Archive for the ‘Sheila Hicks: 50 Years’ Category

THE TEXTILE MIRROR: A Visit to the Penn Museum

June 10 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Sheila and Ingrid walking toward the Penn Museum.

“Lucy,” Ingrid says, “you’re living my Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler fantasy!”

We are in the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Keeper Lucy Fowler Williams, who specializes in American textiles, keeps bringing out the most extraordinary things from behind the poker-faced doors of numbered cabinets: fragments of thousand-year-old tunics, cactus spine needles, a tie-dyed Anasazi blanket. The comment might seem strange coming from a curator like Ingrid, who seems to practically live in ICA, our own museum; but the Penn Museum is a different animal: vast and historical rather than bright and emphatically new. ICA doesn’t have a permanent collection, but the Penn Museum’s collection, like a great tree, grows larger every year. There are 300,000 objects in the American collection alone!

This special tour is occasioned by the presence of artist Sheila Hicks, whose fabulous survey exhibition, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, is on view at ICA through August 7. Sheila knows everything about textiles, and so does Lucy, though their two everythings don’t always exactly overlap. On the way in they talk about the magic Sheila performed at ICA’s benefit a few nights earlier. Subscribers brought her items of clothing—ties and shirts and underwear-and she wrapped them in layers of thread, transforming them into containers for memory. Sheila says the podium from which she worked was like a confessional: people brought their stories—both of their objects and of themselves—hoping for the absolution of art. We walk past an ancient bull with lapis horn tips and a headdress of gold. Sheila stops to admire a figure from Guanyin, China (900 – 1279 A.D.)—how the folds of the drapery are rendered in wood and stone.

We pass through a private hall where people are setting up for a dinner, clothed tables overlooked by stone sphinxes. Sheila and Lucy reminisce about potlatches.

It’s chilly in the white collections room. Lucy has pulled out some boxes for us, each one divided into smaller compartments, each compartment holding some small but extraordinary fragment: a 15th-century loop of a thread, or a bit of cloth, or a spiny needle, all from Pachacamac, Peru.

Photo: Pam Kosty

“The soil is very oily there,” Sheila says in her Nebraska-bred, Paris-refined voice. She’s been there.

“These were buried with women,” Lucy says. “Textiles or cloth for these cultures were the most important thing—like gold might be somewhere else.”

“Because it’s the most difficult thing to do,” Sheila says. “These are the superheroes!”

Lucy shows us a stretch of vicuna wool cloth, dark red with green, brown, and mustard woven in. “A lot of recent scholarship relates these to the sky, possibly to time,” she says, explaining where the colors come from: the red from cochineal—tropical insects—the bluish green at least partly indigo.

“I’m very fond of these positive/negative shapes,” Sheila says, pointing.

Photo: Pam Kosty

Lucy takes the lid off a box holding a khipu—threads of knotted cords used as a recording device. Different styles of knots—different colors, different turnings—mark different characteristics of whatever is being recorded. Sheila bends over to see. She makes khipus, too.

“The word khipu is very fun to say,” Ingrid says.

“You can imagine putting it on your belt and walking with it,” Sheila says.

“Recording how many llamas were born last year.”

“That’s why we do shows, to have an excuse to get out some of this material.”

After the khipus, Lucy shows us two mummy bundles: ancient bodies wrapped in cloth. One is an infant, another an adult with a mask where the face would be. She asks us not to take photographs. The discussion returns to the wrapping Sheila did at the benefit, to how wrapping something is an ancient, natural way to make it sacred. “In the relation of the human and the spiritual,” Sheila says, “cloth plays such an important role.”

Why cloth? I ask.

“It’s worn on the body,” Lucy says. “It holds the memory of you.”

“The fluids of the body are in it,” Sheila adds.

“But we wrap our dead in wood,” I say skeptically.

“But cloth first,” Lucy says. “First we dress them appropriately.”

Sheila nods. She bends her head over the bundle, and so does Lucy. The maker of cloth and the keeper of cloth meet over this sacred object. For both of them, textiles are mirrors in which you can see—if you know how to look—a human face.

* * *

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years is on view at ICA through August 7.

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@upenn.edu.

