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Top:
Color Alphabet II/V I,
1988
wool, silk
74.8 x 72.8 in.
Left:
IVrapJKd and
Coiled Traveler,
2009
bamboo, cotton,
wool, silk
8.8 x5.25 m.
Above:
Vanishing Vellow,
1964/2004
cotton
9.5x8.25 in.
Opposite:
Installation, SD26
restaurant, 2009
silk, cotton, wool,
synthetic and metallic
fiber, personal items
of the artist;
dimensions vary
classes. Traveling on a Fulbright scholarship
in South America, she befriended revolu-
tionaries in Caracas and carried a 5-kilo sack
of “sugar” over the border between Chile
and Peru. Since settling in Paris in 1964, she
has commuted to a second home in New
York (serving in the early 1980s as the editor
of
American Fabrics and Fashion
magazine).
She was named to the ACC College of Fel-
lows in 1983 and received the Aileen Osborn
Webb Gold Medal in 1997 for consummate
craftsmanship. She has studied local weav-
ing practices around the world, from Kyoto
to Kabul, Tangiers to Tel Aviv, and Zagreb
to Zurich.
But wherever she has gone, in the world
or in her art, she has simply never allowed
herself to be tied down. Early on, as one of a
handful of avant-garde midcentury artists
working with fiber, Hicks kept “painting,”
but escaped the canvas. She moved tapestry
from the wall to the center of the room, but
escaped a visionary’s egocentricity when
her unsigned work was sold by retailers from
Knoll to Crate & Barrel. And, as the
minimes
show, Hicks also escaped the grid of the
warp and weft, showing that the two can be
worked autonomously and still produce a
coherent image. Like painter Lucio Fontana,
who slashed canvases, Hicks opens incisions
and passages in textiles or, by using a few
strands of warp, leaves entire sections of
weft exposed - sometimes slinkily, as in
Promeneur
(1988). The often unruly
minimes
have provided a cloistered space - in fact, the
word also refers to a monastic order, where
one seeks transcendence - in which Hicks
studies how best to transcend convention.
Evolution? The word is too linear to
describe the multidirectional expenditure of
Hicks’ vast curiosity and vigor. Perhaps she
experienced an evolution once, in the mid-
1960s. During her early years in Paris, Hicks
moved from the art world into the craft
world, then into the design world. But she
didn’t settle in any of them.
+
icaphila.org
sheilahicks.com
“Sheila Hicks:50 Ttars”continues at the
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia,
through Aug. 7. It will be at the Mint Museum
Uptown in Charlotte, North Carolina, from
Oct. 1,2011-Jan. 29, 2012. ShonquisMoreno,
a former editorfor
Dwell, Surface,
and
Frame
magazines, writes about art and design from
Brooklyn, Nezv Tork.
060
american craft jun/julu
Color Alphabet
photo: Pierre Plattier /
IVrapped
and
Vanishing
photos: Bastiaan van den B erg/SD
26
photo: Cristobal Zanartu
