We were fortunate to be invited to our friends Jim Karlovec and Dana Longo’s wedding, August 26th, in Cleveland, Ohio. We stayed with friends Karen Moyer and Bruce Kahn in their wonderful condo in Broadview Heights. Luckily we flew out of Seattle, so we spent the day visiting the Pacific Science Center to see the Chihuly Garden and Glass Exhibit, also the Terracotta Warriors. The Chihuly exhibit opened May, 2012 and includes three components: the Garden, the Glasshouse, and the interior exhibits. We were in awe of the beautiful glass art especially the installation inside of the Glasshouse, the expansive 100-foot long sculpture, it is one of Chihuly’s largest suspended sculptures. If you haven’t visited a Dale Chihuly blown glass exhibit, I highly recommend it. Dale Patrick Chihuly was born in Tacoma, September 20, 1941, and has had exhibits all over the world. Click on thumbnail to view images
Chihuly Garden and Glass Exibition
Terracotta Warriors Exibition
Then we went to see the Terracotta Warriors of the First Emperor at the Pacific Science Center featuring 10 warriors from the tomb of a Chinese Emperor and more than 100 other artifacts from the third century BC. We were astonished by the scale of the archaeological site near Xi’an, China, more than 8,000 life-size ceramic figures were buried there, and each figure weighs about 300 pounds. Only 2,000 of them have been excavated so far. the burial site covers at least 22 square miles, it lay hidden for 2,200 years, and was only discovered in 1974. The site is still a work in progress more than 40 years later. We saw 10 of the full-size figures from the original site, an armored general, a cavalryman, a musician and other figures, as well as the tools and weapons of their daily existence. The exhibit devotes significant space to replicas and videos that evoke what these clay figures looked like in their original state. Well worth the visit if you get a chance! Click on thumbnail to view images
This clay figure is the form of a body-shaped “screen” on which facial and costume colors are digitally projected, then shown in fast-forward decay over the centuries.