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Benefit 2011: Sumo Balls

May 20 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s early evening, and the servers are holding trays of champagne glasses—not flutes, but the saucer-shaped kind said to have originally been molded from the breast of Helen of Troy. The guests filter through the glass doors in their finery: a blonde in a shimmering green dress, a smiling man in bow tie, a young woman in a gown printed with foxes. The ICA staff has spent the day arranging the dark purple calla lilies in their vases, dealing with a shortage of electricity, buying extra tequila, and laying Mylar—sent all the way from France—across the tables. I myself have spent an extraordinary amount of time proofreading names on place cards; you wouldn’t want to get that wrong. It’s nice to have all that behind us now, and to see the guests enjoying themselves.

Photo: Shira Yudkoff

The large ravioli filled with cheese and quail egg seem to be a success. In the gallery (champagne and ravioli left outside), a woman points to large hanging Sheila Hicks sculpture and says to her companion, “We need one of those!” I presume she can afford it. This is ICA’s Benefit, the night our most generous donors pay a tidy sum to honor a special figure in the art world in support of the museum’s programs. This year’s honoree is Sheila Hicks, whose current ICA exhibition Sheila Hicks: 50 Years is the first major retrospective of this extraordinary artist who works largely in fiber: cotton, wool, linen, silk, bamboo fiber, synthetics, rubber bands. Sheila, who lives in Paris, was around through a chilly March week for installation, and it’s nice to have her back in this celebratory mode.

Sheila in the gallery. Photo: Shira Yudkoff

After cocktails, everyone moves out onto the Terrace for dinner, where luckily the heavy rain had held off. The Mylar tablecloths look lovely with the dark flowers on them. They reflect the deep purple of the programs and the bright yellow of the wine. After the caponata and the beef cheeks (SD26 Restaurant and Wine Bar prepared the dinner), there is a pause. ICA Board Chair Andie Laporte welcomes the guests. ICA’s director, Claudia Gould, tells a story about a man who picked Sheila up hitchhiking in Mexico in 1950, where she was studying indigenous textiles, and got taken back to her house for a good meal. Poet Bill Berkson, an old friend, takes us on a leisurely journey through the Paris streets to Sheila’s studio: “If you are in Paris, and you’re coming from the Marais, you take the 96 bus,” he says. Then Sheila herself floats up to the podium:

“I was thinking we could take off our clothes and I would wrap them for you, and then we could decide who was worthy of taking them home. Who will give me something that I can wrap?”

Murmurs and laughter rise through the night. People start passing bits of clothing up the tables: socks and stockings, a hair ribbon, a glove. A man stands up and takes off his tie.

Taking off the tie. Photo: Shira Yudkoff

At the podium, Sheila asks for scissors. She lifts spools of thread from a bag: silk and cotton, synthetic and linen, green and gold and blue. She begins to wrap the flotsam clothing the tide washes up, making sumo balls—commemorative pieces that cocoon significant objects in thread. She wraps a man’s shirt. She wraps a pair of pink and white lace panties. Claudia takes the microphone: “I want everyone to know that one of our Board members just gave up her bra!” she reports jubilantly.

A man approaches solemnly with his hand in his hand; he has a prosthetic hand, which he has removed, and he passes it silently over to Sheila who takes it quizzically, tenderly, wraps a ribbon around it, and passes it silently back. Two men, a couple, offer up their ties, and she unspools purple silk, then blue linen, binding them together into one bright sphere, enfolding intimate objects in the blessing of thread.

Sheila wrapping. Photo: Shira Yudkoff

Sheila wraps and wraps, beaming as she works. She likes working. As the night wears on, it seems to me that she looks younger, as though she is unspooling not just thread but also time; as though she is moving back toward that young woman she used to be, hitchhiking through Mexico. The woman who loved textiles, color, pattern, texture, but couldn’t yet guess what she would make of them.

* * *

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years will be on view at ICA through August 7.

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@upenn.edu.

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Sheila Hicks: The most beautiful belly buttons

April 15 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“The Swedes are known to have the most beautiful belly buttons,” Sheila Hicks says. It is a few days before her show, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years opens at ICA, and we are sitting on a bench in ICA’s lobby watching Enrico Martignoni, 35 feet up in the air on a Genie, hang Raining Baby Bands from the ceiling. This work consists of clean white baby bands—pieces of cotton cloth used in Swedish hospitals to wrap the umbilical stumps of newborns—tied together in long, lovely strands. It is the use of these bands, Sheila explains, that makes the Swedes’ navals so attractive.

