ways. “Glass is very seductive,” he says. “We have to go beyond that. If that’s all there is to it, it’s not enough.”

Future exhibitions of works by American artists include a survey of artists affiliated with the glass studios at Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle, paintings by Deborah Oropallo and maquettes by the late ceramic sculptor Robert Arneson. In keeping with its international mission, the museum also plans to present glass works by Swedish artist Bertil Vallien and “Glass of the Avant Garde: From Vienna Secession to Bauhaus,” drawn from the Torsten Brohan collection at the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Madrid.

“The most intriguing part of this project has been to figure out what we wanted this place to be, to clarify the vision,” Callan says. “It was a challenge to integrate the exhibition spaces, the education studio and the hot shop.” The key was to develop the hot shop “not as a Disneyland attraction” but as “an education center where we translate a lot of what’s happening in the galleries,” she says. “The same thing is also happening in the education studio, which is currently designed to bring out ideas presented in the Cage, Graves and Tobey show.”

The overarching goal of the museum, Callan says, is to make art accessible in a program that integrates artistic, scholarly, educational and community outreach activities. It’s a balancing act, but Callan says she never doubted that the museum would come to fruition or open on time.

Nonetheless, big challenges remain. About $42 million of the $48 million project budget has been raised, and the rest is promised by the end of the year, Callan says. About half the money has come from local and regional sources, the rest from patrons in 37 other states and several foreign countries. But plans for a $15-million endowment were delayed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The museum, which has no permanent collection, has also postponed a decision about what, if anything, it should collect. Yet another problem is that Tacoma has long been viewed as Seattle’s poor, blue-collar relative. The museum’s marketers say their biggest challenge may be to attract people from neighboring cities who never think of going to Tacoma.

Still, this a time to celebrate “the people here who had a vision of what Tacoma could be,” Callan says. Tacoma Mayor Bill Baarsma agrees. “This used to be a polluted, dirty site,” he says, explaining that “the city bought the land, cleaned it up and turned it over to the private sector” as part of an urban renewal plan. The inauguration of the museum and the bridge not only show the world “where we are, but how far we’ve come,” he says.

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“The Inner Light: Sculpture by Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova” and “Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey and Morris Graves,” Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art, 1801 E. Dock St., Tacoma. Open Tuesdays-Wednesdays and Fridays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sundays, noon-5 p.m. “The Inner Light” ends Oct. 27; “Sounds of the Inner Eye” ends Oct. 6. Adults, $8; seniors and students, $6; children 6-12, $3; children younger than 6, free. (253) 396-1768.

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Suzanne Muchnic is a Times staff writer.