PRESENTATION: Sheila Hicks-Off Grid
Inspired by the concepts of the Wiener Werkstätte and the Bauhaus, Sheila Hicks transcends media, national, and gender boundaries – emphasizing the vast sociopolitical connotations of textiles. Her immensely rich knowledge of indigenous weaving practices—gleaned from working in North and Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, and Asia, is integral to her multi-faceted work.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: The Hepworth Wakefield Archive
Sheila Hicks is one of the world’s foremost artists and sculptors working with textiles, fibre, color and form. Drawing together over 70 works of art from international public and private collections, the exhibition “Off Grid” explores the many facets of Hicks’ ground-breaking work – from her intimate “Minimes”, small woven drawings she creates on a hand-held frame, to large-scale installations that fill gallery spaces with vibrant color. The exhibition provides insight into how Hicks’ extensive travels across several continents – where she studied vernacular textile traditions and construction techniques through observing and collaborating with local artists, as well as experimenting on her own – has deeply informed and inspired her work. Sheila Hicks was born in the small town of Hastings, Nebada, in 1934. Though her family moved around a lot during the Depression, Sheila Hicks and her brother returned each summer to Hastings, where their great-aunts instructed them in music, art and reading, as well as pioneer skills like spinning, sewing and weaving. She majored in art at Syracuse University, then transferred to the Yale School of Art where she studied with Josef Albersand with George Kubler, the influential historian of Latin American art. A picture of Peruvian mummy bundles, shown in Dr. Kubler’s class, sparked her interest in textiles, which was further galvanized when Albers took her home to meet his wife, Anni, the celebrated Bauhaus weaver. Hicks went to Chile on a Fulbright grant and traveled around Latin America, absorbing the influence of weavers in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. She received an M.F.A. from Yale, then returned to Mexico, where she photographed architecture and exhibited her “minims”. Some of her weavings entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She also married a Mexican-German beekeeper, moved to his ranch and gave birth to a daughter, Itaka. Having lived briefly in Paris in 1959, and finding that her life and marriage in rural Mexico conflicted with her artistic aspirations, she returned here with her daughter in 1964, supporting herself as a textile design consultant for Knoll Associates and through work for a German carpet manufacturer. Her second husband, a Chilean artist introduced her to surrealist and Latin American circles in Paris, and through a curator at the MoMA she received her first big public commission, for a wall hanging at the restaurant of Eero Saarinen’s new CBS building in New York. A defining moment in her career came with her invitation to exhibit at the Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne in 1967. In postwar Paris tapestry was promoted as a glory of French culture, but by the late ’60s the French organizers of this event were looking to shake things up. The monumental public commissions that have occupied her, intermittently, since the mid-’60s have often required complex studio setups and a phalanx of assistants: from her bas-relief medallion tapestries for the Ford Foundation headquarters in Manhattan (1966-67); to her wall hangings for a fleet of Air France 747s, stitched by hand in white silk (1969-77); to commissions for King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, (1982-85) and a cultural center in Fuji City, Japan (1992-93); to an immense linen-and-cork knot, some 20 feet high by 60 feet wide, for the corporate offices of Target in Minneapolis (2002-3). At the same time her temporary, poetic installations of found fabrics, a cascading mountain of some five tons of clean Swiss hospital laundry, for example, which was her contribution to the Lausanne Biennial in 1977, or the floating curtains of baby bands (used to bind a newborn’s umbilical wound), which she showed in a gallery in Kyoto in 1978 — explore the pervasive presence of cloth in every facet of human existence, from birth until death.
Photo: Sheila Hicks, Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands, 2016-17. Natural and synthetic fibres, cloth, slate, bamboo. 600 x 1600 x 400 cm, 236 1/4 x 629 7/8 x 157 1/2 ins. © Sheila Hicks. Courtesy of Alison Jacques, London. Photo: Andrea Avezzù
Info: Curator: Andrew Bonacina, The Hepworth Wakefield, Gallery Walk, Wakefield, United Kingdom, Duration: 7/4-25/9/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://hepworthwakefield.org
