Dale Chihuly is the most famous and influential artist working in glass today. A career-spanning biographical essay by curator Timothy Anglin Burgard and stunning colour photography of the works will captivate Chihuly's myriad fans - both old and new.

Bound like an artist's sketchbook this book documents the culmination of this amazing artistic odyssey that took the artist from his Seattle Boathouse hot shop to Nuutajarvi, Finland; Waterford, Ireland; Monterrey, Mexico; and finally Venice to blow glass. In the factories in those locations, Chihuly and his team of American glass blowers worked with native artisans more accustomed to making functional objects than art. Together they created the 14 chandeliers that graced the campos and canals of Venice for a remarkable time in September 1996. In her essay Dana Self, curator of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, muses on the relationship of Chihuly's glass and 'The Spectacle of Beauty'. She concludes that Chihuly's fantastical explorations demonstrate that beauty does produce a meaningful experience of the world. Writer William Warmus chronicles the culmination of this two-year project with his diary entries. Full-colour photographs record for readers the installations as they were assembled. An extensive chronology traces the artist's career.

From Baskets and Seaform to Chandeliers and Towers, this 176 page book features subsections dedicated to many of Chihuly's series including a dynamic pictorial chronology documenting the development and history of Chihuly's most popular glass series. A companion to the popular Chihuly: Form from Fire.

Chihuly's glass is richly-coloured, extravagantly formed and enormously varied - ranging from chandeliers to spears, 'Seaforms' to 'Macchias', renowned for their organic subtlety and textural refinement. His work, which owes much to the grand tradition of Venetian glass, is put into historical context and his importance in introducing the Venetian style to America is also explored. Drawing on the Museum's historic Renaissance collections and expertise the book also explores the development of the traditional Venetian glass workshop and Chihuly's enormous influence in introducing Venetian glass-makers to the USA. It includes a brief resume of his career and an assessment of his art and its significance. The book shows the enormous variety of glass forms that comprise Chihuly's work as it has developed over the last 30 years. His glass is technically and sculpturally ambitious on a scale unmatched by any other maker.