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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weaving
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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......