Photo: J. Katz

Sheila points to the other lobby work, Baby Time Again, which is already hung. This one is made of newborns’ white cotton shirts unsewn and then reassembled and stitched together in great sheets with gaps where the heads would have gone through, and more gaps where the body of the shirt curves into the sleeve. She takes my notebook and makes a drawing to show me, pointing out the almond-shaped spaces where “the little patches of things come through—the light, the sky.” On a sunny day like this, in our spacious glassy lobby, the two bright hangings flutter cheerfully like sails before the blue of the clear March morning.

Photo: J. Katz

Sheila goes on explaining things. “In the eighties, I made a series of shows, and instead of shipping materials, they shipped me!” She tells me about going to Oslo, Norway and Lund, Sweden and making work out of freshly washed hospital laundry, partly for the pleasure (and economy) of using what was to hand, and also “for the unity of it—it was white. And it was snow, it was January.” In Paris they hung the baby shirt panel in a gallery on Boulevard Saint Germain in front of a bus stop. In Jerusalem she made a similar work out of soldiers’ uniforms.

“The concept originated on the avenue of the Grande-Armée in Paris,” Sheila says. This was in the seventies, and she had applied to the Tapestry Biennial of Lausanne, which required a work made of six square meters of material. Her proposal drawing was accepted, but Sheila didn’t have time to make the piece. One day, however, she was driving down the Avenue de la Grande-Armée, and there was a laundry truck in front of her, making its round of the hotels, picking up dirty sheets and delivering clean ones. That’s when she had the idea: borrow linens from a local Lausanne hospital to make her tapestry. “That was the year I got thrown out of the Biennial!” she exclaims. “They considered it blasphème. But I got a lot of press, and it was a turning point in the Biennale Tapisseire.” People started to look at ready-mades and other new forms. “It was 1977,” she says, but her daughter, Itaka, who is standing nearby, disagrees.

“It was 1975,” Itaka says. She remembers because of what year she was in at school. They argue peaceably. Itaka says she remembers telling her mother not to do the laundry tapestry, and Sheila says this was how she knew it was a good idea. “She was very conservative,” she says of her daughter, and they smile at each other, remembering.

Photo: J. Katz

Itaka says, “I love the baby bands! I love the way they catch the light, and that they swaddled so many babies. And they go on, from exhibition space to exhibition space.” Take a moment to consider those babies of Lund and Lausanne, all grown up. Are the Swedes displaying their beautiful navels complacently on some sunny beach even now? Are the Swiss pondering the boundaries of art?

High in the air Enrico, who is married to Itaka, measures a distance from the high windows along the ceiling, makes a mark, drills a hole, measures again. Behind us in ICA’s auditorium, the installation crew irons and knots more baby bands for Enrico to hang. Something has shifted: baby clothes become art, readied for use by the hands of men, their new handmaidens, under the direction of women.

Not that it matters: men or women, tapestry or blasphemy, 1975 or 1977. What matters is the snowy cloth, the patches of sky coming through, and the people passing on the street who peer in, their day illuminated briefly by the light that has traveled here from that long-ago moment on the Avenue de la Grande-Armée as from a distant star.

Photo: J. Katz

* * *

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years is on view at ICA through August 7, but don’t wait that long!

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Ornery

April 1 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Photo: J. Katz

Everyone else on the steps is in black, but Sheila Hicks is wearing burgundy and purple. It’s only fitting. She is the royalty here tonight, the honored maker of the hundred plus pieces in the exhibition Sheila Hicks: 50 Years. Organized by Joan Simon and Susan Faxon for the Addison Gallery of American Art, and reconfigured with some new work here at ICA by Jenelle Porter, this brilliant and colorful career survey is opening tonight. ICA’s lobby is full, the bar is open, and the chatter drifts and floats forty feet up to the ceiling, where the hanging sculpture, Baby Time Again, made of dozens of hospital infant shirts, flutters and ripples in the late afternoon light.

(Muñeca, Zapallar, Blue Letter, Dimanche, Tenancingo.)

