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.

http://www.andover.edu/Museums/Addison/Exhibitions/Hicks/Pages/default.aspx

www.sheilahicks.com

Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11Hicks, Sheila, 1934- Fiber artist

https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-sheila-hicks-11947

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 

Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow: Director, Screenwriter, Painter, Activist, Producer, founder of The Last Days of Ivory and the only woman to receive an Academy Award, 

The journey for women, no matter what venue it is 

- politics, business, film - it's, it's a long journey. 

Kathryn Bigelow

Here is another woman of whom I did not know much about however now I am mesmerized by her voice, vision and work.  Besides being the only woman director to receive the coveted academy award for Best Director, I wanted to feature her during my National Women's History Month's postings because of her assertion that she would like to be thought of and celebrated as a film maker, not a female film maker.
This is an important distinction to think about, especially during this tumultuous time of the women's movement and women's rights.  My hope is that women, and men, can follow their passions, make their best contributions to the world, excel, explore and learn, regardless of their gender.
The rub is that women have not always been given that opportunity, so there is a disadvantage ...

At the Directors Guild of America Awards, where she also won the top honour, Bigelow said: "I suppose I like to think of myself as a film-maker", rather than as a female film-maker.www.theguardian.com www.imdb.com

There is so much to learn and read about this multitalented woman, so enjoy the below excerpts about Bigelow as well as some articles about her work and the animated short that she directed for her foundation, the Last Days of Ivory. VF

A very talented painter, Kathryn spent two years at the San Francisco Art Institute. At 20, she won a scholarship to the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. She was given a studio in a former Offtrack Betting building, literally in an old bank vault, where she made art and waited to be critiqued by people like Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Sontag. Later she earned a scholarship to study film at Columbia University School of Arts, graduating in 1979. She was also a member of the British avant garde cultural group, Art and Language. Kathryn is the only child of the manager of a paint factory and a librarian. www.imdb.com

It was a conversation with Andy Warhol that moved Bigelow's attentions from painting to film:

"Andy was saying that film is way more populist than art—that art’s very elitist, so you exclude a large audience," Bigelow tells TIME Magazine in its new cover story. Walking into an art museum around the same time provided a similar realization."A Male­vich or a Mondrian requires that you come to it with a certain amount of information, a context," she explains. "And you don’t necessarily need that with film. A movie is accessible, available. That was exciting to me from a political standpoint." www.hollywoodreporter.com

link to entire TIME article: http://content.time.com

While low budget and foreign language films are somewhat more equitable, major Hollywood movies are almost always directed by men. The exceptions can be counted on one hand. And that hand's tallest, most defiant middle finger is the great Kathryn Bigelow. http://www.biography.com/
On Monday, February 8, 2010, SBIFF presents "A Celebration of Kathryn Bigelow." A director not afraid to push the envelope in the cinematic world, Kathryn Bigelow has the eye for the picture she wants to present and then does so, with an expertise that is both gracious and bold. Having studied art, she takes her vision and presents it to her audience all the while telling a tale that evokes various and intense emotions. Bigelow graduated from Columbia's Film School and started a career, gaining experience in numerous genres - such as music videos, television and film, showing us once again the depth of her creativity and talent.Commented SBIFF Executive Director Roger Durling, "Kathryn's custom of the first person perspective throughout her films, as seen in Point Break and Strange Days, had always made her films visceral and favorites of mine, but the culmination of this is The Hurt Locker - her crowning achievement. The fact that I'm able to honor a fellow alumnus of the Columbia Grad School is icing on the cake."

 Kathryn Bigelow named Outstanding Director of the YearSBIFF presents a retrospective of Bigelow's \www.emol.org

Bigelow was only the fourth woman to be nominated for best director in the 82-year history of the Oscars.

