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SHEILA HICKS: WEAVING TO THE WORLD

by

Grant Klarich Johnson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
ART HISTORY

August 2021

Copyright 2021 Grant Klarich Johnson
ii
Acknowledgements
Meditating on the power of higher education and museums as this project seeks to do, I
am grateful to the institutional homes I have moved between, all of which have afforded space to
think and write, to ask questions of institutions by helping to realize them. I am grateful for the
always warm, family feeling of the University of Southern California and the greater world of
Los Angeles, where I was honored to be regarded as a valued interlocuter and intellectual equal.
There, this project was generously supported by the Department of Art History, USC Graduate
School, the Del Amo Foundation, the Visual Studies Research Institute, and USC Fisher
Museum of Art. There, I appreciated the mentorship of Selma Holo and Ariadni Liokatis, and the
friendship of Selin Camli who all opened doors from Spain to Istanbul. I am grateful to all in the
Department of Art History, and particularly for the opportunity to think, learn, and teach in the
company of Samuel Adams, Susanna Berger, Jennifer Greenhill, Sonya Lee, Dina Murokh,
Vittoria di Palma, Lisa Pon, Aaron Rich, Vanessa Schwartz, and Ann Marie Yasin.
I chose a project that would take me places, both imagined and real. One of its greatest
pleasures has been going there and discovering worlds, new textures and tangles I could never
have anticipated from afar. I am deeply grateful for the accessibility of archives and artworks at
the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art at The
University of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Archives of American Art, the
Museo Amparo, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée des Arts
Décoratifs, the Palace of Versailles, the Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert, the Cleveland
Museum of Art, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Sikkema Jenkins gallery, and Yale
University. I am grateful for the warm welcome and the kind of unexpected conversations with
experts of all kinds one has beside collection files and artworks. Thanks as such to Elissa Auther,

iii
Frédéric Bonnet, Sascha Feldman, Scott Briscoe, Danielle Cardoso Schaeffer, Elizabeth Agro,
Juliet Kinchin, Michelle Millar Fisher, Margriet Schavemaker, Nicholas Fox Weber, Melina
Moe, Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye, and John Stuart Gordon. At various stages, this project has been
secured as well by the generosity of the Association of Historians of American Art, the Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation, The Frick Collection, and the Performa biennial. The generosity of
the Nasher Sculpture Center brought me to Texas more than once, where I was pleased to meet
and learn from Leigh Arnold and Lucia Simek among others.
Before USC, I was a student at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
I remain indebted to the teaching and writing of Claire Bishop, Romy Golan, David Joselit,
Briony Fer, Hal Foster, and Leah Dickerman. The first seeds of my future in art history were
sown at Kenyon College by Melissa Dabakis. Meanwhile I learned how to make meaning
through making from Karen Snouffer, Marcella Hackbardt, Barry Gunderson, and the late Jake
Adam York, a friend for life. In the past year, Jennifer Clarvoe and Jesse Matz have returned
once again as generous friends and readers. Thanks to Anna Duke Reach, who also buys the
flowers herself.
I am grateful for the camaraderie and intellectual richness of the Joan Tisch Teaching
Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where I have learned much from Vivian
Crockett, Janine DeFeo, Ayanna Dozier, Joshua Lubin-Levy, and Aliza Shvarts. Artists,
intellectuals, activists, they make it all one. Thanks to Ellen Tepfer, Emma Quaytman, Anne
Byrd, and Kathryn Potts for giving me a foothold in New York, and gifting me with the
unbelievable intimacy of a life with art and endlessly curious audiences. I am also grateful for
new thoughts about the work at hand afforded by Megan Heuer, Andrew Hawkes, Hakimah

iv
Abdul-Fattah, Midrene Lamy, Laura Protzel, Monica Sekaquaptewa, Elena Ketelsen González,
Sasha Wortzel, David Breslin, and old friend Roxanne Smith.
As a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this project’s
archive became richer, its stakes, deeper. So many helped me ask bigger questions and learn new
histories, including Christine Giuntini, Joanne Pillsbury, James Doyle, Adrienne Spinozzi, Sylvia
Yount, Amelia Peck, Eva Labson, Elena Kanagy-Loux, and Eva DeAngelis-Glasser. Thanks to
Sheena Wagstaff, Pari Stave, Ian Alteveer, Brinda Kumar, Stephanie D’Alessandro, Claire
Davies, Sabine Rewald, and Elizabeth Doorly, for making a home for me (and fiber) in M&C,
and for many conversations at the copy machine. I miss Sean O’Hanlan, Meredith Brown, Hilary
Whitman Sánchez, Abbe Scriber, Marissa Vigneault, Horatio Joyce, Nicole Coffineau, and
Jeroen Luyckx, who made the fellowship into friendship. Thank god for Kelly Baum, who
provided expert counsel amid both calm and crisis.
Thanks to those who answered my emails and entertained my questions, welcoming me
into their homes and their pasts. I will never forget afternoons with Monique Levi-Strauss and
Barbara Chase-Riboud, who underscored how many stories there are to tell. Acknowledgements
are due, of course, to one in particular, without whom there would be no such project. Thanks to
Sheila Hicks, for blazing a trail for me to follow.
I am honored by the generosity of my dissertation committee, Jenni Sorkin, Megan Luke,
Amy Ogata, and Nancy Lutkehaus who each contain multitudes. Thanks to Suzanne Hudson for
advising me all the way, from Chelsea to Cambridge, I am endlessly inspired by your tireless
enthusiasm for new words and ideas. Thanks for opening your mind, home, and heart to me.
Thanks to family and friends for keeping a world beyond art history going. I am glad I
left Los Angeles, if only because it brought old friends like Nadiah Rivera Fellah and Maria

v
Quinata ever closer. Thanks to Hally, Cate, Bri, Max, Kate, Jae, Lucy, Oona, Jeanie, Rachel and
all the rest in the indefatigable Kenyon circle. A toast to Frances Lazare and Isabel Wade, who
make it fun. Another for Joumana Khatib for taking me to dinner and telling me your side of the
story. Where would I be without the wide mind and patient heart of Gill Gualtieri, who still
dreams. Thanks to Hampton Smith, a stabilizing force, who helps me see the past in the present,
the present in the past, and a future too. I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, Mary Jane
Klarich Jr. and Alan Johnson, and my sister Hannah—who were always with me.

vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………….. ii

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………... vii

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………..….. xiv

Introduction: Biennale/Biennial………….……………………...………………………………. 1

Chapter 1: “This Man’s University”: Josef Albers, George Kubler, and The New Art School,
1954-57……………………………………………………………………………... 33

Chapter 2: “My Great Teachers”: Anni Albers, Andean Textiles, and the World in Miniature,
1957-1959…………...………………………………………………….........……... 87

Chapter 3: “Some exotic girl”: Letters from Mexico and The Value of Difference from a
Distance, 1959-1964………………………………………………………………. 130

Chapter 4: “Homeless Orphans”: Sculpture Dislocated, 1964-1989………………………….. 185

Chapter 5: “Inspired and ‘happy’”: Collaborations, Corporations, 1964-2004…….……….… 253

Coda: Goodbye to All That………..…………………………………………………...……… 299

Figures…………………………………………………………………………………………..311

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….…….. 410

vii
List of Figures
(in order of appearance)

Fig. 56: Sheila Hicks, Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands, 2017, Venice Biennale…………...314

Fig. 20: Sheila Hicks, Taxco-Iquala, 1954. As pictured in Sheila Hicks: Free Threads, 53..…315

Fig. 21: Alexander von Humboldt, Chimborazo seen from the Tapia Plateau, Voyage of
Humboldt and Bonpland, 1810. British Library, London, UK…………………………316

Fig. 22: Sheila Hicks, Parque Forestal, 1957. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 89……..317

Fig. 23: Sheila Hicks, Zapallar, 1957. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 85……………...318

Fig. 24: Sheila Hicks, Snow Garden, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks: Free Threads, 39…..319

Fig. 25: Sheila Hicks, Rallo, 1957. As pictured in Rallo, 1957………………………………...320

Fig. 26: Albers and Hicks in Yale classroom, mid 1950s. As pictured in Sheila Hicks 50 Years,
228………………………………...……………………………………………………………...321

Fig. 27-31: Look 14, no. 9, April 25, 1950. As pictured in Yale University, Memorabilia:
Scrapbook Documenting the School of Fine Arts and the School of Art. Yale University
Archives, New Haven,
Connecticut...............................................................................................................322-326
Fig. 32a: Sheila Hicks, Andean Textile Art, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks 50 Years, 49.....327

Fig. 32b: Andean Textile Art, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks 50 Years, 48...........................328

Fig. 33a: Sheila Hicks, Andean Textile Art, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks Free Threads,
135...................................................................................................................................329

Fig 33b: Sheila Hicks, Andean Textile Art, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks Free Threads, 135.
..........................................................................................................................................330

Fig 34: Sheila Hicks, Andean Textile Art, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks Free Threads, 135.
..........................................................................................................................................331

Fig. 53: Ernest Boyer, Sheila Hicks in her studio at Yale, 1958. As pictured in Sheila Hicks Free
Threads, 29......................................................................................................................332

Fig. 52: Sheila Hicks, Chonchi, Chiloe, 1958. As pictured in Sheila Hicks Weaving as Metaphor,
91.....................................................................................................................................333

Fig. 53: Sheila Hicks. Chonchi, Chiloe, 1957. Sheila Hicks 50 Years, 154................................334

viii
Fig. 37: Sergio Larrain, Sheila Hicks in Chonchi, Chiloe, 1958. As pictured in Free Threads,
168. ..................................................................................................................................335

Fig. 38: Sheila Hicks, Sergio Larrain in Chonchi, Chiloé, Chile, 1958. As pictured in Free
Threads, 169. ..................................................................................................................336

Fig. 54: Ernest Boyer, photograph of Sheila Hicks with her MFA show, 1959. As pictured in
Sheila Hicks 50 Years, 53................................................................................................337

Fig. 40: Sheila Hicks, Muñeca, 1957. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 81........................338

Fig. 41: Sheila Hicks. Bonsai Tapestry, ca. 1986. Cotton, rayon, 9 1/2 × 5 1/8 in. (24.1 × 13 cm).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Edward Merrin, 1990 (1990.271).................339

Fig. 42: Sheila Hicks. Écailles, 1976. Silk, wool, razor clam shells, 26 1/2 × 8 1/4 in. (67.3 × 21
cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Melvin L. Bedrick Gift, 1989
(1989.29). ........................................................................................................................340

Fig. 43: Krishna and the Gopis on the Bank of the Yamuna River, ca. 1775-80. Opaque
watercolor and gold on paper; dark blue border with red inner rules, 6 3/8 × 10 1/8 in.
(16.2 × 25.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Steven Kossak, The Kronos
Collections, 2017 (2017.736). .........................................................................................341

Fig. 44: Bichtir. Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings from the St. Petersburg Album, ca.
1615-1618. Opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper, 9 15/16 x 7 1/16 in (25.3 x 18
cm). National Museum of Asian Art, Purchase — Charles Lang Freer Endowment
(F1942.15a). ....................................................................................................................342

Fig. 45: False Face for Funerary Bundle, 3rd century B.C.–A.D. 1st century. Cotton, paint, 15
1/2 x 9 in. (39.37 x 22.86 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Lee F. Barash,
2016 (2016.703). .............................................................................................................343

Fig. 46: Sergio Larrain and Sheila Hicks with her painting at Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago de
Chile, 1958. As pictured in Free Threads, 175. ..............................................................344

Fig. 47: Sheila Hicks. Rallo, 1957. Wool, 9 1/2 × 5 1/8 in. (24.1 × 13 cm). Cooper-Hewitt,
National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York, Museum purchase from
the General Acquisitions Endowment Fund. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor,
87......................................................................................................................................345

Fig. 48: Sheila Hicks. Parque Forestal, ca. 1957. Wool, 9 5/8 × 6 3/4 in. (24.5 × 17 cm). Itaka
M. Schlubach. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 89................................................346

Fig. 49: Sheila Hicks. An Acre of Rainforest, 1989. Silk, handspun wool, cotton, 8 1/4 × 6 1/4 in.
(21 × 16 cm. Collection of the artist................................................................................347

ix
Fig. 50: Sheila Hicks. Dégringolade, 1971. Cotton, wool, silk. 8 5/8 × 6 3/4 in. (22 × 17 cm).
Collection of the artist. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 169.................................348