Joan Simon takes the microphone. “The important part of the show for me,” she says, “is that we haven’t made a distinction between art, design, textiles, weavings, commissions. The question is: Why hasn’t there been a major show of Sheila in the U.S.? The reason is that the work doesn’t fit into a category.”

When I first started writing about Sheila Hicks I made the mistake of calling her a fabric artist, but I was quickly corrected. She’s an artist, period. Or sometimes: an artist of international stature who works with color and line. A born Nebraskan who has lived in Paris for 45 years, an independent, spirited artist who has worked with and for international corporations, Sheila Hicks is a woman of contradictions. Tonight one of the many curators in attendance says of her, “Sheila is original, innovative, international,” but the artist slyly interrupts:

“I’m most often accused of being ornery.”

(Willow, Squiggle, Vanishing Yellow, Serpent à Sonnette, Grand Prayer Rug, Linen Lean-to, Cicatrices.)

Photo: J. Katz

We make our way into the galleries for the members-only walk through. Standing between a woman with raised gold dots all over her shirt and another with daisies braided through her hair, I listen to the curators describe the work and to Sheila resist their analyses. Jenelle points out a hanging piece “that begins to punch out from the surface of the wall.” Sheila counters, “The show speaks for itself.” Susan says, “For the first time a body of work has been collected so the conversation can begin.” Sheila pipes up, “If I have made anything in this show that requires an explanation, I apologize.” But she herself can’t quite resist the temptation. “There are two words that I think of in this room,” she says, looking around. “Precariousness and permanence…those two qualities I play with throughout the show.”

(The Principal Wife, Banisteriopsis—Dark Ink, The Principal Wife Goes On, Self-Portrait on a Blue Day.)

A little later, standing in front of Trapeze de Cristobal, which once hung in the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam, she reaches her hand through the thickly twined thread and asks the Stedelijk curator, who is in attendance, to reach in too and take her hand. “I like that you can enter the work,” Sheila says. “It’s an inextricable involvement of the eye, the mind, and the hand.” (Visitors to the show, however, should keep their hands to themselves.)

(Footprints, Raining Baby Bands, Olympic Bravery, The Silk Invitation.)

In the next room, gazing up at the cascading enormity of May I Have This Dance?, Sheila calls over Enrico Martignoni who installed it. “Enrico, tell us how you installed this piece forty feet high!”

Sheila Hicks, Jenelle Porter, and others. Photo: J. Katz

Enrico beams. “It’s all about belief,” he says.

(Loosely Speaking, Kneeling Stones, Battle of Lexington, Battle of Lincoln, Battle of Omaha.)

As the walk through reaches the final room, Jenelle tells us how she tried to cull the show when she thought there wasn’t enough space to hang it all: “So I thought—because this is what curators do—does anything repeat?” Nothing did. As Jenelle told us, Joan Simon and Susan Faxon had made a perfect selection from Sheila’s hundreds of works. Luckily, there was enough room after all.

The tour is almost over. “Be sure to grab the gallery notes with the checklist,” Jenelle says, “because the titles take you places.” Titles like Les Escargots, La Lettre du Rupture, Déménageur, Embedded Voyage.

Jenelle and Sheila again. Photo: J. Katz

Sheila looks around. “Any pressing questions?”

Jenelle looks at her watch. “And I mean, really pressing,” she says.

Someone calls out, “What are you doing next?”

(A Certain Distance, Prophecy from Constantinople, Triumph.)

Sheila smiles. “Monday night, I’ll take a flight to Paris,” she says. “Tuesday at nine AM, I’ll be in my studio.”

* * *
Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, is on view at ICA through August 7, but don’t wait till summer.

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Cristobal’s Trapeze

March 18 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

The crew has been working in the gallery for weeks, transforming it from the shape it was when it held Set Pieces to the shape it needs to be to hold Sheila Hicks: 50 Years*, which opens on Thursday. By this morning when I got to work, the walls were painted and the floor exposed and the light barrier in place at the entrance. The crates and cartons containing Sheila’s pieces were lined up neatly on the left, while on the right thick snakes of color were coiled inside translucent plastic, looking like lifeboats. This, I could see, was “May I Have This Dance,” specially loaned to ICA by Target for our presentation of the show. Enrico Martignoni, Sheila’s son-in-law, has come all the way from France to install it.

