Anne Fiedler, left, and Erin Kantola, both from Seattle, work on the installation of Dale Chihuly’s “Persian Ceiling” at RISD’s new Chace Center. The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

Dale Chihuly is stumped. On the phone from his Seattle studio, the world’s most famous glassmaker has just been asked where he is, artistically speaking, at this point in his career.

“Actually, I don’t really think about my artistic development very much,” he says after a long pause. “I know that I don’t want to quit — that I want to keep working as long as I can. I know that I love what I’m doing and that I have no desire to stop. After that, it’s basically a blank.”

But Chihuly, whose rainbow-hued sculptures and installations are the focus of a major exhibition opening next Saturday at the Rhode Island School of Design, isn’t done yet.

Warming to the theme of where he’s at as an artist — and what keeps him going after more than three decades as the most successful American glassmaker since Louis Comfort Tiffany — Chihuly says that his biggest motivation is a desire to keep pushing himself and his medium.

“A lot of the stuff I’m doing now is very technically challenging,” he says. “There’s no precedent for it, so it’s really a form of exploration. It’s about exploring the potential of glass as a material and yourself as an artist. It’s about getting up every morning and surprising yourself.”

Certainly, there’s a good chance “Chihuly at RISD” will surprise (to say nothing of dazzle) area art lovers. Taking full advantage of its site — a 4,000-square-foot gallery in the school’s new Chace Center complex, which also opens to the public on Saturday — the show features some 20,000 pieces of glass arrayed in a series of smaller mini-exhibits and installations.

As they enter the gallery, for example, visitors will pass through a tunnel-like installation filled with dozens of the flamboyantly colored glass sculptures Chihuly refers to as “Persians.” Dubbed the “Persian Ceiling,” it’s similar to several other large-scale works Chihuly has created in recent years— most notably the ceiling for the lobby of the famed Bellagio Resort in Las Vegas.

“Basically, it’s a way to bring people inside the glass,” Chihuly says of such architecturally scaled pieces. “Traditionally, art glass was seen as this precious thing that people admired in the same way you might admire a piece of jewelry. But in this case, the glass actually envelopes you.”

After passing beneath the “Persian Ceiling,” visitors will confront another dramatic installation — a wall filled with more than 75 of the poster-size drawings Chihuly makes to kick-start his creative process. Arranged in a giant grid, the drawings have many of the same characteristics as Chihuly’s glass pieces: bright colors, swirling shapes and an exuberant, almost joyous energy.

Chihuly, who just turned 67, says he enjoys making the drawings on weekends, when his waterfront studio — appropriately known as “The Boathouse” — is mostly empty.

“The older I get, the more important drawing becomes,” he says. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because everything else is so hectic, with people coming and going all the time and lots of activity in the studio. Whatever the reason, I really love the time I spend on the drawings.”

Other highlights include a group of cylinder-shaped works that hark back to one of Chihuly’s first major sculpture series, the so-called “Navajo Blanket Cylinders” from the mid-1970s; a trio of the large blown-glass chandeliers that have become a Chihuly trademark; and a series of newly minted “basket sets” — the big multi-part glass sculptures that Chihuly, an avid fan and collector of Native American art and artifacts, originally modeled on Native American baskets.

The show, which is being billed as New England’s biggest-ever Chihuly bash, also features two large sculptural installations. One, Neodymium Reeds, consists of 30 or so lilac-hued sculptures that appear to sprout, mushroom-like, from a pile of logs. The other, Glass Forest, is modeled on an installation Chihuly first created in 1971 while teaching at the School of Design.

Dale Chihuly, in his Seattle, Wash., studio, is world renowned as a glass artist. THE NEW YORK TIMES / KEVIN P. CASEY

In fact, while viewers don’t have to know much about Chihuly to enjoy “Chihuly at RISD,” the show manages to cover a broad swath of his career — from the blown-glass “baskets” and cylinders he began making in the 1970s, to the flamboyant “Venetian,” “Persian” and “Sea Forms” series that began appearing in the 1980s and ’90s to the large-scale museum works and installations that have occupied Chihuly and his glassmaking team over the past two decades.

