Pillar of Inquiry- Supple Column

source: whitneyorg
This cascading installation is one of the most massive produced by Sheila Hicks since she began working with textiles, or “supple materials” as she refers to her medium, in the late 1950s. As with many of her other large-scale works, Hicks designed the piece with the architecture of the gallery in mind. Of interest to her here are the coffered, open design of the ceiling and the sense of solidity she found in the stone floor. By extending the cords so they unfurl from the ceiling and coil on the floor, she hopes to activate viewers’ awareness of these architectural elements.

Trained as a painter, Hicks became interested in global, and particularly South American, textile traditions, going on to develop her distinctive merger of painting, sculpture, drawing, and weaving. For her, the way that the richly colored lines of her pieces move and intersect is a form of drawing in three dimensions.

Also on view in the Biennial are four smaller works by Hicks, made from threads of silk, paper, pineapple fiber, and cotton.
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source: architecturaldigest
It’s hard to believe that Sheila Hicks will turn 80 this year. The globe-trotting fiber artist is featured in several international exhibitions, including the 2014 edition of the Whitney Biennial in New York and L’État du ciel, an installation opening April 25 at the Palais de Tokyo. Fans can also view pieces by Hicks in “L’Almanach 14,” a group show at Le Consortium—the art museum in Dijon, France that was recently renovated by Pritzker Prize winner Shigeru Ban—and at the Biennial of Contemporary Art in Cartagena, Colombia.

The study of architecture and a fascination with artisanal crafts are at the crux of Hicks’s work, as she plays off of gallery spaces with gorgeous woven sculptures. Her interest in design was established years ago with commissions installed in iconic buildings by legendary architects—Eero Saarinen’s CBS headquarters and TWA terminal in New York City, for example, as well as the Ricardo Legoretta–designed Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. For this year’s Biennial—the last to be held in the Whitney’s Breuer building—Hicks created Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column, a 17-foot-long mass of threads cascading from the coffered ceiling to the stone floor below. “Strictly speaking, I don’t consider myself a weaver, even though I draw from a vast vocabulary of weaving technology,” Hicks says of her many fiber constructions. Even so, the installation for the Whitney was labored over with the same meticulous dedication as any traditional weaver’s work. It traveled to workshops on three continents during construction, where painstaking twisting techniques were used to alternately tighten and release tension on the pigmented threads.

New York in particular has seen a lot of Hicks this year. In addition to her work at the Biennial, two of the artist’s early woven compositions are also featured at Demisch Danant gallery: Ribbons, composed of cotton mounted on bamboo, and Prayer Rug, which is made of wool, mohair, and gold thread. With pieces ranging from the 1960s to the present, these exhibitions demonstrate Hicks’s continued, prolific devotion to textiles-as-sculpture.
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source: denadadesign
Sheila Hicks has been a pioneer in the fiber arts for over 50 years, and we at DeNada greatly admire her work. Originally trained as a painter, Hicks blurs the boundary between painting and sculpture with her vibrant woven textile works. Globally recognized with exhibitions traveling around the world, Hicks has definitely been an inspiration in world of fiber arts.
Hicks was born in 1934 in Hastings, Nebraska and holds both a BFA and a MFA in painting from Yale University. In 1957, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to paint for one year in Chile. During her time in South America, she was introduced to the world of textiles where she developed her interest in working with fibers. Traveling to Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, Hicks explored and researched the artisanal fabrics native to these countries. Ever since, Hicks has been merging painting with vibrant textiles, sculpture, and weaving.
Now at 80, Hick’s most recent work in the U.S. include Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column at the Whitney Biennial – a 17 foot long mass of threads cascading from the ceiling to floor. Hicks designed the piece with the architecture of the gallery in mind and hoped to activate the viewers’ awareness of the architectural elements of the building. The inspiration of this piece came from the coffered, open design of the ceiling in the building and the sense of solidity she found in stone stone floor. Last year Hicks also remade two monumental works at the Ford Foundation in Manhattan which was originally installed in 1967. Each piece comprised of over 500 medallions made with an understated, honey-colored thread. Due to the natural wear and tear of the fibers with irreversible damage, Hicks decided to redo the piece despite many people advising her against it.
Hicks has been widely exhibited through out her 50 plus years as an artist. In 2010, a retrospective exhibition of her career Sheila Hicks: 50 Years debuted at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Massachusetts and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA, and Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. With over half a century of work recognized around the world, Hicks is an artist we truly look up to. Though Hicks has never considered herself a weaver, her meticulous dedication and knowledge to working with fibers is something we admire.