At ten Sheila herself arrives, smiling and carrying bags. Enrico kisses her on both cheeks and greets her in French (she lives in Paris, even if she grew up in Nebraska). Sheila sets down one of her bags and takes out a small framed piece she has brought for the show: muted gray and white stripes, very much the mood of this cloudy, not quite spring day.

I introduce myself and explain that I’ll be poking around, waiting to see something interesting, but with Sheila there’s no need for waiting. She takes me by the arm and leads me over to a crate marked Stedelijk, Amsterdam. “The most interesting thing,” she says, “is here in this crate.” The work inside, she explains, used to hang in the entrance to the Stedelijk museum. “People who are forty and fifty come up to me and tell me this is the first work of art they ever saw,” she says. “Their parents would drag them to the museum, and they wouldn’t want to go, and there it would be when they went in! They’d go over and touch it, and it would be their friend.”

“You mean they’d sneak a touch?”

“There weren’t any guards in the front,” Sheila explains. “Just the ticket sellers.”

We look at the crate, on which are neatly printed the words: Trapeze de Cristobal. “It was named for my son,” Sheila says. “He and his friends would climb up it when it hung over the balcony in my studio, so I named it “Cristobal’s Trapeze.” When the curators at the Stedelijk wanted it, I took it over to the museum in duffel bags in an old Volvo station wagon. And now this crate! It’s a work of art. Wait till you see the inside—how beautiful.” The inside of the crate, she means.

Cristobal's Trapeze unpacked. Photo: J. Katz

The outside of the crate is pale and smooth, not so different in size itself than a Volvo station wagon. Sheila tells me it’s made of poplar—it took three poplar trees to make this crate! When she expressed her dismay to the people at the Stedelijk, they told her it was all right. “Poplar grows very fast,” they said. “We make our klompen out of it”—their wooden clogs.

Sheila says she always wanted to make things she could roll up and carry under her arm; but many of these works have been loaned by places like MoMA and the Met, so no one will be tossing them under any arm, or even so much as touching them without art handling gloves.

At noon, a young photographer on assignment to The New York Times shows up. He takes photographs of the crates; of Sheila sketching with rectangular crayons; of the crew starting install. Music plays quietly over the sound system. Some of the guys are sweeping the floor. They unfold plastic sheeting and tape it down with blue tape. Then Enrico and Isaac slit the heavy plastic around the colorful lifeboats and begin to unfurl the huge coiled snakes of linen thread.

“Flip it this way?” Isaac asks.

“Just twist it,” Enrico says.

“It’s kind of like a garden hose, you know?” Isaac says.

More like a fire hose! Or like an anaconda, or maybe a family of anacondas. One long tail of it stretches the entire length of the room.

At one o’clock, Enrico is 30 feet up in the air on the Genie. Somehow he has attached an end of one anaconda to the ceiling. It cascades down in indigo and green, olive and black. “It has to look like it’s coming down from the floor above,” Sheila says. “I want it to be part of the architecture.”

An hour later, four strands are dangling, a red and a brighter blue moving into green and black—underwater colors—and suddenly I see what the piece looks like. Not a hose, not a snake, but rather the tremendous tentacles of an unimaginably large sea creature whose body is hidden somewhere out of sight. Up on the next floor, I guess! The blues are sea water in and out of sunlight, the green is seaweed, the red is coral. The silvery gray bands are fish scales, or fragments of the fleshy skin of sharks. The dusky purple is the inside of an oyster shell.

Down on the ground, three men are wrestling with another tentacle. They twist it one way, then back the other way, lifting it high over their heads with their white gloved hands until they finally get it right. “There we go,” Paul says, and carefully they pile a heap of tentacles on a platform while Enrico gives directions, and Sheila smiles her inscrutable smile, and the photographer snaps away. The aquarium gallery grows still. Fifty years of work are condensed by a kind of dream-time into this single moment.

* * *

*Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, is organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art. The exhibition opens to the public at ICA on Thursday evening, March 24, at 6:00.

Uncredited photos above are of: Sheila Hicks, Variation of “May I Have This Dance?”, 2002-2003, dyed and twisted linen with cork and synthetic core. Courtesy of the artist and Target Corporation. Photos by J. Katz.

