The Song of the Loom: Sheila Hicks / 50 years

by Phillip Larrimore

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Picture by Mint Museum

January 17, 2012

A retrospective at the Mint Museum through January 29

I once owned a piece of Incan gauze that had been unearthed from the sands of the Andean high desert after 600 years. It depicted mythical animals—llamas, perhaps--copulating in geometrical bliss. Such objects had been elevated from ethnographica to art due to the efforts and advocacy of such pre-Columbian specialists as Pal Kelemen, Raoul d’Harcourt, and George Kubler, author of The Shape of Time, who taught Sheila Hicks at Yale. Kubler was intent on developing a grammatology of forms, one which include writing, implements, pottery, and weaving as well as the traditional "fine arts." It was under his tutelage - and with the encouragement of the textile artist Anni Albers - that Hicks explored the villages of Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru in a time when travel was much less easy than it is now. And it is why - if one flashes forward 50 years - that the Mint Museum features on the wall of its grand atrium a work, “Mega Footprint Near the Hutch,” which is not only a 50-foot wall sculpture but also probably the world's largest construct of post-Columbian Incan braid.

Viewing it is an occasion for wonder. What is it, first of all? An object which is both like and unlike a painting and a sculpture in which color and shape rival each other for our attention, appearing differently from each angle at which it is viewed. The material is a handcrafted linen thread dipped in handcrafted dyes and wound around the cladding used to insulate plumbing. I attempted a count of the components, but this was about as fruitless as trying to count the leaves of a tree.

This is the fourth incarnation of this particular work, which began in an entirely different configuration, as horizontal as this is vertical, for the Target headquarters. Photographs of the different versions confirm a sense that Hicks uses her braiding as a device with which to draw in space, much like Eva Hesse or Fred Sandback but in a different hand, and with altogether a more resonant relationship to color. There is a continual interplay that never quite balances between the cool and warm colors. None is dominant, but appear instead to converse among the others. This ability to make color interact shiftingly, was one which Hicks learned under the master of color interaction, Josef Albers, who also taught at Yale. It is Alber's peculiar wizardry to put one color next to another in order to create a third color - and a fourth - which exists only in the eye of the beholder. This form of visual reverberation is one which Hicks exploits craftily.

The remaining works of the Mint retrospective form a strong case for Hicks as a major artist. The small work - and some is the size of a vest pocket - is presented intimately enough to be studied; the larger work is given space to breathe. I inwardly classified the smaller pieces as haiku, grids, or "rabbits out of the hat" --the last term might apply to a palm-sized piece made of rubber bands, or another of buttoned collars. The grids are small but powerful studies in subtle syncopation. All combine a (literally) homespun quality with great technical panache. They are large, small objects which belie their scale with their sense of heft, like one of Josef Alber's Homages to the Square, or a building by Louis Kahn. Though small, they "read" across a room.

The large works might be described as vulnerable monuments. They are remindful that Hicks - like Eva Hesse - was part of a generation of women artists who eschewed male heroics for a different kind of recognition of birth and death. It seems to say that awkwardness is something to be lived with, that beauty may be found in awkwardness if it is not automatically transcended or surmounted. Hence Hicks’s “Menhir,” like a haystack too resolute to be abject. Unlike Hesse, Hicks’s work also conveys a great deal of joie de vivre as well as ambivalence. Whether large or small, they typically read as craft, albeit craft of a high order, until one notices some little hook or deliberate “glitch" which leads to a greater complexity of meaning, a little like a slant rhyme in a poem by Emily Dickinson.

Which would I choose for myself? There are the sculptural “wall reliefs” which make a kind of visual fugue with tassels. There are the "Battle" series, linen stitched into parchment, as witty as Paul Klee. But the object that I woefully covet is the “Banisteriopsis,” an undulating mound of Hicks’s "ponytails" (picture a huge ribbon made of thousands of ponytails, which can be folded or unfolded in a number of different ways and you get the general idea). From some angles, it resembles the buttes of Monument Valley, from others the inner rill of a mushroom. The first “Banisteriopsis” I saw - in a collection in Montreal - was in dark purples and aubergines, but the one at the Mint is in Titians, Russets, Irish-setter, squash, and pumpkin colors, and seems to grow in complexity as one looks at it, like a hallucinatory landscape.

The retrospective is much more than this, and if you haven't seen it, I would hasten to do so, for it is up only until January 29th. Looking at it, I thought of how often weaving has been a metaphor for thought - think of Ariadne’s thread leading through the labyrinth or Penelope weaving her tapestry by day and unweaving it by night. Our computers began when Charles Babbage applied the hole-punched coding of the Jacquard looms to numbers back in the 1840s, but it was Hicks who elevated weaving arts to something kin to sculpture, painting - and lyric poetry.

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Also at the Mint...

Overlapping the Hicks show at the Mint is Jun Kaneko: In the Round which features the work of this Japanese born, Nebraska-based ceramist/sculptor and designer of Opera Carolina's upcoming production of Madama Butterfly, which promises to be a thing of beauty. The studies for the sets and costumes are now up at the Mint as part of the exhibition. A large Kaneko piece will soon partner the Bechtler's Niki de St. Phalle “Firebird” in the square of the arts campus. Meanwhile, on opposite sides of the Mint's grand atrium are two Kaneko ceramic vases, tall as the body guards of Peter the Great, which manage to be both subtle and grand.