Chihuly at Cheekwood

I have a monthly plan. I have made this plan known to my guy, and the plan is this: every month we get out of the house and go somewhere or do something different. September was the month this plan came to be, and we’ve been somewhere every month, with the exception of this one. (September, we found a waterfall. November, we drove the Dragon.) Back in October, we finally went to the Cheekwood Botanical Gardens in Nashville, specifically to see the Chihuly exhibit at night. I’ve had this place on my list for years, and the Chihuly exhibit made it that much more exciting.

Dale Chihuly is an American glass sculptor. His exhibitions move around the world to various places for display and he even has a few permanent locations where is work is always on show. This particular exhibit at Cheekwood will remain until January 10th, and I am really thinking about seeing it again in the daylight before it is gone. (Not so sure Stephen will be up for another walking tour of glass so soon after the last. Perhaps I can talk him into it for a January outing…)

Like I mentioned we chose the night tour because it looked pretty spectacular online when I first came across it. Due to Covid, you have to buy your tickets in advance, don’t just walk up expecting to get in. And there are limited availabilities per hour to keep people spaced out. Most of it is outdoors. You have two ticket options, garden only or garden and mansion. We got the garden and mansion so we were able to go inside the mansion to look at the few sculptures in there. Worth it to see the amazing chandelier and the illuminated room of neon.

Everything was amazing! It was a neat walk around the place to get to each sculpture area, and the night was fresh and cool. People were very well spaced out so you could take your time and didn’t feel rushed to move out of the way. The most congested area was the mansion and that had some stunning to see features all around it. The terrace was just beautiful! I definitely want to see that in daylight. It wasn’t easy to get many pics of it in the dark.

And my absolute favorite from the night, this blue and white/clear, icicle puff looking thing. I took way too many pictures of it, and good thing cause I did get a couple that came out okay. My photography skills were a little rusty, and on top of that make them night pictures and I am sure to get more bad ones than good ones.

A few more from the night and it was hard to limit my selections, so I may have gone overboard with what I am posting, but that is fine with me. It’s been too long since I’ve gone through photos; I was quite enjoying picking them out. 🙂

Definitely lots of oranges and reds. This one above was one of the stranger looking ones. Reminds me of Medusa. Stephen didn’t like it. Many of these were very tall and my angles don’t give them the proper perspective. Like this Medusa pineapple, ha ha. And lastly, the one that reminded me of an ice burg. It was probably the hardest to photograph as it was not easy to get that close to it.

My main edits for all these pictures was to resize and I sharpened a few. I also added a bit of shadow and highlight on some to make the colors not so harsh. And I adjusted the black to darken the backgrounds. There you have it, Chihuly at Cheekwood by night.