Fig. 51: Sheila Hicks. Mogador, ca. 1966. Cotton, silk. 9 1/2 × 5 1/2 in. (24 × 14 cm). Suzy
Langlois. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 153.......................................................349

Fig 55: Sheila Hicks, Faja II, Faja III (belts), 1956. As pictured in 50 Years, 52......................350

Fig. 55a: Contemporary Sara belt and historic Incan comparison, as pictured in Lynn A. Meish,
“The Murúa Code,” Natural History magazine,
https://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/112333/the-mur-a-code, accessed June 8,
2021..................................................................................................................................351

Fig. 1: Faith Stern, Sheila Hicks Weaving with a backstrap loom, Mitla, 1961. As pictured in
Free Threads, 173. ..........................................................................................................352

Fig. 2: Faith Stern, Sheila Hicks weaving on a backstrap loom in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1960. As
pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 53..............................................................................353

Fig 3: Weaver with Back-Strap Loom and Birds, A.D. 600–900, Mexico, probably Campeche,
Jaina Island, Maya. Yale University Art Museum...........................................................354

Fig 4: Faith Stern, Learning to Knot with Rufino Reyes, Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1961. As
pictured in Free Threads, 192..........................................................................................355

Fig 5: “A Weaver of Santa Cruz…” from “Weavers of the World,” National Geographic,
1919..................................................................................................................................356

Fig 6: “Outdoor Weaving in Sunny Mexico,” from “Weavers of the World,” National
Geographic, 1919............................................................................................................357

Fig 7: “Weaving a Burnoose,” from “Neolithic Folk Today,” Life, 1956...................................358

Fig 8: “A Chichicastenango Weaver…,” National Geographic, 1947........................................359

Fig. 9: “A Chakma’s Featherweight Loom…,” from National Geographic, 1955.....................360

Fig. 10: “Ignoring passers-by,” from National Geographic, 1961..............................................361

Fig. 11: Tenancingo, 1960 as displayed as part of Weavings by Sheila Hicks, Art Institute of
Chicago, 1963. As pictured in Lifelines, 127...................................................................362

Fig. 12: Richard Serra, Photograph in Life, Feb. 27, 1970: "Fling, Dribble and Dip"................363

Fig. 13: Sheila Hicks, Solferino Tacubayo, 1963. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 103...364

x
Fig. 14: Sheila Hicks, Catholic nuns walking in front of the San Vicente de Paul chapel
(designed by architect Félix Candela), under construction in Colonia Coyoscán, Mexico
City, 1959. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 355....................................................365

Fig. 15: Sheila Hicks, Weaver Rufino Reyes, 1961. As pictured in Free Threads, 20-21...........366

Fig. 16: Marc Riboud, Hicks in the Weaving Workshop, 1961. As pictured in Free Threads, 6-
7........................................................................................................................................367

Fig. 17: Sheila Hicks, Taxco El Viejo, 1960. As pictured in Lifelines, 48...................................368

Fig. 18: Sheila Hicks, Amarillo, 1960. As pictured in Lifelines, 47............................................369

Fig. 17: Sheila Hicks, Luis Barragan and Mathias Goeritz, Casa Barragan, 1962-3. As pictured
in 50 years, 163................................................................................................................370

Fig. 18: Sheila Hicks, Blue Letter, 1959. As pictured in 50 Years, 13........................................371

Fig. 17: Ferdinand Bosch, photograph of Sheila Hicks working on Solferino Tacubayo at home
in Taxco El Viejo, Mexico, 1960-61. As pictured in 50 Years, 159................................372

Fig 57: Sheila Hicks, Tenancingo, 1960. Yale University Art Gallery.......................................373

Fig. 64: Funereal hair wreath, ca. 1860, Presque Isle Historical Society,
https://www.mainememory.net/artifact/98916................................................................374

Fig. 59: Sheila Hicks, The Evolving Tapestry: He/She, 1967-8. The Museum of Modern Art,
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/3819................................................................375

Fig. 61: Sheila Hicks, The Evolving Tapestry, 1968, linen and silk. As pictured in Wall
Hangings, Museum of Modern Art, n.p...........................................................................376

Fig. 60: “Wall Hangings” [installation view], 1969, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Pictured from far left to center right are, White Letter, Prayer Rug, The Principal Wife,
and The Evolving Tapestry: He/She. The Museum of Modern Art exhibitions archive,
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1800?locale=en........................................377

Fig. 62: Sheila Hicks, Bamian (Banyan), 1968-2002, wool and acrylic 102 3/8 x 102 3/8". As
pictured in 50 Years, 69...................................................................................................378

Fig. 74: Beatrice Garvan with The Principal Wife, 1971, Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection
Files..................................................................................................................................379

Fig. 63: Mantle ( “The Paracas Textile” ), 100-300 C.E. The Brooklyn Museum,
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/48296..................................380

xi
Fig. 65: Sheila Hicks, The Principal Wife, 1968. Rhode Island School of Design Museum......381

Fig. 67: “Hicks’s son Cristobal Zañartu and daughter Itaka Schlubach in their grandparents’
garden in Northfield, Illinois with elasticized cords that were the model of Hicks’s
commission for the Hyatt Hotel, O’Hare Airport, 1969.” As pictured in Sheila Hicks: 50
Years, 231. ......................................................................................................................382

Fig. 66: Sheila Hicks, Huaquen, 1967. As pictured in Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, 177...................383

Fig. 68: Willoughby Wallace Hooper (English, 1837 - 1912), Banyan Tree Moul Ally, about
1870, Albumen silver print. J. Paul Getty Museum.........................................................384

Fig. 69: Detail of The Principal Wife captured by Beatrice Garvan. Philadelphia Museum of Art
Collection Files................................................................................................................385

Fig. 70: Eliot Porter, Strangler Fig Roots, Everglades National Park, Florida, 1954. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art...........................................................................................386

Fig. 71: Installation diagram for The Evolving Tapestry: He/She. Department of Architecture and
Design Collections Files, The Museum of Modern Art...................................................387

Fig. 72: Sheila Hicks, Banisteriopsis II, 1965-66/2010. The Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston. ............................................................................................................................388

Fig. 75: Jean and Franc Shor. “From Sea to Sahara in French Morocco: Jet Planes Lace Vapor
Trails over Modern Farms, but in the Markets of Marrakech You Can Buy an Evil Eye
for Three Centes.” National Geographic, February 1955...............................................389
Fig. 78: Sheila Hicks, Sorting Wool, Rabat, Morocco, c. 1970-71. As pictured in Lifelines, 131..
..........................................................................................................................................390

Fig. 76: Sheila Hicks, Sorting Coconut Fiber, Calicut, India, 1966. As pictured in Lifelines, 128.
..........................................................................................................................................391

Fig 76a: "Ethiopia's Artful Weavers," National Geographic Magazine,
January 1973. ..............................................................................................................................392

Fig 76b: Sheila Hicks, Commonwealth Trust, Kozhikode, Kerala, India, 1966. As pictured in
Weaving as Metaphor, 367..............................................................................................393

Fig. 77: Sheila Hicks, Arterior Workshop, Wuppertal, Germany, 1967. As pictured in Lifelines,
129....................................................................................................................................394

Fig. 79: Beliko Oksana, El Molo huts, Lake Turkana, Kenya. Viewed July 2017,
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/el-molo-huts-lake-turkana-kenya-127474349.
..........................................................................................................................................395

xii

Fig 79a: Pyramid of the Magician, Uxmal, 560...........................................................................396

Fig. 72: Sheila Hicks, Banisteriopsis II, 1965-66/2010.
Photo: https://www.galeriefrankelbaz.com/328/news-hicks-revolution-in-the-making-abstract-
sculpture-by-women-1947-2016......................................................................................397

Fig. 19: Sheila Hicks, Inca suit, 1964. As pictured in 50 Years, 101..........................................398

Fig. 20: Sheila Hicks, Inca samples, 1966. Art Institute of Chicago...........................................399

Fig. 21: Sheila Hicks, Prayer Rug, 1966 as installed at Blackrock, CBS building. As pictured in
50 Years, 62.....................................................................................................................400

Fig. 22: Marc Riboud, Le Tapis Mural de Sheila Hicks, National Gallery, Rabat, Morocco, 1971.
As pictured in 50 Years, 232. ..........................................................................................401

Fig. 26: Sheila Hicks, The Silk Rainforest, 1972. The Smithsonian American Art Museum......402

Fig. 23: Sheila Hicks, La Mémoire, IBM Paris, 1972. As pictured in Sheila Hicks, 50 Years, 87..
..........................................................................................................................................403

Fig 24: H.J. Sommer III, Magnetic core storage - detail.
Source: Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Magnetic-core storage." Encyclopedia Britannica,
June 28, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/technology/magnetic-core-storage.............404

Fig. 25: Sheila Hicks, Labryrinth of Communication, 1990-91. Minneapolis Institute of Art....405

Fig. 27: Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The Spirit of Communication, 1914 (also known as “Golden
Boy.”). Image via: “Spirit of Electricity,” accessed February 2021,
https://glassian.org/Paper/spiritofcomm.html..................................................................406

Fig. 18: Letter from Sheila Hicks on studio stationery, 1988. Art Institute of Chicago Textile
Collection Files................................................................................................................407

Fig. 19: Detail from Palm Tree tapestry, 1984-5 (photograph by author). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.................................................................................................................408

Fig. 75: Sheila Hicks, Four Seasons of Mount. Fuji, 1992-3. As pictured in 50 Years, 143.......409

Fig. 76: Sheila Hicks, May I Have This Dance, 2002-3 (still from video by Cristobal Zañartu),
https://vimeo.com/133904753. .......................................................................................410

Fig. 77: Sheila Hicks, Ford Foundation auditorium, 1967. Photo by author...............................411

xiii
Fig. 78: Robert Rauschenberg, Small Rebus, 1956. Museum of Contemporary Art Los
Angeles............................................................................................................................412

xiv
Abstract
Sheila Hicks: Weaving to the World presents the first monographic, critical history of
Sheila Hicks (b. 1934; Hastings, Nebraska), the prolific weaver and argues for her as a signal
figure in the emergence of global contemporary art. By tracking Hicks’s textiles both in and well
beyond the art world, I argue that shifting taxonomies of objects reflected and indexed related
hierarchies of people and culture, including shifting stratifications of gender, race, class, and
geography.
Embracing opportunities in novel exhibition, manufacturing, and design contexts in Latin
America, Africa, India, and the Middle East, all before 1980, Hicks personified a globalist
outlook and international mobility well before they became cultural norms in Europe and the
United States. She produced a diversity of forms in painting, photography, and especially fiber,
including weavings, wall hangings, sculptures, architectural commissions (including for AT&T,
the Ford Foundation, and IBM), and mass-manufactured fabrics. By reading Hicks’s work in the
company of historic and contemporary art—including Andean textiles, South Asian painting,
Mayan monuments, and nomadic architecture from North Africa and the Middle East—I trace an
intercultural conversation. I map a narrative geography that upsets distinctions between Western
and extra-Western culture. Employing feminist and postcolonial approaches, I explain how
Hicks’s work defied Eurocentric definitions of art, culture, and history and modeled new
genealogies by way of its emergence.
I begin at the 2017 Venice Biennale, populated by a greater representation of work by
womxn, artists of color, and work in fiber in particular, to historicize such impermanent
collections and their role within a greater field of cultural production still slow (if not resistant
entirely) to meaningful demographic change. Beginning at Yale in 1954, my first chapter, “‘This

xv
Man’s University’: Josef Albers, George Kubler, and The New Art School,” argues that Yale’s
severe gender imbalance encouraged Hicks to embrace a transmedial and Indigenous American
definition of art as professed by Josef Albers and George Kubler. Ch. 2, “‘My Great Teachers’:
Anni Albers, Andean Textiles, and the World in Miniature, 1957-1959,” follows Hicks ‘off-
campus,’ at home with the noted weaver Anni Albers, and then further south to the Andes, where
I examine the discursive history of the “miniature” as a cultural category, drawing connections
between the belts of Incan Queens, their heirs in the twentieth-century Andes, and postwar
abstract painting by women.
In Ch. 3, “Some exotic girl”: Letters from Mexico and The Value of Difference from a
Distance, 1959-1964, I argue that weavings from Hicks’s first workshop in Mexico posited
modern craft (and fiber in particular) as it entered the museum as a matrix of intersectional
alterities. My fourth chapter, “Homeless Orphans: Sculpture Dislocated, 1964-1989,” reconciles
Hicks with post-minimal sculpture in the United States to uncover how the raw materiality of
this work processed the relocation of heavy industry to the emergent economies of the Global
South. My fifth and final chapter, “Inspired and ‘happy’”: Collaborations, Corporations, 1964-
2004 examines Hicks’s most massive works through the lens of the new multinational corporate
logics and globalist media theory that informed the firms that commissioned her, from the Ford
Foundation in 1964 to Target in 2003.
By reading Hicks’s objects with and within the discourses of the regions through which
they emerged and moved (far from the art world’s supposed center) my work complicates the
geography typical of dominant narratives of contemporary art, still largely devised in response to
artists consecrated by the market and museums of New York City. I historicize not only how
Hicks’s work signified, but also, distinctly, how forms read as feminine, or evocative of specific

xvi
extra-Western cultural histories disrupted the status quo and captivated spectators eager to
engage a global world.

