Posts Tagged ‘Jenelle Porter’

Same Paintings, Different Rooms: Charline von Heyl in Boston

May 4 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

For six months, from the fall well through the winter, the large, vibrant paintings of Charline von Heyl hung on the walls of the first-floor gallery at the ICA in Philadelphia. I remember peeking into the gallery as they were uncrating them, how even half unwrapped they caught and drew the eye with their great splashes and zigzags, their stripes and squiggles and harlequin diamonds, their cloudy, ambiguous orbs. These are big paintings, each one nearly seven feet tall, and the 17 of them on view in the exhibition here made the space vibrate with energy and color.

The other week, I had the opportunity to see the show at the ICA/Boston, where—pruned and reconfigured— it is currently on view. I wanted to see how different it would look in that quite different space. Would it be like seeing the same dress on two sisters? Like meeting an old friend after a long absence? Or perhaps it would be like revisiting a familiar city in a different season. (Note: There is no institutional relationship between the two ICAs.)

In Philadelphia, the gallery opens off a tall, sunlit lobby. Entering the show was like plunging into a pool: paintings all around you, a wealth of choices as to where to swim.

Philly view

Photo: Alex Klein

The works were generously separated, but in that big, open space you were always aware of more of them to your left and right, behind the partial walls, and all the way back in the depths of room. Color shimmered everywhere, calling out for you to look.

In Boston, you enter the show through a kind of anteroom, a narrow gallery with one painting on the left: Phoenix, with its swoop of red and its diamonds of blue and black, its white background and lozenges. Rather than plunging, one eases into the show, absorbing the fiery colors and bold shapes of Phoenix like a mountain climber pausing at base camp to get acclimated to the new air.

I pass through a doorway into the second room.

Photo: John Kennard. From left to right: It’s Vot’s Behind Me That I Am (Krazy Kat), 2010. Acrylic, oil on linen and canvas. 82 x 72 inches. Private collection, New York; courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; Yellow Guitar, 2010. Acrylic, oil and charcoal on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Private collection, New York; Alastor, 2008. Acrylic on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

The three paintings in here happen to be three of the von Heyl paintings I know best. I think of them as the drippy purple one, the bright yellow one with the knife, and the one with the squid shapes and the bloody hand prints. I’m happy to see them again after our months apart, but something is strange. I seem to see shapes and patterns I don’t remember: a curving ribbon of black triangles in the drippy purple one, inky tracings in the purple wash in the squid one. In fact, I don’t really remember the purple wash itself—I would have said it was more of a gray. I start to wonder—did I not look at the paintings as closely as I thought I had back in Philadelphia?

This feeling of unfamiliarity is intensified in the final room, where I spend a lot of time staring at a painting I don’t remember, wondering how I could have forgotten it (it turns out it wasn’t in the Philadelphia iteration of the show). I circle around a couple of times, eavesdropping on visitors, looking for Untitled (aka: Greetings), the favorite of the Philadelphia ICA’s guard, Linda, but it isn’t here. This show has fewer paintings than the Philadelphia version, which feels like a loss to me, except that I find myself looking more carefully at the paintings that are here, which feels like a gain. Because of the smaller size of the rooms, I’m standing closer to the paintings. I wonder if that’s why the colors look so different.

Photo: John Kennard. From left to right: Time Waiting, 2010. Acrylic and oil on linen. 82 x 78 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Solo Dolo, 2010. Oil and charcoal on linen. 82 x 74 inches. Private collection.

According to Jenelle Porter, the show’s curator, the lighting here—a filtered northern light from shaded skylights plus bulbs—has a huge impact on the way the show looks. “I think it’s the light that makes the show look like a jewel box,” she wrote me in an email. “Also, the galleries are very ‘white’ which really makes the color of the painting pop….But all in all, it’s the same show—we even hung the works in essentially the same relationships we established in Philly.”

Still, it’s the differences that stay with me. The word that keeps surfacing in my mind here in Boston is intimate. When I think back on the show in Philadelphia, I think electric, I think buzzing. I loved that electric, buzzing energy, and it was always a delight to wander through the gallery and visit the paintings on my way in to or out of work. But it’s here in Boston, for the first time, that I can imagine living with one.

