Is a Chihuly glass sculpture in a Tacoma McDonald’s? The answer may surprise you

If you’ve driven past the McDonald’s on Tacoma Avenue near the County-City Building, you’ve likely seen a large glass vase of flowers dominating the restaurant’s facade for the last 25 years.

Commenters on Reddit have speculated for years that the sculpture was done by Dale Chihuly, a world-renowned glass artist who got his start in Tacoma and is credited for shaping the glass-art scene in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. You can see his work inside the Tacoma Art Museum and the Museum of Glass, as well as on the Chihuly Bridge of Glass downtown, a 500-foot outdoor pedestrian bridge that crosses Interstate 705.

After a lot of detective work, The News Tribune recently confirmed that the sculpture inside the McDonald’s at 802 Tacoma Ave. is not a Chihuly. It was commissioned by artist Dennis Mullen for the McDonald’s location in 2000, two years before the Museum of Glass opened a mile and a half away.

Many people, including staff at the Museum of Glass and the owner of that Tacoma McDonald’s, had no idea who the artist was. The Chihuly Studio in Seattle confirmed it was not a Chihuly. Pretty Gritty Tours founder Chris Staudinger – known for his extensive knowledge of Tacoma’s weird and interesting history – was able to track down an old advertisement for the grand opening of the McDonald’s location that identified Mullen as the artist.

After calling around to several galleries in the United States that have Mullen’s work on display, The News Tribune was able to connect with Mullen at his home in Utah to learn more about what inspired the piece.

Mullen, who is 75, said the McDonald’s owner reached out to him about commissioning a blown-glass sculpture to hang in the restaurant’s atrium. At the time Mullen was working out of his studio, Uptown Glassworks, in Renton. Over the course of three to four months, Mullen crafted more than 30 colorful wavy glass platters, 10 of which he used as the flowers. Mullen had to find others who could help him build a metal coned vase, and he wired it with lights so it could be illuminated in the dark.

“I sort of overdesigned it, to make sure that it would stay there for a long, long time,” Mullen said.

The sculpture weighs about 500 pounds, which Mullen admits is “heavy, but not as heavy as it looks, because a lot of the arms and the basic structure is tubular aluminum.”

At the time, Mullen quoted the owner $20,000 for the sculpture and the installation – a deal, as some of Mullen’s iconic glass lamps retail for more than $1,500 today.

“I made money, I had to, but I think I gave them a lot more value in what I did than what I made off of it,” he said. “I wanted to do the project. As long as I made enough to cover me and cover my time and everything, I was happy.”

The sculpture is unnamed (”I had no idea what to call it,” Mullen said). At the time Chihuly’s influence was very strong, and Mullen said he differentiated himself from Chihuly’s more solid colored glass by being “a colorist” and using all sorts of colors in his wavy platters.

A self-described “military brat,” Mullen was born in California and moved often. He learned how to blow glass in Scandinavia and worked for studios in Copenhagen and Sweden. He worked for a few studios in Seattle and Renton before getting burned out in 2004 and moving to Bingen, then, White Salmon, small Washington cities in the heart of the Columbia River Gorge. He later moved to Portland and blew glass until he hurt his back doing martial arts at age 62.

Due to his injuries, Mullen hasn’t been able to blow glass for the past nine years. He misses it.

“I really like the whole feeling of being able to build a studio or be involved in a studio, being able to take a fluid material and create something that came out of my head, then be able to make it and then sell it,” he said. “Glass gave me that opportunity and the appreciation for doing what I really wanted to do. I wanted to start from the beginning, because there’s a creative process of putting everything together in order to blow the glass and then figuring out how to decorate it and make it my own.”

When asked how it makes him feel that people are still enjoying his piece in Tacoma 25 years later, Mullen said, “It makes me smile, because it’s part of my evolution.”

“When I got your text, I was like, ‘Wow, really? Cool,’” Mullen said.

Tacoma resident Ed Maher, who is 85, remembers commissioning the piece from Mullen to make the McDonald’s restaurant more attractive. At the time, Maher said, the area was “downtrodden” and full of crime. He bought the building in 1982, and, when it opened in 1964, it was the 585th McDonald’s worldwide. There are now more than 40,000 McDonald’s worldwide, said his son Pat, who lives in Gig Harbor and is now the owner and operator.

Although the Museum of Glass didn’t have more information about Mullen (to communications director Tim Butler’s surprise), Butler said Tacoma and Seattle are where the glass-art movement really got its start in the ’70s and ’80s. Each year 50-60 glass artists visit the museum’s Hot Shop, which also has a full-time team of expert glassblowers, he said.

The fact that there’s a massive glass sculpture in a Tacoma McDonald’s really speaks to the prevalence and appreciation of the art form here, Butler said.

“It’s kind of is par for the course for how much this art form means to this town and to this region,” he said. “I mean, you look at the Chihulys in (Union Station) across the highway from us. Hilltop Artists is another organization in the city that really emphasizes glassblowing and teaches glassblowing to their students. It’s Tacoma Glassblowing Studio. I mean, it’s all around the town. It’s definitely something that is kind of part of the identity of Tacoma and the Pacific Northwest in general.”

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