Who Is Really Making ‘Chihuly Art’?<br />“But he’s a shell of the man that he was — it breaks my heart.”<br />In the lawsuit, where pretrial motions are underway, Mr. Moi said the level of Mr. Chihuly’s disabilities were never disclosed to art buyers or the public and<br />that Chihuly Studio often intimated that Mr. Chihuly’s paintings were entirely by his own hand.<br />Another artist who has known Mr. Chihuly for many years said he believes Mr. Chihuly<br />is still making “Chihuly art,” even if others are constructing and finishing it.<br />“Any artist is going to suck up all the energy in the room,” said Toots Zynsky, a glass<br />artist who studied with Mr. Chihuly in the 1970s and remains friends with him.<br />Seattle became an art-glass capital largely because of Mr. Chihuly, through the Pilchuck Glass School, a nonprofit academy north of the city<br />that he helped found in 1971, and the two museums built around his work or glass art in general.<br />“The more I worked, the more I sold work, the more people I could hire,” Mr. Chihuly said in an interview<br />in his 34,000-square-foot studio complex here in Seattle, near where he was born and raised.
