See glassmakers at work on Pilchuck Glass School spring tours

STANWOOD — The once-a-year chance to tour the Pilchuck Glass School happens this week.

Tickets are being snapped up quickly for the open house events scheduled May 2, 3, 4 and 6 on the school’s 54-acre campus northeast of Stanwood.

Extra tours have been added to accommodate as many people as possible, said Pollyanna Manning, a spokeswoman for the glass school.

The open house “is an opportunity for people to come and see and watch practitioners in action,” said Dante Marioni, one of two designated “artists at work” who will be blowing glass at the public events.

“It’s a hidden treasure in the Northwest, but it’s a worldwide phenomenon,” Marioni said. “Anybody in the world who has done something with glass has been to Pilchuck.”

That includes glass artist Dale Chihuly, who founded the school in 1971.

Marioni said his father was a student at the school during its earliest years. And as he hung out with his dad there, he said he worked with Chihuly and other glass artists of the time as a high school teenager.

After graduating from Seattle’s Garfield High School in 1982, he enrolled at Pilchuck at age 19 and went on to spend more than 20 years there as a teaching assistant, teacher and other roles.

Marioni was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship for study of sculpture, a national program providing grants to artists of promise.

His work is included in the White House Collection of American Crafts, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia.

Kait Rhoads, whose current project is creating glass jellyfish for the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, is the spring tour’s other artist at work.

The artist-at-work designation gives the artists a chance to explore new work, Manning said. “It’s kind of an award. They get to use the Pilchuck hot shop for free.”

One of the projects Rhoads hopes to work on during her stint at Pilchuck is an installation for the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art — a single long piece of bull kelp.

Rhoads has been a student, teaching assistant, and staff member at Pilchuck. She characterized the school as “an amazing, magical place” that was key in her development as an artist working with glass.

After earning a master’s degree at Alfred University in New York State, she was named a Fulbright scholar and traveled to Murano, Italy for further work in glass blowing.

Her three works to be installed at the aquarium in Tacoma later this summer are her first permanent pieces of public art. The orange colored pieces are modeled on the sea nettle found in the Salish Sea.

“Jellyfish are so mysterious,” she said. “No brain, no heart. They’re very successfully designed. They’ve been around forever.”

This year is the first time Rhoads has been asked to participate as an artist at work during the spring tour, and she said she feels lucky to be invited to take part in the event.

“I love to give back to an institution that has given so much to me,” she said.

Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486 or salyer@heraldnet.com.

If you go

Pilchuck Glass School’s annual spring tours, when the public can tour the grounds and see glass artists at work, is scheduled May 2-4 and 6. Tours of 60 or 90 minutes are scheduled throughout those days.

The 60-minute tour is of the school’s campus, set on 54 acres of a tree farm northeast of Stanwood. The extended tour includes a light hike that finishes at Inspiration Point, with great views of Puget Sound. In addition to the school buildings, the 90-minute tour visits the “Chihuly Cabin,” “Buster Simpson’s Treehouse” and the “Trojan Horse.”

Tour tickets are $30, $25 for students and seniors and $15 for kids 12 and under. Lunch and teas are available for an additional charge. The Pilchuck Glass School is at 1201 316th St. NW, Stanwood. Tickets are available online at www.pilchuck.com/springtours.