VirginiaCreates: Sheila Hicks

Sheila Hicks: artist, fiber artist

Sheila Hicks is not a weaver. She has been a sorority girl and

a synchronized swimmer, an accidental drug smuggler

and a magazine editor. She married a Mexican beekeeper

and dated a would-be Venezuelan revolutionary.

But she is, emphatically, not a weaver.

'Itinerant Artist:Sheila Hicks' https://craftcouncil.org/

I discovered the work of Sheila Hicks during a visit to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy Andover, MA to experience their exhibit, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, and I have not been the same since.

I was so moved by her work, the different scale of work, from her miniatures, or as she calls them, minime literally means "very small". These 'studies' lined the hallway leading into the main galleries and I found them mesmerizing.

Now she is going to be in the 2017 Venice Biennale and watching the attached video just made me love Hicks and her work even more. I hope you enjoy the below links and pictures of her work. VF

Sheila Hicks was taught to sew by her mother and to embroider and knit by her grandmother, making her 'thread conscious' from a young age. [2]Hicks attended Yale University School of Art and Architecture in Connecticut (1954-1959), where she gained a BFA in painting (1957) and MFA in painting (1959)[3] and studied with Josef Albers, Rico Lebrun, Bernard Chaet, Jose de Riviera, Herbert Mather, Norman Ives, Gabor Peterdi, George Kubler, George Heard Hamilton, and Vincent Scully. Along with George Kubler, independently, Junius Bird of the American Museum of Natural History and Anni Albers were advisors for her thesis, "Pre-Incaic Textiles."[1] Hicks was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study and paint in Chile (1957–58); she photographed archeological sites in Peru and Bolivia.

wikipedia

Hicks will be participating in the 2017 Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva, May 13 - November 16, 2017

Even her miniature pieces, or minimes, assume the asymmetry of a photograph, a landscape's irregularity of color and texture, and all the unpredictability of real life recorded. The French word minime literally means "very small"; and though it also connotes "of very little significance," her miniatures are of the first importance to Hicks. She uses them as studies, sketches, and material explorations: Roulade Amazone (1965), made of crushed, rolled, and sewn pages from a natural history book, explored a concept for larger sculptural pieces.

'Itinerant Artist:Sheila Hicks' https://craftcouncil.org/

Hicks’s “La Clef’’ (1988) features rubber bands and a metal key.

Sheila Hicks, weaving her own fabric of modernismBy Sebastian Smee for the Boston Globe, November 14, 2010

In fact, a lot of Hicks’s work suggests intimate connections with Klee. Her miniatures, or “minimes,’’ as she calls them, are, like Klee’s watercolors, about the size of a sheet of paper. There are dozens of them on view at the Addison (the show was co-curated by independent scholar Joan Simon and Addison curator Susan Faxon).They’re wonderful — small, woven works in jewel-like colors that use the warp and weft as a natural grid to play with patterns, divisions, asymmetry, varying degrees of tautness and looseness, and above all, color.Some have threads hanging out in tufts or lolling arabesques; others are cut on the bias, creating jaunty diagonals.Each one is like an evocative perfume, with an immediate impact conjured by color and shape, then a tantalizing dry down as subtleties and layered relationships between color, material, thread thickness, and shape gradually emerge.Hicks has made these “minimes’’ throughout her career. Many are initially unprepossessing. They’re like studies or sketches. But they do one of the things that modernism always strove to achieve (though not always successfully): They enhance our awareness of things as they are, rather than as representatives of other things.http://archive.boston.com

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years

November 5, 2010 - February 27, 2011

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years marks the first museum retrospective devoted to this exceptional American artist. Co-curated by independent scholar Joan Simon and Addison curator Susan Faxon, the exhibition opens at the Addison Gallery and will be touring to various venues.

Born in Hastings, Nebraska in 1934 and a resident of Paris since 1964, Hicks is a pioneering figure noted for objects and public commissions whose structures are built of color and fiber. Independent in spirit and itinerant in practice, she deliberately and provocatively engages what are often considered mutually exclusive domains, rethinking and pushing the limits of generally accepted contexts, conditions, and frameworks.

These include distinct objects and temporal, performative actions, studio works and commissions for public buildings, and textiles made in artisanal workshops or for industrial production in places as different from one another as Chile, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Sweden, and the United States.

The exhibition addresses Hicks's conceptual, procedural, and material concerns via five distinct though intimately related fields of inquiry: miniature weavings and drawings, site commissions for public spaces, industrially produced textiles and workshop hand-productions, bas reliefs and sculptures, and, process works made of recuperated textiles, clothing and other found objects.

Generous support for this exhibition and publication was provided by the J. Mark Rudkin Charitable Foundation, The Coby Foundation, Ltd., Saundra B. Lane, The Poss Family Foundation, Nancy B. Tieken, Able Trust, Target Corporation, Friends of Fiber Art International, Dirck and Lee Born, and several anonymous donors.