This lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed catalogue by Joan Simon and Susan Faxon accompanies the first museum retrospective devoted to fiber artist Sheila Hicks. Extensive images are accompanied by three scholarly essays which analyze and place in critical context her many modes of creation, and demonstrate how Hicks’ pioneering work has both embraced and reinvented tradition, successfully navigating the terrain between art, design, and architecture.
Sheila Hicks: 50 Years addresses the artist’s conceptual, procedural, and material concerns via five distinct, though intimately related, fields of inquiry: bas reliefs and sculptures; small weavings and drawings; site commissions for public spaces; production textiles; and process works made of recuperated textiles, clothing, and other found objects.
The Mint Museum Uptown at Levine Center for the Arts is showing Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, an exhibition organized by The Addison Gallery of American Art, the art museum of Phillips Academy on 1 October 2011 through 29 January 2012, marking the first museum retrospective devoted to this pioneering figure. Sheila Hicks is an artist who builds with color and thinks with line. From her earliest work of the late 1950s to the present, she has crossed the boundaries of painting, sculpture, design, drawing, and woven form, and has been a critical force in redefining the domains of contemporary art-making. While challenging the relationship of fine arts to commercial arts and studio practice to site-specific commissions, Hicks has, above all, re-imagined the profound, vital connection of artist to artisan.
2010. Hardback, 256 pages, 250 images 174 color/76 b&w, 10 x 12 inches.
Price $65 Item #2816 – www.mintmuseum.org