1
Introduction — Biennale/Biennial

Much of the alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it
seems to me, by (1) both the threat and promise of globalism and
(2) an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own
rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging.
1

-Toni Morrison

By the time I got to Italy for the 57
th
Venice Biennale, I had already seen Sheila Hicks’s
Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands, 2017 hundreds of times [see figure 56]. I had seen it at the
top of art critic Ben Davis’s review.
2
It was there again at the top of ArtNews’s first coverage,
and also alongside remarks by Holland Cotter in The New York Times.
3
And then, of course,
there it was all over Instagram, where it filled my feed and my inbox as eager friends and
supportive colleagues sent me their own shots all summer long—from majestic wide angles to
testimonial, ‘I-was-there’ selfies and precious details of the hundreds of bushels of unprocessed
fiber that Hicks had stacked from floor to ceiling in a vibrant rainbow of hues. To either side of
this fiber mosaic, Hicks suspended two expansive tapestries as large as municipal swimming
pools from the ceiling, suggesting the potential role all this raw material could play if similarly
conscripted. Produced in Antigua, Guatemala by the Mitchell Denburg Collection (an atelier of
175 weavers founded in 1980 by Denburg, an American entrepreneur) their origin echoed
Hicks’s own leadership of similar workshops across the Global South beginning in the early
1960s.
4

1
Toni Morrison, “The Foreigner’s Home,” Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (Vintage International,
2019), 5.
2
Ben Davis, “In the Venice Biennale’s ‘Viva Arte Viva,’ Shamanism Sneaks Back Into the Picture,” artnet news,
May 12, 2017.
3
Andrew Russeth, “A Look at ‘Viva Arte Viva,’ the Hippie, Heal-the-World Venice Biennale,” ARTnews, May 9,
2017, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/a-look-at-viva-arte-viva-the-hippie-heal-the-world-venice-
biennale-8288/; Holland Cotter, “Venice Biennale: Whose Reflection Do You See?,” The New York Times, May 22,
2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/arts/design/venice-biennale-whose-reflection-do-you-see.html.
4
“The Mitchell Denburg Collection supports artisans and producers of fine materials, ancient processes, and
preserves customs and ways of life that are threatened by globalization and mass production…We support suppliers

2
Enlarged versions of Hicks’s small weaving Wil Bertheux, 1973, the tapestries pointed
back to the moment of Hicks’s first and most prominent twentieth century solo retrospective
(which Bertheux organized for the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam in 1974), the height of her
recognition by the contemporary art world prior to her recovery in this century. Indeed, of the
120 artists participating in curator Christine Macel’s exhibition, 103 (including the then 83-year-
old Hicks) were participating for the first time. As Biennale President Pablo Baratta put it,
“Some are discoveries; many others, at least for this year’s edition, are rediscoveries.”
5

Like giant unfurled proclamations, the tapestries testified to Hicks’s deft ability to shift
between massive distinctions of scale, her close attention to the diminutive as constitutive of her
mastery of the monumental. Tufts of fiber from the colorful bolls were subtly tucked into gaps in
the crumbling brick walls. Arriving as it did, at the end of one the Arsenale’s very long, straight
architectural arms, the installation felt like a strategically deployed visual and emotional climax,
evoking the “positive and prospective energy” sought by Macel and reiterated in the exhibition’s
overall title, Viva Arte Viva, “an exclamation, a passionate outcry for art and the state of the
artist.”
6

Macel, advocating for a capacious idea of fiber within contemporary art, flanked Hicks
with sculptures by Judith Scott, found objects cocooned in webs of colored yarn and threads.
Elsewhere, Lee Mingwei’s The Mending Project, 2009-2018 invited visitors to bring a piece of
clothing to be repaired while engaging in conversation with the mender. Visualizing the

from many parts of the globe by encouraging them to retain their centuries old processes and ways of life,” Mitchell
Denburg Collection, accessed April 1, 2021, http://www.mitchelldenburg.com/.; Mitchell Owens, “The Surprising
Origin Behind This Guatemalan Weaving Studio,” Architectural Digest, December 22, 2019,
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/the-surprising-origin-behind-this-guatemalan-weaving-studio.
5
“57
th
International Art Exhibition,” La Biennale di Venezia, accesed Apr. 1, 2021,
https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2017/57th-international-art-exhibition.
6
“57
th
International Art Exhibition,” La Biennale di Venezia, accesed Apr. 1, 2021,
https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2017/57th-international-art-exhibition.

3
Biennale’s synthesis of thousands of international origins and global trajectories (the exhibition
hosted over 615,000 visitors), repaired garments left behind remained attached to the spools of
thread used to fix them, drawing thin colored lines between the garments left behind on the
mending table and the surrounding gallery walls where the spools were arrayed in irregular
clusters like points on a map.
Other textile set pieces included David Medalla’s A Stitch in Time, 1968/2017, where
more colored spools invited visitors to stitch an object or message into a drape slung from the
rafters, and Franz Erhard Walther’s fabric architectures, including Wall Formation Yellow
Modeling, 1985 a goldenrod relief resembling a built-in closet or some kind of IKEA storage
unit. Senga Nengudi brought her signature pantyhouse sculptures, including A.C.Q., 2016-2017,
Nancy Shaver offered fabric wrapped panels as part of a cubic, collage-oriented installation, and
Michele Ciacciofera presented yarn wrapped wall reliefs and paintings composed with large
quotations of found fabric. Unstretched paintings with frayed edges by Giorgia Griffa reminded
that Western art’s most vaunted and central media has, at least since the Renaissance, often also
been a textile. Then, there were the charming costumes of Francis Upritchard’s miniature figures,
Teresa Lanceta’s paintings inspired by Moroccan textile patterns, moths made of carpets by
Petrit Halilaj, the strip assemblies of Abdoulaye Konate drawing from the textile traditions of
West Africa, and the sewn books of Maria Lai. This list is already extensive, but one could go
further, to works evocative of (if not literally) textiles, like McArthur Binion’s minimalist,
gridded paintings with their intersection of warp and weft, or the upholstered furniture of Franz
West, fabric laden beds by Yelena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev (The Artist is Asleep, 1996),
or the textile rich photograph that introduced the show, of artist Mladen Stilinovic in bed, in
Artist at work, 1977.

4
As the span of dates above indexes, excavating projects and works created almost fifty
years prior and setting them at the center of art world attention, Macel used the Biennale not just
to synchronically survey the state of present activity but also, as this study shall as well, to trace
an alternative history of contemporary art.
7
As I will argue, the palpable shift in attention to both
different objects (particularly those inflected by the textile and evidence of hand-making) and
artistic subjects was not mere coincidence. In the face of isolationist nationalism and xenophobia
on the rise worldwide, climbing to the highest ranks of world political power, fiber and craft-
oriented practices not only comforted but also provided a way of thinking through the
complexity of contemporary experience, especially its creation of intersectional subjectivities
and international identities that exceed any singular or essentialist lens.
Picking up on “a surplus of textile works, draped painting-like on the walls, and
intimately crafted things, presented on shelves or on tables,” critic Ben Davis described how,
“even some of the more impressive beats of the show—say, Leonor Antunes’s delicate,
shimmering hangings and dangling lamps made in the Murano glass workshops, and Sheila
Hicks’s climactic wall of multicolored pompoms—are examples of craft exaggerated to the level
of spectacle.”
8
“Craft,” wrote Davis, “with its associations with comforting tradition, connects to
what I take to be the larger presiding theme of the show: the power of personal ritual.”
In a moment of political, social, and ecological crisis, an overall “age of anxiety,”
9
Holland
Cotter appreciated how, “much of the art substitutes touch and texture for digital gloss,” while

7
As Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures had two years prior, Viva Art Viva presented a significantly more
demographically diverse Biennale than past iterations, an exhibition more inclusive overall especially in its
representation of women and artists of color. “It is not, for one thing, an off-the-rack gathering of market-vetted
stars. Most of the 120 artists will be unfamiliar to even the most assiduous art world travelers. The ethnic spread is
wide; the gender balance, even,” Cotter, “Venice Biennale: Whose Reflection Do You See?.”
8
Davis, “In the Venice Biennale’s ‘Viva Arte Viva,’ Shamanism Sneaks Back Into the Picture.”
9
Paola Baratta, as quoted by Davis.

5
Davis saw, “contemporary art as coping mechanism…art of rough DIY edges as if to say, ‘Hey,
take pleasure in the small things.’”
10

Defying the expectations at least of these critics—of how best to meet such a politically
fraught moment—for her part curator Christine Macel made her disinterest in a reactionary,
explicitly political response relatively clear. “I’m very interested in politics,” she remarked, “but
not all art should be about politics. It’s only one dimension…To me, art is linked with all
dimensions of life…People think art will save the world…I don’t think art will save the world,
but it’s saved a lot of lives.”
11
While I certainly recognize, and am deeply troubled by the present
(four years, and one pandemic later, things have hardly improved), I also understand and admire
Macel’s honesty especially amid such a troubling world, her admission of art’s limited agency, in
part because it is only one part of a larger political and material ecology. What and how much
can art do, especially in moments of apparently universal emergency, when, left with apparently
no other options or sense of agency, we hoist ever greater expectations upon it?
Attentive to the political agency of fiber in particular, art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson
has defined “textile politics,” as “how textiles have been used to advance political agendas but
also to indicate a procedure of making politics material: textile as a transitive verb…to textile
politics is to give texture to politics, to refuse easy binaries, to acknowledge complications.”
12

Faced with Macel’s skepticism, both Davis and Cotter grappled with how her return to the
hands-on coincided with a general spirit of New Age utopianism, including projects that
rehearsed anthropological engagements with Indigenous peoples and as such threatened to revive
modernist primitivism. “The show puts a curious accent on works that speak with an almost

10
Cotter, “Venice Biennale: Whose Reflection Do You See?.”; Davis.
11
Christine Macel, “A Venice Biennale About Art, With the Politics Muted,” The New York Times, May 7, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/07/arts/design/a-venice-biennale-about-art-with-the-politics-muted.html.
12
Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 7.

6
anthropological voice about non-Western cultures,” wrote Davis, drawing attention to Juan
Downey’s video sculpture, The Circle of Fires Vive, 1979, “stellae of paired video monitors
organized in a low-slung circle, playing identical footage he took while living among an
indigenous tribe in Latin America during a sojourn in the ’70s.”
13
Drawing in the ‘new’ media of
television monitors and inhabiting the genre of anthropological documentary, Downey’s
monitors attempted to evoke a “shabono, or gathering place for the Yanomami people.”
14
Further
in, Ernesto Neto created a netted “Cupixawa” for Um Sagrado Lugar (A Sacred Place), 2017 and
invited a group of Huni Kuin, Indigenous people of the Amazon, to use it as a ritual space,
demonstrating how the exhibition’s fibrous investments might intersect with this potentially
troubling anthropological leitmotif. “Their presence was disconcerting,” wrote Cotter of Neto’s
work. “It revived the ‘primitivism’ debate of 30 years, its terms unchanged: We in the West
continue to import the Other for our pleasure, while remaining complicit in a global economy
that is destroying the Other’s world,” Cotter concluded.
15

Several months later in the pages of Artforum, art historian and critic Claire Bishop
questioned the “disconcerting” “vehemence” and “condemnation” that greeted Macel’s Biennale,
describing it instead as “more convivial than discomforting” and “far from offensive…even
enjoyable.”
16
While validating the potential critiques of particular projects like Neto’s, Bishop
resolved with the acknowledgement that “the kind of naive utopianism that infuses [these]
projects today comes across as decidedly retro.” “Given that the world is going to hell in a
handbasket,” wrote Bishop, “there is also something to be said for zooming out from granular
political immediacies and considering the bigger picture.” Her reading recognized the attraction

13
Davis “In the Venice Biennale’s ‘Viva Arte Viva,’ Shamanism Sneaks Back Into the Picture.”
14
Davis.
15
Cotter, “Venice Biennale: Whose Reflection Do You See?.”
16
Claire Bishop, “The Long View,” Artforum (September 2017).

