Sheila Hicks: 50 Years,
March 24 – August 7, 2011

"Hicks's exceptional body of work blurs boundaries between art, design, and architecture just as deftly as it crisscrosses cultures. "

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) presents Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, the first major retrospective to honor this extraordinary American artist. Sheila Hicks has built an international reputation with her two- and three-dimensional works in fiber. Her remarkably far-reaching artistic focus has encompassed painting, sculpture, photography, weaving, fabric design, writing, publishing, teaching and collaborations with architects. Her early work of the 1960s was at the forefront of experimentation in sculpture. By the 1980s it had taken hold. Since that time, her unique work has explored the dynamic interactions of color and the skills required to hone an aesthetic vision in multiple media.

Featuring more than 90 of her most important works, including a major installation of a work on loan from Target's headquarters in Minneapolis displayed in an entirely new iteration, this exhibition offers insight into Hicks's thinking, her processes, and her approach to materials, both fibers and found objects. The project reveals the continuities between the artist's small weavings, and free-standing wrapped sculptures, and a colossal 20-foot high work suspended from ceiling and cascading from wall.

Hicks's exceptional body of work blurs boundaries between art, design, and architecture just as deftly as it crisscrosses cultures.

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Y H B H S (card catalog) selection 6

Meaghan Roddy, Design Specialist, Phillips de Pury & Company
"It’s one of those books I never really tire of seeing, and I get excited if we have a work in an auction by one of the artists who was a part of it."

OBJECTS: USA,
by Lee Nordness, 1970

OBJECTS: USA,
by Lee Nordness, 1970
Works by Artist-Craftsmen in Ceramic, Enamel, Glass,
Metal, Plastic, Mosaic, Wood and Fiber


"An old faithful. It’s a survey of what was happening in craft in America by the 1960s, following the OBJECTS: USA exhibition that opened at the Smithsonian in 1969. It is also a wish list of things I would like to spend some quality time with in person.

I have a special fondness for this book, that I think has to do with the pictures of the artists being placed alongside their pieces; it makes everything seem more approachable (see: Helen Bitar on page 277 posing with a cat that appears to be talking). Every time I look through it I find a new area to become attached to: for a long time it was just wood and ceramics, but now it’s fiber and metal. It’s one of those books I never really tire of seeing, and I get excited if we have a work in an auction by one of the artists who was a part of it."


- Meaghan Roddy



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Meaghan Roddy is a Design Specialist for the auction house Phillips de Pury & Company (www.phillipsdepury.com) and is based in New York .















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Catherine Willis

The
continents
of scent
and of color

Catherine Willis
works in progress
Atelier, Paris

Last week, Catherine Willis from Paris
sent me these incredible images of her
new work. I've been staring at them ever since...
I hope in the future, I'll be able to see them in person,
and perhaps have a conversation with Catherine.
We met via Ivan, who has become a dear friend, even though
we are a sea apart.

--------



Is it the circles I'm so transfixed by?
The yellows? the materials?

she told me her friends call this work shamanic,
and I can certainly understand why...
a very strong but silent energy....

materials:

3 yellows from plants for this recent expo:

the one from berberis roots,
the one from pomegranate bark,
and the paler one from filipendula.

The scents inside the PERFUME RINGS
and THE BATONS DE PAROLE were gum resins,
cinnamon , laurel leaves, Tonka beans, cedar of Lebanon shavings.












more works in progress!

go to here
site for more info.
thank you catherine!




----

weaving
as
metaphor.
sheila
hicks...

"If her plan didn’t work out, she noted, she could always unravel it, something she has done to her creations time and again."

-Sheila Hicks, taken from NY Times article here.

go to Sheila Hicks site here.

Sheila Hicks (b. 1934)

Indisputably the most internationally known living Nebraska artist and one of the world‘s most renowned fiber artists, Sheila Hicks was born in Hastings, Nebraska in 1934. From her early life in Nebraska, Hicks gives credit to her mother, great aunts, and grandmothers for influencing her art through various techniques of working with textiles and threads. Hicks studied painting under the tutorage of Josef Albers and pre-Columbian textiles with George Kubler at Yale University where she was inspired by the Bauhaus theory and received both B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees in painting. She was also a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Chile in 1957. Her work can be found in both public and private collections throughout the United States as well as abroad. Hicks divides her time between her Paris and New York City studios.

"“Sheila was part of the textile revolution of the 1960’s,” said Nina Stritzler-Levine, the center’s director of exhibitions and the show’s curator. “She, along with other fiber artists, is really responsible for taking textiles off the wall and giving them a sculptural dimension. I was very interested in the way in which the hand and craft informs the design process in her smaller works. I think they illuminate her desire for the superb skill she has as a weaver but also highlight this subversion in her technique.”

“The act of creating is much more exciting for me than leaving a monument to myself,” she said, explaining how she would deconstruct her fiber twists and spirals and ponytails and tapestries into piles of yarn. “It felt great. It meant that my imagination could run free.”

Sheila Hicks

new installation up in SD26 New York,
read review here with more photos..

more of sd26, ny......

judith scott
1943 2005

"Born with Down syndrome, Judith Scott lived with her family until she was 7, when she was institutionalized for 35 years. Twelve years ago, when she was 45, her fraternal twin, Joyce Scott, became her legal guardian and enrolled her in the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, Calif., where she lived in a group home...."

taken from here...

As a woman who was born with Down syndrome in the 1940’s, Judith Scott’s story traces our society’s response to disability and how it has changed over time. As a child, Judith Scott’s parents were told there was no hope of their daughter ever achieving anything. That fateful analysis led to her institutionalization. At the age of seven, she left her family and was taken to a horrifying place -- a massive, crumbling warehouse of humanity where people like Judith were incarcerated simply because they were so different from the norm. Children in her circumstances often didn’t survive the ordeal. But Judith did, and in the 1980’s when community-based programs were available to support individuals with Down syndrome, Judith had the opportunity to leave the institution behind and find her true place in life.

That she would seize this opportunity and become a recognized artist is nothing short of miraculous. Judith’s spontaneous development of a sculptural technique of taking objects and tightly wrapping them with yarn and fibers became her signature style. Working on her sculptures day after day, year after year, she came to the attention of people interested in “outsider” art who recognized that they were looking at the genuine article – art with a highly developed sense of unity and purpose created by a woman who new little or nothing about art at all. We can now recognize that Judith has an enormous contribution to make to society – all it takes is our ability to see it, recognize it and celebrate it."

taken from press release for a documentary about her work and life. read and watch it here..