Q: HOW DOES THE CHILDREN’S MUSEUM CLEAN ITS GIANT DALE CHIHULY SCULPTURE?
A: Fireworks of Glass Tower and Ceiling is as hard to clean as it was to create. Made of 4,800 individually handblown glass pieces, the three-story column towers over a vast pergola, the ceiling of which is made up of a compartment containing more pieces scattered on a clear glass plate. Every six weeks, a crew from Seattle-based Denny Park Fine Arts (the only one authorized to maintain Chihuly’s work) descends on chairs suspended from the roof to oh-so-carefully wipe it down. Once every other year, it gets a deep cleaning. “We close the area under the tower so the crew can open the panels in the pergola ceiling, remove all the glass, clean each piece, and then return them to the compartment that forms the see-through ceiling,” says the Children’s Museum’s exhibition conservation manager, Christy O’Grady. The staff takes care of easy-to-reach dust on the base.