7
of such projects (despite their potential shortcomings) as manifestations of wishful thinking
reminiscent of a now historical, “retro” outlook, hope for a world as it could have been
otherwise. Valuing art’s ability to create a space of respite, her appraisal also admits how
impossible it is now, surrounded by a greater world “going to hell in a handbasket,” to imagine
any utopia succeeding beyond (and even within) the realm of art.
I am with Bishop in recognizing that art rarely offers a perfect response, especially to
moments of daunting, dire social crisis. As she suggests, often, it is valuable as an experience
apart from and elusive of the exigencies of politics and direct social utility. Through close study
of Hicks’s career, itself consistently predicated on the activity of one or more studio or workshop
models, I frame such socialized practices of making as part of a longer history of diversification
and globalism very much connected to the modernist belief in art as an agent of important social
shifts, utopian dreams, and real individual liberations—all now palpably historic and elusive, and
yet still seductive.
Toward an Art History of the Global South
Internationalism’s potential to unseat a Eurocentric academic establishment as well as an
art world controlled and defined by a North Atlantic power block has become a core belief of the
“global contemporary”
17
as endorsed by a growing, interdisciplinary body of scholarship.
Likewise it has become common within histories of European and American art, architecture,
and literature (among others) to reveal modernism’s relationship to colonialism.
18
Yet, few have
historicized the gap between the established historiography of early twentieth-century

17
David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT Press, 2020); Dumbadze and Hudson, Contemporary
Art: 1989 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
18
Joshua I. Cohen, “Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern 'Primitivist' Uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905-
8.” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 2 (June 2017) 136-65; Debora L. Silverman, "Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African
Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I." West 86
th
18, no. 2 (2011): 139-181; Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and
Modern Architecture in Germany (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).

8
modernism, particularly that dedicated to primitivism (here understood as modern art’s
incorporation of Indigenous and non-white forms and practices), colonialism, and imperialism
(particularly its appropriation of the labor and livelihood of womxn and people of color both
domestically and internationally)—and the global contemporary art world that came after.
19
In
the following study, via close attention to the career, artwork, and life of the artist Sheila Hicks, I
track the productive role textiles played in the diversification of the contemporary art world from
the mid 1950s to the present. The temporal arc of Hicks’s career as well as her more prominent
status in this century exemplifies the slow emergence of the global contemporary as a distinct
discursive formation and an increasingly palpable “shift” in the words of Terry Smith, “nascent
during the 1950s, emergent in the 1960s, contested during the 1970s, but unmistakable since the
1980s—from modern to contemporary art.”
20
In addition to this timeline, Cuauhtémoc Medina
argues that the early 1990s evidenced a new discursive map, especially “the collapse of the Euro-
American monopoly over the narrative of modernism.”
21
Likewise, David Joselit has centered
1989 as a “watershed” for its “deregulation of the established hierarchies that had long divided
fine art from commercial and indigenous or folk practices in the West,” particularly in
exhibitions such as Magiciens de la Terre, 1989, and the 3
rd
Havana Biennial, 1989 that
evidenced a shifted relationship between Western and extra-Western artists, as well as between
the cultures from which they emerged.
22
Following the itineraries of Hicks and her works, I map

19
Art historian Partha Mitter has argued that, “For the avant-garde, the artistic discourse of primitivism opened up
the possibility of aesthetic globalization as part of art historical consciousness. The very ambiguities, instabilities,
and fractures within primitivism provided the colonized a singular weapon within which to interrogate the
capitalist/colonial world of modernity, enabling them to produce a counter modern discourse of resistance.” In
Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” The Art Bulletin 90,
No. 4 (Dec 2008), 542-543.
20
Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5.
21
Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses,” What is Contemporary Art? (Sternberg Press, 2010),
10-21.
22
David Joselit, Heritage and Debt, Art in Globalization (MIT Press, 2020), 4.

9
a textile modernism and trace a contemporary art of the Global South well before 1989—
between the Andes, Mexico, India, North Africa, the Middle East, United States, and Europe—
that assembled usable, revisionist pasts and posited a more global, intercultural present.
Sheila Hicks: Weaving to the World, presents the first monographic history of Sheila
Hicks (b. 1934; Hastings, Nebraska), the prolific weaver and, I argue, signal figure of global
contemporary art. It traces a deep history for contemporary art in dialogue with ancient material
culture, contemporary Indigenous practices, and skilled labor across the Global South. By
tracking textiles both in and well beyond art’s worlds, I argue that shifting taxonomies of objects
reflected related, and rearranging hierarchies of people, including stratifications of gender, race,
class, and geography. Embracing opportunities in novel exhibition, manufacturing, and design
contexts in Latin America, Africa, India, and the Middle East, all before 1980, Hicks personified
a newfound globalism facilitated by more affordable, expedient international mobility well
before it became the dominant mode of contemporary artistic practice. Increasingly across the
second half of the twentieth century, more people moved more freely and expediently around the
world than ever before in human history, creating a new social and perceptual reality encouraged
by the unprecedented mixing of people and cultures.
23

Not at all incidental, the particular itinerary of Hicks’s career parallels the greater logic
and networks of late capitalist globalization, a new map drawn by new relationships between the
centers of Euro-American cultural arbitration (as well as commerce), and the emergent markets,
sites of both cultural production and consumption across the Global South, in the postcolonial
nations and nascent democracies of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Toni Morrison puts it
thusly:

23
Vanessa Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion (New Haven, Yale University Press,
2020).

10
the mass movement of peoples in the latter half of the twentieth century and the
beginning of the twenty-first is greater now than it ever has been. It is a
movement of workers, intellectuals, refugees, armies crossing oceans, continents,
immigrants through custom offices and hidden routes, speaking multiple
languages of trade, of political intervention, of persecution, exile, violence,
poverty…While much of this exodus can be described as the journey of the
colonized to the seat of the colonizers (slaves, as it were, abandoning the
plantation for the planter’s home), and while more of it is the flight of war
refugees, the relocation and transplantation of the management and diplomatic
class to globalization’s outposts, as well as the deployment of fresh military units
and bases, feature prominently in legislative attempts to control the constant flow
of people.
24

Informed by and alongside her international travels, Hicks produced a diversity of forms in
painting, photography, and especially fiber, including weavings, wall hangings, sculptures,
architectural commissions (including for AT&T, the Ford Foundation, and IBM), and mass-
manufactured fabrics. By reading Hicks’s work in the company of historic and contemporary
art—including Andean textiles, South Asian painting, Mayan monuments, and nomadic
architecture from North Africa and the Middle East—I trace a polyphonic intercultural
conversation. Employing feminist and postcolonial approaches, I explain how Hicks’s work
defied Eurocentric definitions of art, culture, and history—devising new genealogies as it
emerged.
This research has framed Hicks as one of a cadre of underexposed and interrelated artists,
contemporaries like Olga de Amaral, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Mrinalini Mukherjee, who, like
Hicks, have been occluded not only for their affiliation with a feminized, othered craft, but also
their status as people.
25
One part of the greater ongoing recovery of this generation, this focused
history of Hicks affords a new model for gauging the impact of the generation of which she was

24
Morrison, “The Foreigner’s Home,” 5.
25
T’ai Smith, “The Problem With Craft,” Art Journal 75, No.1 (2016): 80.

11
part, revising the meaning of both lesser known and long-canonized figures in the history of
modern and contemporary culture.
As part of a larger current of revisionist thinking surrounding the history of collecting,
contemporary curatorial practice, and the potentially progressive role of museums and art in
society at large, I demonstrate how stratifications of media and cultural categories (still largely
regarded as simply formal or bureaucratically neutral in many museums in Europe and the
United States) shape social hierarchies of gender, race and geography. Toward an art history of
the Global South beyond the medium-specific biases of post-Enlightenment Europe, Weaving to
the World posits a South-South textile alignment. Through intermedial analysis of weaving,
painting, clothing, sculpture, architecture, exhibitions, photographs, and other depictions of
weavers at work, I argue that textiles constructed an especially worldly conversation, unraveling
the West and its Eurocentric definitions of history, knowledge, and culture.
Rejecting abstraction’s twentieth century, European, painterly origin story, I insist upon
its ancient record, an implicit disruption of Western theories of representation that shaped not
only definitions of the aesthetic but also models of political and historic subjectivity.
Constructing diverse comparisons via dialectical images drawn from distinct cultural traditions, I
explain how contemporary culture constructed non-linear histories and more diverse cultural
archives in order to exist.
26
Engaging anthropology of Indigenous practices and study of ancient
material culture, I track the assembly of a usable past.
27

26
Shannon Lee Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6
(2010): pp. 761-793; George Kubler, The Shape of Time Remarks on the History of Things (Yale University Press,
2008).
27
G. Arabel Fernandez Lopez, in Reycraft, Us and them: Archaeology and Ethnicity in the Andes Vol. 53. ISD LLC,
2005; Daryl Stump, “On Applied Archeology, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Usable Past,” Current Anthropology,
54, No.3 (June 2013), 268-298; Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969); Raoul d’Harcourt,
Textiles of Ancient Peru and Their Techniques (1934).

12
In the words of Darby English, by scrutinizing who profits, becomes visible, and how,
when art and alterity intersect, this study offers, “a way to account for the changing materiality of
difference,” as well as a more rigorous understanding of the unrealized equity of the present.
28

Employing postcolonial and feminist approaches, I explore why abstraction and representation
have historically been at cross-purposes.
29
I historicize not only how Hicks’s work signified, but
also, distinctly, how alterity untethered from a body disrupted the status quo.
30
Entering a heated
debate, I cross-examine a prehistory of “cultural appropriation” before it became click bait.
31

Following Saidiya Hartman, I narrate histories effaced by disciplinary routines.
32
I follow the
twin histories of anthropology and art museums across the Americas, demonstrating how such
institutional divisions still concretize a hierarchy of people and objects.
33
Charting new critiques
of representation, I advance our interdisciplinary understanding of diversity’s incomplete
realization. By theorizing the mobilization of one of the oldest technologies on earth, Weaving to
the World mobilizes textiles to diversify definitions of twentieth and twenty first century culture
and excavate the impact of millennia of historically underrepresented peoples upon it.
Modern and Contemporary
Although her recent visibility in temporary exhibitions like the 2017 Venice Biennale
might suggest longstanding prominence, Hicks is still largely occluded within art history. Until

28
Darby English, 1971: A Year In the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
29
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Rosalind C. Morris, Can the Subaltern Speak? : Reflections on the History of an
Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Amelia Jones, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader
(Psychology Press, 2003).
30
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949); Sherry B. Ortner, "Is female to male as nature is to
culture?." Feminist Studies 1, no. 2 (1972): 5-31. David Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded
Field of Gender (Yale UP, 2015).
31
Sophia Chang and Hari Kondabolu, “Sophia Chang's Unlikely Hip Hop Odyssey,” The World from PRX,
September 19, 2019, https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-09-19/sophia-chang-s-unlikely-hip-hop-odyssey.
32
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (W.W. Norton, 2019).
33
Haidy Geismar, “The Art of Anthropology: Questioning Contemporary Art in Ethnographic Display,” The
International Handbooks of Museum Studies, 2015, pp. 183-210

