Sheila Hicks: Retrospective at Addison Gallery of American Art

Posted: 4 November, 2010.

The Addison Gallery is organizing a comprehensive traveling exhibition of the work of Sheila Hicks. Sheila Hicks: 50 Years marks the first museum retrospective devoted to this exceptional American artist. Co-curated by independent scholar Joan Simon and Addison curator Susan Faxon, the exhibition will open soon at the Addison Gallery and will be touring to various venues.

Born in Hastings, Nebraska in 1934 and a resident of Paris since 1964, Hicks is a pioneering figure noted for objects and public commissions whose structures are built of color and fiber. Independent in spirit and itinerant in practice, she deliberately and provocatively engages what are often considered mutually exclusive domains, rethinking and pushing the limits of generally accepted contexts, conditions, and frameworks. These include distinct objects and temporal, performative actions, studio works and commissions for public buildings, and textiles made in artisanal workshops or for industrial production in places as different from one another as Chile, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Sweden, and the United States.

The exhibition will address Hicks's conceptual, procedural, and material concerns via five distinct though intimately related fields of inquiry: miniature weavings and drawings, site commissions for public spaces, industrially produced textiles and workshop hand-productions, bas reliefs and sculptures, and, process works made of recuperated textiles, clothing and other found objects.