* * *
Charline von Heyl is on view at ICA/Boston through July 15.

You can read more about Charline von Heyl here and here.

To sign up for Miranda‘s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Charline von Heyl: The right kind of frustration

February 17 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“When I went to Marfa last time,” Charline said, “I was totally burned out.” She was speaking at a program at ICA, where her survey exhibition Charline von Heyl, curated by Jenelle Porter, closes this Sunday. Charline spoke passionately and memorably about painting, abstraction, representation, desire, frustration, and how she began her newest body work, during a long stay at her studio in Marfa, Texas. It was one of most dynamic and generous lectures I’ve heard in a long time.

Installation view

Installation view. Photo: Aaron Igler / Greenhouse Media.

“I’m always fascinated by the stupidity of the painter,” Charline declared, meaning the way a painting grows out of small steps taken in the studio—out of doing things that might seem dumb at first glance but are necessary to awaken what she calls the right kind of frustration. This is the active frustration that leads to solving problems in paint, as opposed to the passive frustration that leads to nothing but sitting gloomily on the couch.

Not that sitting around on the couch can’t be a part of the process too. In Marfa, Charline did a lot of reading and looking at books, a lot of walking in the parched Texas landscape and whiskey-drinking and lonely mulling. Among the books she spent time with were catalogues of work by Willi Baumeister and Bernard Buffet. Of an early Buffet self-portrait she said, “It’s so weird and stubborn and awkward, but also right.” I think that’s one of the most profound compliments I’ve ever heard an artist give another.

Buffet self-portrait

Bernard Buffet, 1981

I love listening to artists talk about the work of other artists. It’s almost better than hearing them talk about their own art, maybe because the way they see the work of others isn’t clouded by desire or intention, insecurity or pride.

Or maybe, on the other hand, it’s precisely because their own particular artistic desires and intentions, insecurities and/or pride, make them see other artists’ work in ways the rest of us don’t.

One of my favorite parts of the talk was a discussion of the work of the figurative painter Dana Schutz—in particular, of Schutz’s 2007 portrait of Mike Kelley. “It’s visionary,” Charline said. “It takes you someplace.” Schutz, Charline suggested, imagined the figure (she worked without a photograph), then tweaked it: the fist is too small to be realistic, for example, and the elbow lines up conveniently with the edge of the canvas. “In abstraction,” she said, “it’s the same thing. I’m tweaking, too.” But, since she’s not working from an original in nature, the viewer can’t identify what she’s tweaking from: “You just feel the strangeness. It’s charged with something.”

"Daydreamer"

"Daydreamer," Dana Schutz, oil on canvas, 2007. Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

In relation to Buffet, Charline also said this: “I am interested in artists who are considered second rate, or third rate, because they get onto something, but then they get stuck repeating themselves.” Maybe this insight is part of Charline’s determination not to repeat herself. It is often said about her work that each painting is utterly different, a world in itself. Yet of course there are things that unify the work: her taste, the way she handles color, the way the scale of the paintings is an outgrowth of the size of her gestures. All these things are part of what she calls “a little of the red thread that runs through,” which I take to mean the continuity that comes from her singular hand: her singular self.

The other week, when curator Bennett Simpson was speaking at ICA, he said something interesting about inevitability. Whenever a mode of working, or an artist, becomes a major focus of the art world (Bennett said), that mode or person takes on an air of inevitability; but really, there is no inevitability. There are always a million things we might be talking about, so it’s worth asking what constellation of circumstances makes that one thing so present in the public imagination. He was referring to the incorporation of props and stagecraft in current art; but I’ve been thinking about the extent to which Charline von Heyl and her work have—apparently suddenly—sprung into the public imagination. Witness recent pieces on the painter in Artforum, Parkett, The Huffington Post, Art in America, and elsewhere, as well as a major upcoming exhibition at the Tate Liverpool.