13
recently, Hick’s historiography was defined largely by exhibitions and their catalogues, which
track her prominence as a leading figure of what became known as Fiber Art in the United States
or the New Tapestry (“le nouvelle tapisserie”) in continental Europe, most prominently in the
Museum of Modern Art’s Wall Hangings, the Stedelijk’s Perspectief en Textiel (both 1969), and
various iterations of the Lausanne Tapestry Biennials (beginning in 1962), each accompanied by
a tidy catalogue. Hicks became a central and lavishly illustrated figure in Jack Lenor Larsen and
Mildred Constantine’s Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric, 1973—evidence of Constantine’s life-long
advocacy on Hicks’s behalf. Hicks’s leading role among these currents encouraged her first and
most significant twentieth century retrospective, at the Stedelijk in 1974. Typical of catalogues
of this period, these publications are generally short and only lightly interpretative.
The most significant twentieth century publication on Hicks, Monique Levi-Strauss’s
mid-career Sheila Hicks, 1974 coincided with this institutional concretization. Rather than an
argument for Hicks as an avant-garde figure narrated from the perspective of a modern art
historian or curator, Sheila Hicks offers a concise, clear-eyed biography recorded without
pretense by a close friend. After this highpoint in the 1970s, as investment in Fiber Art trailed
off, Hicks largely abandoned the art world and increasingly pursued corporate or other large
budget commissions. Although more profitable or at least stable as a funding source, these
projects also led Hicks away from the publicity of the art world. Offering a counterpoint of what
could have been, Magdalena Abanakowicz, a generational peer and fellow leader of Fiber Art,
abandoned fiber and abstraction for bronze figurative works in the 1980s and 1990s. These
works became relatively prominent fixtures, riding a wave of support for public art that made her
a more recognized figure than her fiber works had. Meanwhile, Hicks stuck with fiber,
privileging it as her primary medium. Awareness of Hicks’s work was kept alive by craft and

14
design practitioners and curators, especially those working in fiber and textiles, who offered her
story to peers and aspiring students as an essential touchstone for their medium’s recent history
and its potential for innovation. As such, Hicks remained a familiar name for this community of
makers, as well as for craft and design dealers and collectors, a robust but comparatively smaller,
less lavishly financed community than the commercial art world.
Hicks’s significance to these communities is reflected by the history traced by group
exhibitions such as Jeannine J. Falino’s Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and
Design, 2011, and monographically by the exhibition and catalogue, Sheila Hicks: Weaving as
Metaphor, 2006.
34
Grounded in her miniature ‘minime’ weavings, Weaving as Metaphor was
produced by curator Nina Stritzler-Levine for the Bard Graduate Center, home to a MA/PhD
program dedicated to the study of decorative art, design, and material culture, an institutional
frame that reflects Hicks’s firm status within this milieu. Circulating more widely, Weaving as
Metaphor (and especially its handsome publication), helped re-launch Hicks’s visibility and
career as a contemporary artist, initiating a recovery of Hicks by a younger generation of
curators, dealers, and historians, also urged onward by the more comprehensive exhibition and
catalogue, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, 2010. This second exhibition travelled from the Addison
Gallery at Phillips Andover, to the ICA Philadelphia, and Charlotte’s Mint Museum, exposing a
fuller survey of the diversity of Hicks’s works to a variety of audiences on the east coast of the
United States.
Essays in both catalogues, by Stritzler-Levine in Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor and
Whitney Chadwick and Joan Simon in Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, each survey the artist’s career.
Confronted by the challenge of surveying an entire career in the brief space of a catalogue essay,

34
Jeannine J. Falino (edit.), Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design (Abrams, 2011); Nina
Stritzler-Levine (edit.), Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

15
they leave little time for individual works or historical contextualization, delving only briefly
into any potential theoretical, political, or otherwise imaginative readings.
35
Encouraged by the
circulation of Weaving as Metaphor and Fifty Years, Hicks’s reputation, visibility, and market
would grow in this century’s second decade. Previously working without regular representation
from a major contemporary art dealer, after 2012 Hicks was subsequently added to the roster and
began to show new and historic work regularly with New York’s Sikkema Jenkins and Demisch
Danant, Paris’s Frank Elbaz, and London’s Allison Jacques.
36
In this, Hicks became an early
signal figure for two emergent market and exhibition-making trends that would define the
decade: a recovery of historic female artists (such as Carmen Herrera), as well as anyone
embracing a craft medium such as fiber and ceramics (such as Sterling Ruby). Encouraged by the
extensive documentation of these catalogues and relative absence of academic theory, peer-
reviewed essays published in this decade by art historians Sarah Parrish and Cynthia Fowler have
tested more theoretically focused approaches, thinking through Hicks’s work via discourses such
as globalization theory and feminist criticism (respectively).
37

Despite some recognition of textiles’ significance in contemporary culture, scholarship
has not expanded beyond one or two national contexts; nor has it connected ancient, modern,
Indigenous, and extra-Western practices—ultimately failing to assess their role as a global,

35
See Stritzler-Levine, Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor and Joan Simon and Susan C. Faxon (edit.), Sheila
Hicks: 50 Years (Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 2010) and Monique Levi-Strauss, Sheila
Hicks (Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, 1974).
36
In the 1970s, Hicks had shown with Galerie Suzy Langlois in Paris and Charles Slatkin in New York. The design
gallery Damisch Danant is most active in the resale of her historic works as part of its secondary market business but
has also recently shown new works.
37
Sarah Parrish, "From Collectives to Corporations: Sheila Hicks’ Transnational Air/Craft," Design and Culture 8,
no. 1 (2016): 79-99 and Cynthia Fowler (2014) “A Sign of the Times: Sheila Hicks, the Fiber Arts Movement, and
the Language of Liberation,” The Journal of Modern Craft, 7:1 (2014), 33-51.

16
intercultural conduit.
38
The first scholarly history of its kind, Elissa Auther’s String, Felt, and
Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art, 2010, identified and examined the
double standard that characterized the reception of fiber work in American art of the 1960s and
1970s, including Hicks and Fiber Art, contrasted with the distinct fate of figures like Robert
Morris, esteemed as a leading figure of post-minimalism for his drooping cut felt sculptures.
Auther’s publication marks the first peer-reviewed monograph extensively concerned with Fiber
Art as a historic case study, a research agenda which would pick up speed several years later
with the publication of Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Fray: Art and Textile Politics, 2017. Like Bryan-
Wilson, my study moves beyond Auther’s nationalist frame to examine fiber as an international
phenomenon.
In the wake of the more monographic attention of Weaving as Metaphor and Fifty Years,
revisionist group exhibitions began to synthesize Hicks into art history and contextualize her
alongside her peers.
39
Both Paul Schimmel and Jenni Sorkin’s Revolution in the Making:
Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016, and Jenelle Porter’s Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present,
(both 2016) nominated Hicks as a sculptor first and foremost, not only setting the historic, now
seemingly limiting and clunky label of “fiber artist” that defined her in the 1970s at a distance,
but also any contemporary context of craft or design. Both in the galleries of Revolution in the
Making and the accompanying catalogue essay by art historian Anne Wagner, Hicks appeared in
the company (often for the first time) of generational peers such as Jackie Winsor, Eva Hesse,
and Yayoi Kusama, incorporating Hicks into a broader art history not limited by medium.

38
Julia Bryant-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Yale University Press, 2017) and Elissa Auther, String, Felt,
Thread: The Hiearchy of Art and Craft in American Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). The role of textiles
in earlier historical periods is better established, as demonstrated by exhibitions such as Amelia Peck (edit.),
Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013).
39
Paul Schimmel and Jenni Sorkin (edit.), Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016
(Hauser, Wirth and Schimmel, 2016); Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present (ICA Boston, 2014); Stuart Comer, Anthony
Elms and Michelle Grabner, Whitney Biennial 2014 (The Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014).

17
Interestingly, in the same year that Porter’s exhibition positioned Hicks as a crucial figure
in an obscured history, artist and curator Michelle Grabner’s inclusion of Hicks at the heart of
her portion of the 2014 Whitney Biennial advocated for Hicks as a vibrant part of new
contemporary art, especially a resurgence of craft media and painting by women, surrounded as
she was by works by Alma Allen, Sterling Ruby, Laura Owens, and Jacqueline Humphries.
Including Hicks and her peers in temporary permanent collection re-installations such as Making
Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, 2017 at the Museum of Modern Art, Materials
and Objects: Beyond Craft, at the Tate Modern, and Stedelijk Base, “the first-ever major,
integrated presentation of art and design in the history of the museum,” at the Stedelijk (both,
2017-ongoing), similarly revised institutional definitions to consider craft media and work by
women not only as part of contemporary art but also its postwar history.
40
History and the
contemporary effectively blurred alongside these historic exhibitions in the summer of 2017 as
Hicks’s monumental installation became one of the most circulated images of the 57
th
Venice
Biennale and a new long-running installation settled in on the Highline in Manhattan alongside
these more historic exhibitions.
Following this monumental endorsement, Hicks’s work cropped up in a second wave of
both solo surveys, new site-specific projects, and group exhibitions. Examples of the former
included Sheila Hicks: Lifelines (“Lignes de Vie”) at the Pompidou in Paris, 2018, Sheila Hicks,
Free Threads, Textile and its pre-Hispanic Roots, 1954-2017 at the Museum Amparo in Puebla,
Mexico, 2018 and Campo Abierto, 2019 at the Bass Museum in Miami. The former presented
her work without recourse to chronology or other obvious organizational logic, suggesting a kind
of all-at-onceness indicative of her reception recently, as the author of a huge corpus that has yet

40
That said, all of Hicks objects are still categorized as ‘Architecture and Design’ at MoMA and ‘Design’ at the
Stedelijk.

18
to be organized into a history defined by distinct stages. Meanwhile, in Mexico, curator Frédéric
Bonnet installed examples of largely ancient Latin American fiber works alongside Hicks’s
work, visualizing a point of comparison she herself has invoked repeatedly since the beginning
of her career. Alongside these, Hicks occasioned more large-scale site-specific installations,
outside traditional gallery settings such as at France’s Palace of Versailles and the garden of the
Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2019.
As this summary suggests, Hicks’s work has often been conscripted recently into service
as a kind of double agent, signifying as both an object of historic modernism as well as
contemporary art. This duality makes Hicks highly functional for curators and viewers eager for
what the art historian Claire Bishop has underscored as a nostalgia for modernism within
contemporary art, one symptom of the difference between the wishful, wistful utopianism of the
global contemporary and the critical postmodernism that preceded it.
41
Meanwhile, Hicks’s work
has also performed a revisionist role, taking part in efforts to revise collections and institutions of
modern art to make them appear more diverse—whether in terms of gender, race, or medium—to
viewers increasingly sensitive to cultural inequality. In some instances, like at the Tate Modern,
this means incorporating her work, otherwise absent, into a permanent collection for the first
time. In others, like MoMA’s Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, it is an
excavation, bringing out of the permanent collection a long-held but largely invisible object in
order to style the institution as more diverse and committed to greater representation of artists
and demographics it has historically obscured. In others, as in Venice, Hicks’s presence is a
temporary manifestation, reflecting no permanent shift in a permanent collection or curatorial

41
Claire Bishop, “How Did We Get So Nostalgic for Modernism?” Fotomuseum Winterthur, Sep. 14, 2013,
https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-
searching/articles/26960_how_did_we_get_so_nostalgic_for_modernism; Claire Bishop, “Reactivating
Modernism,” Parkett, May 2013: 146-153.

19
mission. To a cynical eye, these maneuvers perform a superficially progressive brand identity,
virtue signaling cued to a time of heightened political crisis when questions of identity are
particularly fraught as the art world attempts to reactionarily differentiate itself from various
conservative positions, from racism and sexism to elitism and white supremacy.
As such, we ought regard such impermanent collections (as I have deemed them) with
skepticism, especially because of their ability to mislead us into thinking real change is
underway. As tracked by the research of Julia Halperin and Charlotte Burns, support for female
identified artists as of 2019 represented only two percent of the art market, only eleven percent
of all museum acquisitions, and fourteen percent of exhibitions at twenty-six leading US
museums in the preceding decade. Calling claims of greater investment in women artists an
“illusion,” Halperin and Burns describe how, “even as museums signal publicly that they are
embracing alternative histories and working to expand the canon…the number of works by
women acquired did not increase over time. In fact, it peaked a decade ago.” “At least when it
comes to gender parity,” conclude Halperin and Burns, “this story is a myth.”
42

Of No Nation
In the first few months of 2014, Sheila Hicks erected Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column at
the Whitney Museum of American Art, at the heart of artist-curator Michelle Grabner’s floor.
Emerging as a rainbow cascade of unruly cords from the iconic molded concrete grid of Marcel
Breuer’s building, Pillar both reinforced and joyously played against the august seriousness of
the architectural landmark of brooding, brutalist modernism. An assembly of hundreds of supple

42
Julia Halperin and Charlotte Burns, “Female Artists Represent Just 2 Percent of the Market. Here’s Why—and
How That Can Change,” Artnet News, September 19, 2019, https://news.artnet.com/womens-place-in-the-art-
world/female-artists-represent-just-2-percent-market-heres-can-change-1654954; Julia Halperin and Charlotte
Burns, “Museums Claim They’re Paying More Attention to Female Artists. That’s an Illusion,” Artnet News,
September 19, 2019, https://news.artnet.com/womens-place-in-the-art-world/womens-place-art-world-museums-
1654714.