That career, in turn, has been one of the most successful — and at times controversial — in contemporary art. You could almost say there is glassmaking before Chihuly — a mostly minor art form dominated by the likes of Steuben and Baccarat — and there is glassmaking after Chihuly — a far more adventurous medium dominated by individual artist-craftsmen in the Chihuly mold.

“He’s really had a huge impact,” says RISD Museum director Hope Alswang, who recently spent several days visiting Chihuly in Seattle. “Apart from Tiffany, no glassmaker — and certainly no American glassmaker — has been as influential as Dale.”

Alswang also has a theory on why Chihuly has been so successful. “His work is sexy,” she says. “There’s really no other word for it. It’s gorgeous, beautiful, sexy stuff.”

A native of Tacoma, Wash., Chihuly attended college at the University of Washington, where he majored in architecture and interior design as well as glassmaking. In 1965, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied with Harvey Littleton, a legendary figure who was among the first artists to treat glass as a sculptural material, on par with stone or bronze.

From there, Chihuly moved on to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he earned a master’s degree in ceramics in 1968. That same year, Chihuly received a Fulbright Fellowship, which he parlayed into a year’s apprenticeship at the famed Venini glass factory in Venice.

Looking back, Chihuly says he learned two things from his time in Venice. One was that glass didn’t have to be clear. In fact, he says, clear glass was to the Venini glassmakers what a blank canvas was to Impressionist artists like Monet and Renoir — a springboard for color.

“The Venini guys weren’t shy about using color,” he says.

The other lesson Chihuly learned in Venice was more practical. Rather than working alone, the Venini glassmakers typically worked in teams, with one artisan blowing the molten glass while a group of assistants helped shape and support the glass as it cooled.

For Chihuly, who’s blind in one eye (the result of a 1976 traffic accident), the discovery proved especially valuable. On the one hand, the socially outgoing side of his personality enjoys the camaraderie of working with a large group of assistants. On the other hand, the team approach has allowed him to produce ever larger and more complex pieces without worrying about his own safety.

“Frankly it was the only way to make the kind of work I wanted to make,” he says. “Working alone in the old starving-artist-in-a-garret mode never interested me very much.”

After returning to Providence, Chihuly began putting the lessons he’d learned in Italy into practice. In 1974, he combined the glass-blowing techniques he’d picked up in Venice with his longtime interest in Native American weaving and basket-making. The result was the “Navajo Blanket Cylinders” — a series of large blown-glass cylinders decorated with crisscrossing geometric patterns.

The pouch-shaped “Baskets” came next, followed by the “Sea Forms,” “Macchia,” “Persians” and “Venetians” series — each seemingly bigger, bolder and brighter than the last.

Despite his success, Chihuly has also found time to pass on his knowledge and passion to a new generation of glassmakers — first as the founding head of RISD studio glass department and later as the driving force behind the Pilchuk Glass School in Stanwood, Wash. (At RISD, Chihuly’s role as a mentor to younger artists is highlighted in separate exhibit featuring works by some of his former students, including Toots Zynsky, Howard Ben Tre and Michael Glancy.)

In recent years, Chihuly has focused on ever larger commissions and installations.

In 1995, he led an international team of glassblowers as they created and installed works throughout the city of Venice. The result, Chihuly Over Venice, also spawned a coffee table book and a documentary film. Another project, “Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem” at Israel’s Tower of David Museum, attracted more than a million visitors in 2001.

And Chihuly continues to be busy. This month, for example, his work is the focus of major museum shows in Providence, San Francisco and Columbia, S.C.

At the same time, Chihuly does have his detractors. Reviewing this year’s “Chihuly at the de Young” exhibition in San Francisco, for example, critic Kenneth Baker accused Chihuly of “empty virtuosity.” He also used one of the most dreaded words in the art critics vocabulary — “decoration” — to describe his work.

Asked how he feels about such comments, Chihuly just shrugs.

“Too pretty? Too decorative? Too popular? Since when is that a problem?”

“Chihuly at RISD” opens Saturday in the RISD Museum’s new Chace Center galleries, 20 North Main St. in Providence. (Note: Glassmaker Dale Chihuly will discuss his work on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the RISD Auditorium. For more information, call 401-454-6500.)

bvansicl@projo.com