It’s impossible to say how much of this sudden spotlighting is because of the nature of the current artistic moment, the reassessment of abstraction, the sheer fascination of the work itself, the painter’s personal charisma, specific serendipitous meetings, or anything else. But as we get ready to say goodbye to Charline von Heyl at ICA, I like to think we’ve been a star in that constellation.

*          *          *

Charline von Heyl is on view at ICA through Sunday, February 19. Don’t miss it!

From March 21 – July 8, you can see the show at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

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

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Miranda’s Birthday

May 12 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

When I started working at ICA in 2009, everyone agreed the museum needed a blog but no one wanted to write it. Poke around the web and you’ll find that almost every museum, large or small, has a blog these days, but for the most part reading them makes you think that the people who write them aren’t having much fun. You can find information in those pixels, but not a lot of inspiration or delight. As a former columnist, and also a novelist, I thought it would be nice to write a kind of online ICA column, made up of little essays and stories that not only described the cool stuff going on at ICA but also seriously explored the work of museums: what curators do, how art is moved around, even how money is raised. I also wanted it to be fun to read.

Luckily for me, ICA liked the idea. In a fit of inspiration, our director Claudia Gould named the blog after my recently deceased corn snake, Miranda. It seemed like a fine choice. The name is derived from the Latin word “mirare”—to admire—and can mean something worth looking at or deserving of admiration. It’s also a nice way to remember my snake.

The real Miranda, in a friend's pocket.

This month, we are celebrating Miranda’s first birthday!

Please send her your birthday wishes. You can use the comments field below for congratulations, compliments, and also suggestions for the coming year. You can post haiku, prose poems, anagrams, koans. Even better, send birthday flowers—or birthday mice!—by attaching images to an email care of me. If we get enough, we’ll post these in a special Miranda at the end of the month, with a free ICA catalog for the sender of the most inventive gift.

As an even better birthday tribute, email me to sign up for our Miranda mailing list, so we can let you know when there’s a new post.

Foil snake by Adam Blumberg. Photo: Robert Chaney

A year ago we published the first blog posts, about me trying to count the people coming in the door for the Queer Voice opening, why public programs are important, and what Chuck Close said in his roast of Lisa Yuskavage at our annual benefit. May is also the month of my own birth. There has been some confusion between me and Miranda, and for the most part that’s okay, as we do largely share one another’s opinions. Miranda is perhaps a little jauntier than I am, and occasionally more sentimental. Looking back over the year’s work, I see that I no longer manage to post twice a week (though only twice have I ever missed a week’s posting). On the other hand, my use of photographs is much improved. These days I try to make them part of the narrative, not just incidental decoration.

Cobra on Wood, by Nick Payne

I’ve been looking back over some of my favorite posts. I still really like the first one, which talks about my aspirations and gives a sense of daily ICA life:

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/video-art-replay/miranda-opening-3/

I’m fond of this one, that connects architect Anne Tyng to Odysseus’s Penelope:

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/anne-tyng/anne-tyng-platonic-solids-and-penelopes-bed/

and this one about the mystery of art crates:

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/mineral-spirits-anne-chu-and-matthew-monahan/big-truck-unloading/.

People really enjoyed these two, about departing staff members, Head Preparator Shannon Bowser and Curator Jenelle Porter:

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/miscellaneous/talk-to-the-boss/

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/curating-and-curators/778/

This one, about the de-installation of Virgil Marti’s exhibition, Set Pieces, is the silliest and most poetic:

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/set-pieces/elegy-for-an-exhibition/.

I hope you have enjoyed Miranda so far, and that you’ll continue to follow her.

Virtual coils
slithering through the white cube:
throw the doors open!

by Casey Watson

* * *

Snake images above (except the real Miranda) by members of ICA’s fabulous installation crew.

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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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Her Air

December 13 2010

Photo: Aaron Igler


post by Rachel Pastan

HER AIR

Today is the first day at ICA without Jenelle. After six years as a curator here, Jenelle Porter has moved on to a senior curator position at another ICA—ICA Boston. It’s funny, because we made T-shirts just last October saying: “My ICA Is Better Than Your ICA!” But along with the jokey competition there’s a wonderful sense that the whole world is made up of ICAs, like islands in a contemporary art archipelago, and that a person could step from one of them to another for a whole long, various career.