20
linear yet curling cords, Pillar both continued and softened the rigidity of the ceiling’s concrete
or the floor’s hard-edged flagstones, alluding to a gendered dichotomy that associates rational
geometry with masculinity. Surrounded by walls hung with painting by women, Grabner
underscored that such old school hierarchies, such as the trope of one medium ruled by one
gender over another, were up for examination.
If Hicks’s installation instigated a Pillar of Inquiry, in the months before and during the
run of the Biennial, the New York art world witnessed another, more verbal inquisition led by
the artist collective HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican? Creating a stir before the oft controversial
recurring exhibition had even opened, the collective ultimately dropped out of the Biennial
completely, removing their movie, Good Stock for Dimension: An Opera, 2014 in light of what
member Christa Bell described as, “institutional white supremacy.”
43
In particular, they objected
to artist Joe Scanlan’s Dick’s Last Stand, 2014 a series of paintings and performance supposedly
created by Donelle Woolford, a fictional black woman invented by Scanlan following his
realization that his collages would be, “more interesting if someone else made them, someone
who could better exploit their historical and cultural references.”
44
While H.D.Y.S.Y.A.
withdrew before the Biennial opened, leaving no obviously palpable hole in the exhibition itself,
Scanlan and Woolford remained, encouraging related questions and scrutiny to plague the
exhibition throughout its run.
All the while, Hicks’s Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column stood silent and sentinel directly
beside Scanlan’s Woolford paintings, closer than any of the other hundreds of works on view.
The lush, saturated colors of Hicks’s cords echoed the monochrome, solid-colored surfaces of

43
Bansie Vasvani, “The Yams Collective: An Insurrection and Resistance,” Art21 magazine, Dec. 2, 2014,
http://magazine.art21.org/2014/12/02/the-yams-collective-insurrection-and-resistance/#.YGk1kUhKhTY.
44
Jeremy Sigler, “Joe Scanlan,” Bomb, July 1, 2010, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/joe-scanlan/.

21
Scanlan’s canvases, each inscribed with written jokes appropriated from monologues by the
comic Richard Pryor printed in contrasting hues. Appropriations several times over, the paintings
mimic the motif and conceit of the so-called joke paintings of Pictures generation artist Richard
Prince. Grabner’s placement of Scanlan beside Hicks, and vice versa, insisted that one
understand the ostensibly purely formal or material through a lens complicated by identity
politics, and that an ostensibly conceptual provocation too be interrogated, as a question of form.
The combination plumbed how we understand identity, especially in this century, as something
we think we know, as a concept we can elect, reject, or deconstruct, but also as a material reality
we continue to evaluate visually, predicated on firsthand apprehensions, not of abstract forms but
the real human bodies we all inhabit.
While scholars have found new ways to consider questions of identity and difference in
studies of postwar abstraction, this sensibility, though possibly obscured, was not lost on artists
in their own time.
45

46
Not unlike her generational peers, Hicks cut her teeth in a proto-feminist
art world long before contemporary charges of cultural appropriation questioned who could
speak for whom and she has never mobilized her work as a vehicle for explicit critique. Thus,
questions of identity (and its politics) remain comparatively latent in her oeuvre. Still, among the
polyglot titles of Baby Time Again, 1978, a curtain of linen baby clothes, the poles of Bâoli

45
Darby English, 1971: A Year In the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); David Getsy,
Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale UP, 2015); Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel,
Ulrich Wilmes, Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (Prestel, 2017).
46
Hicks’s teacher, Josef Albers is often understood as a formalist, unconcerned with how his work might carry a
social meaning. And yet, he likened his thinking on color in art on several occasions to questions of political
ecology. In a 1954 statement entitled “The Color in My Paintings” Albers describes how his colors “support or
oppose one another…embracing, intersecting, penetrating.” If an anthropomorphic diction is latent at first,
ultimately it becomes explicit, when he writes, “My colors remain, as much as possible, a ‘face’ - their own
‘face’…by admitting coexistence of such polarities as being dependent and independent – being dividual and
individual.” Almost a decade later, he would reiterate, “Color, in my opinion, behaves like man- in two distinct
ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others…in other words, one must
combine being an individual and being a member of society…I’ve handled color as man should behave…you may
conclude from this that I consider ethics and aesthetics one.” In Josef Albers, The Artist’s Voice, Katherine Kuh
(edit.), New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

22
Chords/Cordes Sauvages Pow Wow, 2014-2015, and weavings bright as a Holi festival like
Palghat, ca. 1966, some kind of intersectional identity politics arises.
Having arrived as German pioneer-immigrants, her maternal grandparents, Ida Andressen
and William Weingart, had longer roots in Nebraska than her father’s side. There, they farmed
and founded a general store in Hastings, a small town then as it remains now, isolated within one
of the least populated states in the United States. Her father’s mother, a widower twice over in
want of a job found one at a mental hospital outside Hastings. Her son, Sheila’s father, Ray
Eugene Hicks, took a job in that same general store, where he met Hicks’s mother. “My
childhood memories are very much centered around Hastings,” Hicks, the first of three children,
has recalled.
47
She lived in rural Nebraska in her earliest days and returned there for summers
and holidays as she grew up. There, she was hosted by her mother’s aunts, “spinsters” (a
tempting pun) who taught them to paint, draw, and sew. I imagine the three fates of Greek
mythology relocated to the plains of Nebraska: spinning, measuring, and cutting the threads of
life. Her relatives sound like pioneers and prairie people, characters out of Willa Cather’s My
Antonia, a local hero who was celebrated by these same aunts.
48

Hicks’s Nebraska ties figuratively embody the autonomy of making things for yourself,
from quilts and garments to houses and food. As pioneers, the Nebraskans (as allegorized by
novelists like Cather) were the conceptual boundary and geopolitical frontlines of American
colonialism, as it intersected with familial struggle, immigrant arrival, and manifest destiny.

47
Hick’s status as the eldest daughter, assuming she inherited some responsibility for her younger siblings,
anticipates her role later in life as a mother not only for two biological children, but also for step-children, and as a
symbolic matriarch for employees and others. Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11.
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
48
Hicks’s mention of Cather, as a woman explicitly celebrated by her unmarried aunts, potentially hints at an
attendant admiration for her status as an unmarried lesbian. Not only an independent woman and cultural
entrepreneur, Cather may also be understood as a role model in that she demonstrated how to get away from
Nebraska, settling and making her career as she ultimately did far away, in Boston.

23
Asked on one occasion about her “upbringing” (after underscoring the distinctly
‘American’ nature of this word), Hicks resolved that she “grew up in a car.”
49
Her father, unable
to secure a job fixed to any particular location moved his young family from state to state,
normalizing an itinerancy easily read forward into Hicks’s later version of a peripatetic lifestyle.
They moved from Council Bluffs, Iowa to Corpus Christi, Texas; Tallahassee, Florida, Clinton,
Oklahoma; and St. Louis, Missouri. Encouraged by relatives insistent that they settle down to
allow their children to attend school, they returned to Lexington, Nebraska, home to a one-room
schoolhouse. By 1941, they had uprooted again, settling for a time in Chicago, and then Detroit,
where Ray’s career prospects were bolstered by an emerging wartime economy as an
administrator of a ball bearings company. Transitioning into her teenage years, Hicks matured
from itinerant prairie child to suburban aspirant, attending New Trier High school in Winnetka,
Illinois, known then as it is now as one of the best public schools in the country.
In her oral history interview with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art (from which
much of the above has been adapted), Hicks includes the detail that they lived on “Navajo
Street” while in Detroit.
50
While contemporary maps trace Navajo Courts, Trails, and Avenues in
various suburbs of Detroit, no Navajo Street is to be found. Hicks’s memory, whether fact or
fantasy, points to another facet of Hick’s biography omitted from the Smithsonian’s register, that
of her own mixed ancestry. Hicks has only rarely been identified with Native American heritage,
as when critic John Russell described her in 1974 as a “young artist of mixed Anglo-Cherokee
and German-Dutch descent” in the The New York Times or in 1977 when the artist acknowledged

49
Grant Johnson, “Interviews: Sheila Hicks,” Artforum, June 4, 2019, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/sheila-
hicks-on-her-life-and-art-79847.
50
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.

24
her “Father was part Cherokee, but he didn’t think much of that background.”
51
Both followed
the emergence of the American Indian movement, which may have encouraged Hicks to
acknowledge her own family history. Years later, by introducing bundles named Navaho and
Algonquin (both 2018) or the cords of Mandan Shrine, 2016, Hicks continued to invoke both the
ancient and contemporary Native American as she has throughout her career. On the occasion of
Campo Abierto, her recent exhibition in Miami, she summarized this as a career-long concern,
stating, “I enjoy working in Indigenous settings and populations.”
52
As explored throughout this
dissertation, Hicks’s investment in Indigenous art and knowledge is both a question of biography
and self-identification as well as a recurring thematic investment and active engagement, both
related to and independent from her own ethno-racial origins or identity.
These questions are key especially as an arena of cultural appropriation and its critique
has increasingly become not only a scholarly question but a mainstream concern. Notably, before
“cultural appropriation” entered common parlance, it was an academic term theorized especially
by those attending to the coopting of Native knowledge, traditions, or objects—as well as
appropriations of Black or previously colonized cultures.
53
More recently, tensions arose in 2017
following the erection of a sculpture by Sam Durant to commemorate the prosecution and
execution of various Indigenous Americans upon land adjacent to the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis. Meanwhile, the touring exhibition, Jimmie Durham: Center of the Universe was
met by skepticism particularly as it debuted at the Whitney Museum of American of Art, where
activists flagged Durham’s failure to register with any Native American nation. Hicks’s work has

51
John Russell, “An Unnatural Silence Pervades Estes Paintings” The New York Times, May 25, 1974; Sheila Hicks
as quoted in, Originals: American Women Artists, Eleanor C. Munro, edit. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979),
364.
52
Sheila Hicks, as part of a tour at the opening of Campo Abierto, Bass Museum of Art, Miami, 2019.
53
Bruce Ziff and Pratima V. Rao (edit.), Borrowed Power: Essays in Cultural Appropriation (Rutgers University
Press, 1997); James O. Young, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (Blackwell Publishing, 2008).

