F is for Fireworks and G is for Glass!
Fireworks of Glass is finally open at The Children's Museum. We avoided the weekend crowds and went to see it on Monday. The Museum wasn't overly crowded and we really got a chance to enjoy the exhibit and take lots of pictures.
Fireworks of Glass is a huge glass sculpture by artist Dale Chihuly. It's been installed in the middle of the ramps at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis. It is Chihuly's largest permanent installation ever. The sculpture is huge, consisiting of a 43-foot-tall tower which is comprised of more than 3,200 individually blown two to four-foot-long pieces of vividly colored, smooth and twisted glass called Horns and Goosenecks. It took three semis to bring all the glass pieces to the Museum and two weeks to install the sculpture.
Underneath the tower is the Fireworks of Glass ceiling. It is filled with 1,600 pieces of glass from Chihuly’s spectacular series, including Sea Tubes, Hornballs, Persians, and Putti in a variety of shapes and colors. You can lay back on a slowly rotating platform and lose yourself in the colors and shapes above you.
Keithen says it looks like Fourth of July fireworks or a new kind of rainbow fireworks. Kaylee says it looks like balloons or twisted flowers. Ruby says it looks like flowers. Kaylee enjoyed laying on the rotating platform underneath the ceiling and drawing several pictures in her sketchbook. Keithen spent some time blowing virtual glass on the computer. They all enjoyed the hands-on sculpture making in the lower gallery with the plastic shapes. The short movie about Chihuly that is running in the SpaceQuest Planetarium is also very interesting.
At the end of our day we got to watch two artists from the Hot Glass Roadshow, a traveling hot shop from the Corning Museum of Glass. They have a hot shop set up outside the Museum and we actually got to watch them blow glass and make a beautiful dolphin. The hot shop will be set up in front of the Musuem until June 4th and is definately worth a visit, even if you don't make it inside the Museum!
posted by Carissa @ 8:21 AM
2 Comments:
At 9:10 AM, March 22, 2006 ,
Jason said...
Great pictures. The wife and I are anxious to see it. Of course, being a kid at heart, the Children's Museum is one of my favorite places in Indy.
At 9:51 AM, March 22, 2006 ,
Carissa said...
It's really difficult to get a picture that shows how truely HUGE this sculpture is. It's hard to get the whole thing in the lens!
The hands-on exhibit is a lot of fun. It was originally hard to imagine how they would make a glass exhibit hands-on, but I knew they'd come up with something great because we have such an amazing Children's Musuem with a staff who really know what they're doing. (I've done focus groups there and met some of the staff members and I've always been impressed with the PEOPLE as well as the MUSEUM.)
You've got to check out the roadshow outside though. The people working it were great about talking to the kids and they made some amazing glass pieces. They will be here until JUNE! (Betting they didn't blow glass yesterday in the snow though!)
The parts of the exhibit that are open now are the permanent areas. There is another temporary exhibit that will open in June called "A Children's Garden of Glass" or something like that.
Kaylee did a lot of sketching while we were there this week. Next week I'd like to see if she can add some color to her drawings.
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