In Seattle, I found myself equally captivated. Here are other ways to experience the city’s glass scene.

ALL THE CHIHULY

Beneath Seattle’s famed Space Needle, a Medusa’s head of hundreds of yellow, orange and red snakelike tendrils of blown glass sits atop a mound of Black Mondo grass from Japan. Together, they look like a Koosh ball perched on a shag rug — or maybe a curly-spiked sea anemone stuck to the head of someone with a terrible haircut.

That pairing is just a taste of the explosion of glass-amid-foliage on display at Chihuly Garden and Glass, a long-term exhibition celebrating Mr. Chihuly’s career that opened in 2012 and is one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions (admission, $26). The visual smorgasbord stretches over 1.5 acres, from galleries through a magnificent glass house with an 100-foot glass sculpture hanging from its ceiling, and into the outdoors, where, during my visit, a blue glass sphere was hiding in a bed of white and orange daffodils. Every hour, local artists give glassblowing demos out of hot shop an Airstream trailer.

Fans will notice echoes from Mr. Chihuly’s mad-scientist experiments of planting glass spears in Jerusalem’s Citadel, or floating glass balls down Venice’s canals. But this feels more personal than his other installations. Mr. Chihuly co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School an hour north of the city in Stanwood, Wash., where generations of artists have since gotten their training. And while recent years have brought a decline in health for the 76 year old, along with challenges to his legacy, it’s under his influence that Seattle has become the epicenter of where the vast majority of significant, museum-quality glass art is being made.

Changes are overhead, as well: The Space Needle is refurbishing its observation decks, with new glass and glass benches on the upper level (already open) and the world’s first and only rotating glass floor to open later this year on the lower level — all the better to see the colorful squiggles of glass below.

GLASS-THEMED GETAWAY

A 35-minute drive south to Tacoma’s Museum of Glass, where Mr. Singletary will have his exhibition, is critical to understanding the scope of the material in contemporary art. The highlight of my visit was a retrospective on the Japanese ceramist Akio Takamori, who in his later years created rough-hewed, blown-glass heads that looked as if they’d been sculpted from clay. There’s also a hot shop where visitors can view live demos, and an adorable program in which children draw designs that the museum’s artists bring to life. (My favorite was a hamburger cowboy by a 7 year old.)