25
notably never inspired such heated debate. In the study that follows, I meditate on art’s
relationship to questions of identity, especially as this imperative intersects or becomes
meaningfully frustrated by a largely abstract idiom.
I am interested in Hicks’s career as symptomatic of a broader trend to be found across the
postwar and contemporary art world. Her career illustrates an art forged within a postcolonial,
globalized world often still shaped by neocolonial forces. As I will explore throughout, while
Hicks established her increasingly monumental stance as an artist and cultural agent, this new
world order re-organized the mainstream Euro-American art world. As Holland Cotter flags,
critiques of primitivism from many sides met and decried exhibitions such as William Rubin’s
“Primitivism” in 20
th
Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 1984 at MoMA, and
Jean-Hubert Martin’s Magiciens de la Terre, 1989 at the Centre Pompidou. Years before these
dramatic episodes in the globalization of modern and contemporary art, Hicks pursued a way
forward that explored art as a hybrid formation informed by intersectional identities and
intercultural exchange.
As she entered both biographic and artistic maturity, in (at least) 1967, 1969, and 1971,
Hicks repeatedly listed “North American” as her nationality when submitting her application for
participation in the Lausanne Tapestry biennials, even though by then she had settled in Paris—
and in 1972 was one of two women selected for Douze ans d’art contemporain en France, 1972,
or “Twelve Years of Contemporary Art in France” (emphasis mine).
54
Not only unusual,
Hicks’s election of a continental rather than national identity resisted the logic of such
distinctions, blending her upbringing throughout the United States with the preceding early years
of her career in Mexico. It also suggests a more generous definition of ‘American,’ as a

54
CITAM archives, Fondation Toms Pauli, Lausanne, Switzerland.

26
nationality available not simply to artists from the United States, as has traditionally been its
common meaning in English and institutional application (such as at museums like the Whitney
Museum of American Art, or Wanda Corn’s The Great American Thing, 2001) but rather to
anyone born or residing across the American continents, from Alaska and the northern most
reaches of Canada to Cape Horn at the southernmost tip of Chile.
We might say that Hicks approached an identification as an artist of no nation, an anti-
nationalism long-standing as part of feminist thought. “As a woman, I have no country. As a
woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world,” Virginia Woolf declared
in Three Guineas, her pacifist manifesto which deconstructed the intersection of European
patriarchy, fascism, and empire.
55
Woolf’s powerful and provocative declaration of the prewar
1930s was reincarnated as a slogan by feminist activists in the Vietnam era 1960s, a neo-imperial
period within which Hicks emerged. Historically, art in the service of identity, whether that
associated with feminist, Indigenous, Black, queer or other recognized coalitions advocating for
change and visibility, is often expected to be figurative, to visualize a particular and palpable
iconography evocative of the subject position in question. With Hicks’s abstraction as model, I
think through the capaciousness of fiber as a method for materializing complex and plural
subjectivities.
Weaving to the World
The narrative that follows is structured into five chapters, distinguished by shifts in time
and place, as well as distinct formal registers, from Hicks’s smallest and earliest planar weavings
in the 1950s to more sculptural and then ultimately monumental works. This overall structure
was suggested in part by Hicks herself, who in the mid 1970s laid out four classifications for

55
Relevant to Hick’s textiles, Woolf’s included and analyzed photographs of men in military and academic regalia
as part of her argument. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (Hogarth Press, 1938).

27
dividing her work up to that point: what she called closed, open, blocked, and ephemeral
compositions. While I draw on Hicks’s language at times, my divisions do not map upon hers.
Rather, I interface her work with terms and histories already established, integrating her diverse
work into larger and longer standing art and cultural histories and formulations of media like
painting and sculpture. My model also intentionally emulates and draws upon George Kubler’s
notions of the “form class” and “prime object,” both introduced in his landmark 1962 treatise,
The Shape of Time (more, on this, in the following chapter). Central to Kubler’s method is the
articulation of two related concepts, the “series” and the “formal sequence.” Both the series and
the sequence are identified by sorting through the accumulations of the aforementioned “form-
class,” which he describes as “the entity composed by the problem and its solutions.” Whereas
the ‘sequence’ is an active problem, “an open-ended, expanding class,” still actively attended by
solutions in the present, Kubler’s series is a “closed grouping” a sequence that at least for the
moment has come to rest.
56
Both the sequence and settled series of made things, once identified
by the historian, answers the riddle and informs the “shape of time,” affording a concept of
historical development. “The chain of solutions discloses the problem,” a sign of what instigates
a historically recurrent form and repeatedly encourages it into being, he suggests.
57

Thus, each chapter isolates a form class as well as several key “prime objects” that
demonstrate Hicks’s solution to the formal problem at hand in this sequence. A key reason for
this format results from the recognition that once Hicks initiates a sequence or form-class, its use
is not historically discrete. In fact, as a general rule, they tend to continue as formats into the
present, well beyond their initial formulation. For example, her signature small weavings, the

56
George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1962), pp. 33
57
Kubler, pp. 33.

28
minimes, begun in the 1950s, continue according to the same format today, half a century later.
Thus, while grounded in a historic period, each chapter allows for tunnels forward in time and
aims to analytically hold for more recent works that develop each format. In my reading,
Kubler’s idea of the “prime object” (especially as a decisively fashioned bit of language)
reconceptualizes the comfortable, established, but very limiting notion of the canonical art
historical object, a painting or sculpture generally agreed upon as significant evidence of the
story of art by a plurality of scholars and historians. As such, identifying Hicks’s “prime objects”
also allows me, à la Kubler, to draw her work into potentially unexpected, temporally or
culturally distinct or distant form classes or sequences, unsettling the touchstones of a
Eurocentric modern and contemporary canon via a more transhistoric and worldly network of
prime objects from pasts both proximate and remote.
Beginning at Yale in 1954, my first chapter, “‘This Man’s University’: Josef Albers,
George Kubler, and The New Art School,” argues that Yale’s severe gender imbalance
encouraged Hicks to embrace a transmedial and Indigenous American definition of art spirited
into the male-dominated, Eurocentric American research university by Josef Albers and George
Kubler. Chapter two, “‘My Great Teachers’: Anni Albers, Andean Textiles, and the World in
Miniature, 1957-1959,” follows Hicks ‘off-campus,’ at home with Albers, and then further south
to the Andes, where I examine the “miniature,” as a category of extra-Western art, drawing
connections between the belts of Incan Queens, their heirs, and postwar abstract painting by
women.
Drawing attention to the unnamed Mexican weavers of Hicks’s first workshop in chapter
three, “Letters From Mexico: The Value of Difference from a Distance, 1959-1964,” I argue that
Hicks’s early museum reception posited weaving as a matrix for comprehending intersectional

29
differences. My fourth chapter, “’Homeless Orphans’: Sculpture Dislocated, 1964-1980,”
reconciles Hicks with post-minimal sculpture to uncover how the raw materiality of this work
processed the relocation of heavy industry to the emergent economies of the Global South. My
fifth and final chapter, “Inspired and ‘happy’ ”: Collaborations, Corporations, 1964-2004
examines Hicks’s most massive works through the lens of the new multinational corporate logics
and globalist media theory that informed the multinational firms that commissioned her, from the
Ford Foundation in 1964 to Target in 2003. By reading Hicks’s objects with and within the
discourses of the regions through which they emerged and moved (far from the art world’s
supposed center) my work complicates the geography typical of dominant narratives of
contemporary art, still largely devised in response to artists consecrated by the market and
museums of New York City.
Possibly the most important critical stake claimed by Nina Strizler-Levine’s Sheila
Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor is to be found in it its very title, which argues that Hicks’s objects,
and weaving more broadly functions metaphorically. In Metaphors We Live By, language
theorists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson claim that, “the essence of metaphor is understanding
and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”
58
As such, metaphors are a method for
relating two different things. Building upon this basic claim, Lakoff and Johnson identify various
conceptual systems for understanding the world grounded in metaphoric claims, such as “Time Is
Money,” “Argument Is War,” or “Ideas Are Food,” all the way to more elementary spatial
metaphors such as, “Good Is Up” (one especially relevant to an artist who works across
hemispheres). These patterns, they argue, are “not just matters of the intellect. They also govern
our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we

58
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5.

30
perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people.” Thus, contrary to
popular understanding, they argue that metaphors are not simply flowery adornments of
language but concrete evidence of the ways we connect and relate a world of distinct concepts
and things into a coherent logos, in a word how we ‘network’ the world’s rich variety into a
coherent logical system.
As soon as one begins to devote their consciousness to textiles and discussions of them,
one notices that they too inform many figures of speech, another symptom of Lakoff and
Johnson’s argument. We speak of a narrative or simply any form of linear thought as a ‘thread,’
as in ‘I think I lost the thread.’ To manage a tricky situation, we ‘thread the needle.’ Those who
mislead or seduce us, ‘string us along.’ Extravagant storytellers, ‘spin a yarn,’ while those
avoiding obstacles, ‘bob and weave.’ Even new technologies, such as Twitter, appropriate the
language of fiber, so that a series of sequential tweets becomes just another ‘thread.’
If, pace Kubler, artworks satisfy us with solutions to problems, as metaphors, Hicks’s
objects materialize conceptual devices for reconciling what we know or simply our own
consciousness with what we don’t, the apparently different, or simply put the Other in all its
guises. In the chapters that follow, I explore Hicks’s objects as polyvalent visual and material
metaphors, operating partially outside of and distinctly from the rules of language and linguistic
metaphors (a limit testing I explore further in Chapter 3). As I will argue, in them we see echoes
of other textures and structures from the material world, such as trees, snakes, waterfalls, nets,
spider webs, clothing, hair, straw, skin, even television screens and computer hardware, as well
as more invisible, slippery, or daunting concepts such as language, writing, the ‘network’ or
‘matrix’ of electricity, transcontinental travel and international freight, telecommunications, the

31
autonomous computing of capitalist finance, and the vast web of the internet.
59
Grappling with
these claims, I recalled the words of Emily Dickinson, who like Hicks also reached for the letter
as metaphor, writing, “This is my letter to the world, who never wrote to me.”
60
Ultimately, the
world would write back to Dickinson, quite voluminously. What follows is my reply to Hicks—
hopefully the beginning of more correspondence yet to come from both myself and others.
Recalling Dickinson, a great mechanic of metaphors, I arrived at my title, in that Weaving to the
World evokes not only the increasingly cosmopolitan trajectory of Hicks’s biography but also a
reading of her works as a series of interfaces, between artist and environment, art and spectator,
artwork and world.
Though she is a globalist, Hicks is never a force for monoculture, nor a postmodernist.
Her work dependably lacks any irony or cynicism. In this, her work also discourages a
postmodern expectation that meaning be understood as separate (or evacuated) from its signifier.
Hicks does not make representations but real things, wherein matter and meaning, signifier and
signified, are never divisible but always remain one and the same. By looking closely at the
diversity of forms Hicks devised in fiber, including woven wall hangings, sculptures,
architectural commissions, and installations, I argue that these metaphors not only bridged the
inequality produced by art world hierarchies but also challenged social stratifications of gender
and geography by reconciling the Euro-American art world with the art, visual culture, and craft
of the emergent Global South. I argue that Hicks’s oeuvre, from the miniature to the

59
Echoing its development by Bracha Ettinger, Carol Armstrong has invoked the “matrixial” (in a rereading of
Georges Seurat) as an intermedia model (that includes textiles) and as an alternative to medium-specific histories of
modernism. See Carol Armstrong, “Seurat's Media, or A Matrix of Materialities,” Grey Room 58 (2015): 6–25.
60
Emily Dickinson, “Part One: Life, ‘Epigram,’ ” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little
Brown, 1924).

32
monumental, helps us think, feel through global shifts of scale, uniting the local with the global
and the deep past with the present.
Throughout, my reading resists postmodern models that expect meaning to exist
separately from matter and form, or worse, its deferral or complete absence. The immaterial or
optical trajectory of modern art existed in concert with the insistent literalism of the material
world, which throughout continues to assert itself.
61
To do so requires one to get out of Plato’s
cave, and move toward, as Michael Yonan has suggested, Aristotle’s Metaphysics (and maybe
Macel’s Biennale too), where the world and art as some facet of it is understood “not as traces of
something else but as organized embodiments of matter and form.”
62
Hicks models a direct
intervention with the matter of the world rather than a mimetic reflection of it while also
pursuing abstraction as a distinct register for experience. This too was a particular notion of
abstraction, not as something at a distance from the real or figurative world, but as always
already bound up physically in it. Evidence of what Jane Bennet calls “vibrant matter,” Hicks’s
objects persist and triumph.
63

61
My turn here draws on the summary and directive offered by Jennifer Roberts as part of “Shifting Terrain:
Mapping a Transnational American Art History,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., 16
October 2015.
62
Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” W86
th
Vol. 18 No. 2, Fall 2011,
http://www.west86th.bgc.bard.edu/articles/yonan.html.
63
Jane Bennett, Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things (Duke University Press, 2010).