The previous female nominees were Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation in 2003, Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993, and Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties in 1975. www.theguardian.com

In the end of 2014, Bigelow and others created the organization, the Last Days of Ivory:

Last year we were made aware of the very real connection between elephant poaching and terrorism. For us, it represented the diabolical intersection of two problems that are of great concern - species extinction and global terrorism. Both involve the loss of innocent life and both require urgent action.

http://www.lastdaysofivory.com

If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It's irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don't. There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible. It is.   Kathryn Bigelow

interesting article about the backlash of making a raw political filmWhy Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar Snub Is a Symptom of a Larger Problem in Film CriticismHuffintonPost, Scott Mendelson, 01/11/2013 11:20 am ET | Updated Mar 13, 2013

another article from GWToday:
Kathryn Bigelow Joins SMPA for Conversation Series Academy Award-winning director discusses career, filmmaking process and the role of women in the movie industry. Julyssa Lopez, October 30, 2013 gwtoday.gwu.edu/

from Newsweek:

KATHRYN BIGELOW TALKS ABOUT "THE HURT LOCKER", JENNIE YABROFF , 6/18/09  http://www.newsweek.com

From the MOMA:

Crafting Genre: Kathryn BigelowA film retrospective in MoMA's theaters accompanies the gallery installation.May 18–October 3, 2011

Click here to see the list of Bigelow's work: behind and in front of the camera.

https://mubi.com/cast/kathryn-bigelow

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000941/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/kathryn_bigelow/

http://www.biography.com/news/kathryn-bigelow-bio-movies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Bigelow

The three women who created the MOMA (I had no idea?!?!?)

Abby Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss, Mary Quinn Sullivan: the major force behind the creation of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

The Museum of Modern Art owes a large share of its success to women. The Museum was the idea and creation of three women, and from those founders of 1929 to the associate director and president of the Museum today, women have been instrumental in the development of the institution's mission, program, and collection. This essay highlights a few of the innumerable contributions they have made to the Museum over its more than eighty-year history—as curators, administrators, scholars, artists, patrons, and activists. While meant to be informative, it is partial and by no means comprehensive. Organized alphabetically, it presents a selection of brief biographical and historical notes, with an emphasis on the Museum's early years. The goal is to highlight significant achievements and innovations by women, often linked with the establishment of programs that MoMA and many other museums now take for granted. —Michelle Elligott, Archivist

ABBY ALDRICH  ROCKEFELLER (1874–1948)

With her contacts, her knowledge of art, and her family's vast wealth, Rockefeller was able to offer the critical financial backing necessary to create a new museum, and in 1929 she, Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan founded The Museum of Modern Art.

When a purchase fund she had established was used to acquire Picasso's etching Minotauromachy (1935), she suggested, "Let's label this: purchased with a fund for prints which Mrs. Rockefeller doesn't like."2 After her death, in 1948, Barr wrote to Nelson, "Few realize what positive acts of courage her interest in modern art required. . . . She was the heart of the Museum and its center of gravity."3

LILLIE P.  BLISS(1864–1931)

Lillie P. Bliss (born Lizzie Plummer Bliss, April 11, 1864 in Boston; died March 12, 1931 in New York City) was an American art collector and patron. At the beginning of the 20th century, she was one of the leading collectors of modern art in New York. One of the lenders to the landmark Armory Show in 1913, she also contributed to other exhibitions concerned with raising public awareness of modern art. In 1929, she played an essential role in the founding of the Museum of Modern Art. (wikipedia)

the Lillie Bliss collection, MOMA

Bliss herself died on March 12, 1931, when the Museum was not yet two years old. At that time she owned twenty-six works by Paul Cézanne, including The Bather (c. 1885), in what was considered one of the most discerning privately held groups of Cézannes in the United States, as well as works by Honoré Daumier, Davies, Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon, Pierre-August Renoir, Henri Rousseau, Georges Seurat, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Her collection was valued at nearly $1.14 million and, in a complete surprise to staff and trustees at the Museum, including Rockefeller and director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., it was revealed after her death that she had bequeathed the largest and most important part of it to MoMA.2

MARY QUINN SULLIVAN (1877–1939)

In 1917 Mary Quinn, an art teacher, married prominent lawyer Cornelius Sullivan (a noted collector of art and rare books).1 She began to form her own collection a few years later, acquiring important works by Paul Cézanne, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and in 1929, with Lillie P. Bliss and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, she founded The Museum of Modern Art.

