Mille Colori Chihuly

Mille Colori, Italian for "a thousand colours", hangs just above visitors' heads at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and the museum calls it its only permanent work of art on view.

The museum says the 14-foot sculpture is made of 520 separate blown-glass pieces. Virginia Beach Public Art gives an estimated weight of 2,200 to 2,500 pounds. Its roots are in 1996, when Dale Chihuly created 15 large chandeliers and placed them under bridges and across the canals of Venice as a tribute to the Aperto Vetro biennale. Several were re-sited at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, now the Virginia MOCA, for the 1999 Art of Glass exhibition, among them the multicoloured Isola di San Giacomo in Palude. In 2003 its sibling, Isola di San Giacomo in Palude II, was bought with private donations and retitled Mille Colori.