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The Anti-Penelope

November 23 2010

Silk bas relief for interior of Boeing 747 aircraft, Air France, 1969-1977. Silk on cotton canvas, 53 1/8 in. x 157 1/2 in. Private collection.

post by Rachel Pastan

Born in Hastings, Nebraska in 1934, but since 1963 a resident of Paris.

A student of painting who found her true artistic vocabulary in fiber.

Maker of objects ranging from large commissions for corporate offices to small memory bundles—sentimental objects wrapped in yarn.

These are all characteristics of the extraordinary fiber artist Sheila Hicks, whose life and work seem to contain enough contradictions, originality, and triumph to sustain an HBO mini-series or a long novel by Willa Cather. Right now, though, you’ll have to settle for a blog post.

ICA is preparing to host an exhibition of Hicks’s work, co-curated by Joan Simon and Susan Faxon for the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Sheila Hicks: 50 Years just opened at the Addison and won’t be on view at ICA until March 24, 2011, but Curator Jenelle Porter is working hard on it right now. She went up to Andover for the opening, and when she came back she said, “Everything was bigger or smaller than I thought it would be…so I had a lot of Christmas morning surprises.” Jenelle is organizing a series of lectures that explore weaving in relation to four cultural themes: the economy, the built environment, science, and religion. She’s also deciding how the show will work in our big open gallery, which is very different from the Addison’s small classical rooms. She has a three-dimensional model of ICA’s space, and her intern Grace has made miniatures of each of the pieces that will be in the exhibition to help Jenelle envision the possibilities. Here are some photos of the very cool model (though the work in it is that of painter Charline von Heyl, who is having an ICA show next September):

Photo: J. Katz

Some of Hicks’s work is small: flattish woolen weavings with names like “Zapallar” and “Rallo,” “She” and “Squiggle,” framed and hung on the walls. Some of it is made up of weavings piled in heaps or dangling from the ceiling. I love the name as well as the look of this one from 1969, rich with loops and wrappings: “The Principal Wife Goes On.”

The Principal Wife, 1968, bundled and wrapped linen, rayon and acrylic yarns, 100 in. x 80 in. x 8 in. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (Gift in memory of Mary Josephine Cutting Blair 2005.42)

Hicks has designed fabrics for Knoll furniture. She has designed weavings that hung in Air France airplanes, back when flying was more of a luxury thing. She sometimes uses found objects as her raw material, as in her 1986 installation with Man Ray, “patchworks of disassembled nurses blouses,” or “Raining Baby Bands” (1978), which is made of strips of cloth with which Swedish women wrap their babies’ bellies to encourage the belly buttons to go in. She has travelled all over the world, working in Mexico and Chile, India and Japan, collaborating with local textile artisans in their workshops, advising tire engineers about threads of stainless steel, and (always) making art. These various practices overlap, interweave, braid, maybe sometimes snag.

Not a lot of women born in 1934 managed to have careers, let alone become artists—let alone become artists of international stature. The ones who did mostly didn’t have children, but Hicks managed all of it. There’s a story here I want to tell, though I don’t know how much of it is true and how much I’m piecing together out of the snippets of biography and art and other people’s lives—my own found objects. A young girl grows up in the Plains during the Depression, learns to sew and crochet and knit—the tools she’ll need as a wife and mother in that time and place. But instead of staying in Nebraska and becoming a homemaker, she turns these tools to something else entirely—something large and gorgeous, something for corporations and museums, those twin kingdoms ruled by men!

Hicks’s work can be monumental, yet it is soft. Sometimes it hangs in skyscraper lobbies, and sometimes it’s made of baby bands. There’s both an expansive embrace here and also a firm refusal: the work encompasses many cultures and many approaches, and it declines to be categorized as either masculine or feminine, traditional or modernist, art or craft.

A strong woman using the loom to control the situation. A woman who has the patience to make this much work. Can Penelope help but come to mind? But Penelope never left Ithaca, and everything she did she did while thinking of Odysseus, and she spent almost as much time unweaving that famous shroud as she spent weaving it.

I’ve begun to think of Sheila Hicks as the anti-Penelope: weaving many rooms full of vivid, gorgeous, wonderfully useless objects. Instead of shrouds, they are celebrations.

* * *

ICA is grateful for primary sponsorship of Sheila Hicks: 50 Years from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, and for additional support from Elaine Hornick Finkelstein.

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