Dale Chihuly is the artist/celebrity who gets most of the credit for elevating glass blowing from one more craft to a bona fide--and wildly popular and lucrative--art form. He grew up in Tacoma, Seattle's soporific little-sister city, and headed first back East, and then to Venice, to study in the emerging studio glass movement. In 1972, on a tree farm north of Seattle, he founded the Pilchuck Glass School, which made that movement an institution even as he turned it into an industry. "Glass...