When I got to ICA in fall 2009, Jenelle’s Dance with Camera show was just going up. The first thing you saw as you entered the semi-dark space was a series of large Kelly Nipper photographs of a dancer with her arms curved above her head. Half concealed behind a latticed screen, the dancer’s form is broken into pixel-like bits, seeming to invite the viewer to see how the dancer and the dance are changed—hidden and revealed—by the processes of setting up and taking the photograph. Step further into the darkness: the hallways and open spaces and enclosed rooms filled with light and shadows. Enormous images loom, flickering on the walls, while intimate ones unspool just for you on monitors, some serious and intense, others funny, some enacted by professional dancers and others by playful amateurs. The hand of the curator, as always, is both invisible and everywhere. Most people seeing the show don’t think about her, don’t know her name, but the experience they have and the ideas that spring into their heads as they walk through the rooms are shaped by her vision, her excitement, her education, and her hard work. The air in the room is her air.

Jenelle installing. Photo: Conny Purtill

Though visitors down in the galleries might not be quite aware of Jenelle’s presence, upstairs in the offices you always knew when she was around. Opinionated and outspoken, with a confident speaking voice and a loud, frequent laugh, it was no secret when Jenelle liked something, when she didn’t like something, and when she thought it was time for a meeting to be over. At Jenelle’s last staff meeting, ICA director Claudia Gould reviewed her career at ICA, asking about the show she was most proud of (Dance with Camera); the hardest show (Trisha Donnelly—“It was as great to do as it was challenging, we installed one wall of work for two weeks!”); the most surprisingly successful show (Locally Localized Gravity). In addition, Jenelle coordinated ICA publications, worked with her husband Conny Purtill to redesign ICA’s lobby and signage, served on the museum’s strategic planning committee, and on the search committee for the Department of the History of Art’s new contemporary art professor, Kaja Silverman. Claudia said, “You contributed exactly what I hoped. I couldn’t have asked for anything better.”

What I’ll remember most about Jenelle is her attitude that things are doable, that the fact that something is hard is no reason not to go ahead: ambitious exhibitions, long curatorial essays, and smaller things too. That first fall I told her I wanted to go to some of the evening screenings that were part of Dance with Camera, but that I couldn’t because I had to get home to my kids. “Just bring them!” she said. I didn’t, which I still regret. The next spring, after lending me Anne Truitt’s fabulous memoir of an artist’s life, Daybook, she told me Truitt was having a (posthumous) show in New York and that I should go see it. Again I said I couldn’t: New York was too far, I had family responsibilities. “It’s not that far!” she said. “Just go!” So I went. I’ll never forget that exhibition, the vibrant stillness of those tall simple sculptures, the feeling of them so unlike what I had guessed from the photographs. Thanks, Jenelle, for that.

One day last year, Jenelle mentioned to me that she’d been to a presentation of curators reading their manifestos. She didn’t have a manifesto, but she was going home to write one. Last week I asked her if she would share it with me, and with her permission I’m passing on a few highlights here:

• Encourage false constructs and arranged marriages
• Prod artists to get outside their own head/aesthetic/mannerisms
• Say yes until you absolutely have to say no
• Mentor your audience
• Make good design
• Be timely, but lead with your gut
• Fail better
• Don’t take art too seriously, but believe that art can change the world

Good luck on your new island, Jenelle! We’ll think of you on your new part of the archipelago, encouraging, prodding, mentoring, laughing, leading with your gut, and helping art change the world.

* * *

Just because Jenelle Porter is moving to Boston doesn’t mean you’ve lost your chance to see her exhibitions in Philadelphia. She will be back in March to install Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, an extraordinary exhibition of one of the world’s foremost fiber artists (organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art), and she is continuing to work on her Charline Von Heyl exhibition, which will open at ICA next fall.

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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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