If the male members of Paul Sachs' art network can be called "old boys," then Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874-1948) and her friends Lillie P. Bliss (1864-1931) and Mary Sullivan were the "old girls" with extremely progressive views - members of New York's moneyed aristocracy, ambitious, socially committed women who recognized that a gap had crept into in the American museum landscape due to the absence of European Modernism in the institutions.                db-artmag.de

In 1917 she married Cornelius Sullivan, an attorney and collector of rare books and paintings. Mary Quinn Sullivan herself began collecting art. Works by Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rouault, and Picasso formed the beginnings of her collection.                                          femilogue.blogspot.com

click here to see the full information on  MOMA.org

https://www.moma.org/explore/publications/modern_women/history#lexicon1

https://www.moma.org/explore/publications/modern_women/exhibitions/

Art and artists from MOMA exhibit, click here

Doing the research for these posts in honor of National Women's History month blog has introduced me to more amazing and noteworthy women as well as other sites and blogs that celebrate the feminine. Today I discovered this blog and wish to share: femilogue.blogspot.com

Welcome to Femilogue!These pages include a sampling of the women who forged our nation—abolitionists and artists, suffragists and scientists, authors and athletes, inventors, public servants, and more.

Today is International Women's Day

so today I am going to highlight just a few of my personal favorite international bad-ass women, (there are so so so many!!!),  with quick bio.s thanks to Wikipedia, along with a way that you can get involved with the #BeBoldForChange campaign (see bottom of post)

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anais Nin

Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin (Spanish: [anaˈis ˈnin]; born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell; February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) was an essayist and memoirist born to Cuban parents in France, where she was also raised. She spent some time in Spain and Cuba, but lived most of her life in the United States, where she became an established author. She wrote journals (which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death), novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and erotica. A great deal of her work, including Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously.

Annette Messager

Annette Messager (born 30 November 1943 in Berck, France) is a French visual artist. In 2005 she won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale for her artwork at the French Pavilion. In 2016, she won the prestigious Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award.[1] She currently lives and works in Malakoff, France.[2]

Simone de Beauvoir sitting with Jean-Paul Sartre

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir  9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.[3]

Marie Skłodowska Curie

Marie Skłodowska Curie 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), born Maria Salomea Skłodowska was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, and was part of the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris. and mother to Irène Joliot-Curie, herself, an award winning scientist.

Curie mother and daughter duo.

Irène Joliot-Curie (French) 12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French scientist, the daughter of Marie Curieand Pierre Curie and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date.[1] Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also esteemed scientists.[2]

https://www.malala.org

Malala Yousafzai (S.St) (Malālah Yūsafzay: Urdu: ملالہ یوسفزئی‎; Pashto: ملاله یوسفزۍ‎ 

; born 12 July 1997)is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. She is known mainly for human rights advocacy for education and for women in her native Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northwest Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Malala's advocacy has since grown into an international movement.

On the afternoon of 9 October 2012, Yousafzai was injured after a Taliban gunman attempted to assassinate her. Yousafzai remained unconscious, in critical condition at the Rawalpindi Institute of Cardiology, but later her condition improved enough for her to be sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. The assassination attempt sparked a national and international outpouring of support for Malala. Deutsche Welle wrote in January 2013 that Malala may have become "the most famous teenager in the world."  Weeks after her assassination attempt, a group of fifty leading Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against those who tried to kill her. 

virginiafitzgerald 'lovely frida ...' (2017)

Frida Kahlo de Rivera,  July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954), born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, was a Mexican painter known for her self-portraits.[2]

Kahlo's life began and ended in Mexico City, in her home, which is known as "La Casa Azul," the Blue House. Her work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous traditions, and by feminists for its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.

& to finish off this post (that could truly go on forever) I want to share this inspiring and enlightening book that I picked up today!!!  Rad Women Worldwide, by Kate Schatz and Miriam Klein Stahl, authors of Rad American Women A-Z.  I could not stop reading this book once I purchased it.  I, in fact, shared some of the amazing stories with my parents and Harriet over the dinner!! A superb way to end International Women Day.

International Women's Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity.

here is an article highlighting 17 bad-ass women!!
#InternationalWomensDay: 17 Women Who Changed the Game
Happy International Women’s Day! We round-up some of the exceptional women who serve as true inspirations in the fields of Public Service, Arts and Culture, Sciences, and Advocacy – all of whom ask us to #BeBoldforChange