33
Chapter 1 — ‘This Man’s University’:
Josef Albers, George Kubler, and The New Art School, 1954-57
In 1957, Sheila Hicks submitted “Andean Textile Art,” her undergraduate thesis, in
pursuit of a BFA in Painting from Yale University. Preserved now as a loose portfolio of manila
pages, it sets black-and-white photographs of Latin American artifacts into dialogue with textiles
crafted by Hicks’s own hand out of readymade, mass-manufactured yarn. On one page,
photographs of a four-cornered hat and a knitted fringe of parrots accompanies a palpably
textured length woven and knotted out of bright orange and pink yarn, creating a whimsical,
frilly effect at its perimeter (see figure 34). Hicks’s fringe emulates its archeological
companions, further compensating for the demonstrably haptic qualities otherwise lost to the
photographs’ gray flattening. Labeled only by discrete numbers to their lower left (so that the
aforementioned objects are “12,” “13,” and “11,” respectively), we are left to contemplate
Hicks’s formal combinations absent of textual framing before beginning to hypothesize what
effect these unmoored objects and images achieve simply in their adjacency.
64

The wool pile cap, decorated with fantastical animals with the feet and body of a llama
but the wings and elongated beak of a bird, is of a style typical of the Wari and Tiwanaku
peoples, active from 500-1000 C.E. in what, by 1957, was modern Peru and Bolivia. This
particular example was made sometime between 700 and 900 A.D.
65
The fringe originated
several hundred years earlier, made in 300 C.E. by an unknown Nasca artisan.
66
Hicks found
both objects in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, one of the first institutions in

64
The pages, surely, were accompanied by an essay of some sort, but only the illustrations have been presented
publicly, beginning at least with Hicks’s retrospective Sheila Hicks: 50 Years.
65
Artist: Unknown, Wool Pile Cap, wool and cotton, square-knotted network with wool pile, A.D. 700-900 (Yale
University Art Gallery), https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/60488.
66
Maker: Unknown, Portion of a knitted fringe from a manta with birds, cotton and wool, dyed and woven, A.D.
300 (Yale University Art Gallery), https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/59622.

34
the United States to collect and present objects from ancient Latin America as art.
67
Read as a
historical document, “Andean Textile Art” works both retrospectively and prospectively. It
encapsulates Hicks’s synthesis of her education at Yale up until the moment of its creation while
also hypothesizing, like a visual mission statement, a theory of her late-twentieth century
practice as an heir to the tradition such ancient, Andean objects indexed.
The artist Anni Albers, one of Hicks’s most significant mentors during her time in New
Haven, would dedicate her noted treatise On Weaving, “to my great teachers, the weavers of
ancient Peru.”
68
Likewise, “Andean Textile Art” reflects the significant impact of Hicks’s “great
teachers,” from the anonymous Indigenous makers of “ancient Peru,” to the color theory and
material experimentation advocated by Anni’s husband Josef Albers, to the investment in
weaving and fiber as aesthetic media, a lesson Anni would teach. As I will argue, their shared
sense of a historical and formal debt owed to ancient Latin American cultures was fostered
uniquely at Yale, where it was reinforced by the exceptional thinking and teaching of the art
historian George Kubler. Kubler, likely responsible for the entry of these exact objects (the first
of Latin American, Indigenous origin) into Yale’s art museum in 1938, recognized such objects
as art, encouraging students and peers like Hicks, and the Alberses, who saw them as precedents
for their own modern creations.
69

67
If they were presented in the space of the museum, they were more often at home in institutions devoted to
Anthropology and Natural History. Pre-colonial Latin American objects were collected by both the Yale University
Art Gallery and the Peabody Museum of Natural History, including a significant collection of objects deposited by
Hiram Bingham following his “discovery” of Machu Pichu. This group (many of which have since been returned to
Peru) included several quipus, possibly the most widely known type of Pre-Columbian fiber work among the general
public today. In light of Hicks’s recurring emphasis on “Pre-Incaic” material culture, I have not addressed the quipu
(a hallmark of subsequent Incan material culture) explicitly. That said, it has been a recurring touchstone for other
contemporary artists, such as Cecilia Vicuña.
68
Anni Albers, On Weaving (Princeton University Press, 2017), dedication.
69
Susan B. Matheson, Art for Yale: A History of The Yale Art Gallery (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery,
2001), 165.

35
In the following two chapters, I focus on Hicks’s “great teachers,” and her time at Yale,
framed by her arrival in 1954 and her graduation, with an MFA in Painting in 1959. This span
includes her completion of a BFA in 1957 and her Fulbright year in South America, from 1957
to 1958, when the geographies that informed the ancient objects that so fascinated them all
became physically real and the descendants of their makers became Hicks’s contemporaries in
time and space.
70
Hicks, as an artist and woman, was especially unusual, a demographic outlier
in New Haven and Machu Pichu. As she increasingly explored and embraced weaving, this
outlier status similarly inflected her art as much as her person. Within this context, her
difference, particularly her gender, echoed the exoticism and alterity projected upon extra-
Western cultures and objects, including those pictured in “Andean Textile Art,” by modern
Western eyes.
James R. Martel has written of what he calls “the misinterpellated subject,” or those who,
“respond to perceived calls (calls to freedom, calls to sacrifice, calls to justice, calls to
participation, calls to identity) that are not meant for them, and how the fact that they show up
anyway can cause politically radical forms of subversion. What does it mean when the uninvited
subject, thinking that she has been called, shows up and refuses to go away?”
71
This is one way
to understand Hicks at Yale, an institution that was not designed to serve her, within which she
nevertheless found a sense of identification and a trajectory for the rest of her life. It is also a
way of understanding the Indigenous American objects to which she was drawn. Far from the
historic and cultural context for which they were originally designed, and framed instead by a
twentieth-century academic museum and collegiate curriculum, they were “misinterpellated”

70
Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time,” e-flux 11, December 2009, https://www.e-
flux.com/journal/11/61345/comrades-of-time/; David Joselit, “On Aggregators,” October 146, Fall 2013, 3-4.
71
James R. Martel, The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke University Press, 2017), 4.

36
objects, which unsettled the Eurocentric definitions of culture and history the University and
museum was designed to reify.
Even by their most enthusiastic collectors in the United States and elsewhere such objects
were predominantly described and understood as evidence of “primitive” cultures.
72
Even on the
rare occasion when they were valued as art, popular discourse still positioned them as inferior to
the achievements of Europe. Similarly, while Hicks had broken into and would win the decisive
support of an aesthetically visionary coterie newly valued by the powerful Ivy League
establishment, her status as a woman would continue to mark her as a kind of outsider-insider, a
paradoxical identity that would stick, and continue to define her subsequent decades-long career.
A presumed inferiority similarly inflected the status of textiles and weaving, extra-
Western or otherwise. Especially in the galleries and museums of 1950s New York City,
Abstract Expressionist painting reigned supreme. Nevertheless, Hicks invested in projects like
“Andean Textile Art” and began to weave works like Zapallar and Parque Forestal (all in the
same year, 1957) alongside her formal training as a painter, captured in canvases like Snow
Garden, 1957 [see figures 22-24]. Sensitive to such hierarchies and rejecting these discourses of
inferiority from the start, Hicks was attracted to textiles and their extra-Western histories not
despite their alternative status but in full awareness, because of it. Experimenting with weaving,
Hicks aligned herself with a tradition at least doubly othered, as both feminine and extra-
Western. Emulating the iconoclastic, progressive stance modeled by her “great teachers,” Hicks
sought to understand and exercise alterity’s power, beginning at the level of medium and
material.

72
Franz Boas, Primitive Art (Harvard University Press, 1927).

37
Though Hicks’s story is uniquely hers, the growth of contemporary art since her student
days in the 1950s—as an area of focus for museums, an intertwined and international
commercial market, and (most relevant for this chapter) a profitable and increasingly
sophisticated field of study marketed to student-consumers as part of the overall growth of higher
education worldwide—means that the structural dynamics which were idiosyncratic and
experimental when she intersected with them have since become a paradigmatic blueprint for the
education of generations of students following in her wake.
73
Similar dynamics of incorporation
into the academy and personal reconciliation with the dogmas of contemporary art as well as the
patriarchy and Eurocentrism typical of the university, museum, and market at large continue to
shape the participants animating art’s worlds.
As any press release would easily demonstrate, contemporary art is primarily imagined as
a field of discrete individuals and unique practices, each pitched as somehow different from
those already recognized, incorporated, and valued by the art establishment. And yet, art’s higher
education paradoxically promises to introduce and organize all these irregular individuals into a
collaborative, productive field. Even the most demographically normative, white cis-male artists
are framed and learn to describe themselves as actors within a discourse predicated upon
enunciations of difference, novelty, and thus a horizon of alterity imagined to be inexhaustible.
As the participation and recognition of women, extra-Western artists, and artists of color
continues to grow, the reconciliation of Hicks’s difference within the white, male university, and
her subsequent reconciliation of distinct European and Indigenous art histories through her work
at play during her years at Yale offers a historic case study in a dynamic increasingly at play in
the diversification of art and its institutions. Inspired by the words of Léopold Sédar Senghor,

73
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962).

38
who invoked “differences within unity,” I am interested in the potential as well for unity within
differences.
74
As such, I have dedicated significant attention to Hicks’s formative years as a
student in the 1950s, not only to fully grasp the conditions of her particular formation, but
towards a theory of global contemporary art as an institutionalized discipline and practice
relevant to our understanding of all its participants and the art they produce.
Over the Border
Hicks began at Yale as a transfer student after several semesters at Syracuse University,
where she also studied art. She applied to Yale along with, and at the encouragement of her
friend and fellow art student at Syracuse University, Lonnie Summer, in the spring of 1954; both
were accepted to start the following fall.
75
Despite Summer’s industry and their shared success,
their endeavor suddenly became a solo act when Summer committed suicide over the summer
holiday, writing in a note, “I just don’t have the strength to see the whole thing through.”
76

Summer’s sentiment conveys the immense pressure of coming-of-age, looking forward to the
challenge of one’s entire life, as well as the self-doubt and panic such anticipation can inspire.
Suddenly, Hicks was left behind, now facing the critical decision of whether to return to the
comfort of Syracuse in the wake of tragedy, or to embrace the mystery of Yale on her own.
Attending Summer’s funeral with his daughter, Ray Hicks challenged her to consider her
options, not to just run away in the face of uncomfortable scrutiny. Hicks has recalled his harsh
advice at the funeral, remarking:
Now smarty-pants what are you going to do, you were happy in some school
doing well. At least we knew where you were, what you were doing. And now

74
Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Problématiques de la Negritude” (1971), in Liberté III: Négritude et Civilisation de
l’Universel (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 278, as quoted in Joshua I. Cohen, The Black Art Renaissance: African Sculpture
and Modernism across Continents (Princeton University Press, 2020), 16.
75
Summer not only instigated but also executed the bulk of the paperwork and physical travel to New Haven
required for the submission of their respective portfolios.
76
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.

39
you’re going to go someplace where you know no one, where you don’t have a
clue who’s directing this school or what’s going on; you’re just going because
you don’t want to go back to the other school because people are going to ask you
‘Why did your friend commit suicide?’
77

In fact, other potential uncertainties notwithstanding, the leadership that would shape Hicks’s
potential life at Yale was well recognized, including by The New York Times, who announced the
appointment of Josef Albers as the chairman of a “new Department of Design.”
78
To get away
and mull things over, Hicks decided to go to Mexico, enrolling in a summer program
administered by Syracuse and located in Taxco (where she would eventually return and live from
1959-1964). This trip realized a desire Hicks had harbored since at least high school—when she
attempted to pursue an international exchange student program but was stalled by the same
father, worried about her safety.
In Taxco, Hicks painted in the open-air patio of a rented house and “hung out” at Casa
Humboldt, named for the famed European polymath and naturalist, who stayed there in 1803
while traveling through Mexico.
79
As such, even well into the twentieth century, Humboldt’s
journey, especially the sublime imagery of drawings produced by him to illustrate volumes such
as Vues des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l'Amérique, 1810, imaginatively
backdropped Hicks’s first journey south [see figure 21].
80
A small jade-and-brown patchwork of
rectangular brushstrokes, Taxco-Iguala, 1954, survives from that summer [see figure 20].
Following Humboldt’s path both tourisitically and thematically, Hicks’s painting concretizes a
sublime image of the Latin American landscape as Humboldt had done in works like

77
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.
78
“Will Serve as New Chairman of New Art Unit at Yale,” The New York Times, July 16, 1950.
79
Eleanor Jones Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture (Princeton
University Press/Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2020).
80
Humboldt’s status as a naturalist also anticipates the at time vegetal or tree-like nature of Hicks’s more mature
sculptures, as discussed in chapter 4.

40
Chimborazo Seen from the Tapia Plateau, Ecuador. As in Chimborazo, the image of a white and
blue-gray mountain arises in the distance, toward the top of Taxco-Iquala, while a palette of
blue-greens and browns below echo the nineteenth century landscape’s description of an arid
plain, as well as high mountain flora and fauna. The title of Hicks’s painting, taken from the city
in Southwestern Mexico, reinforces an apprehension of it, like Humboldt’s print, as a landscape,
an entry in this long and large pictorial tradition.
Unlike Humboldt, Taxco-Iquala updates the landscape tradition by offering a blocky,
abstracted view that moves away from his Enlightenment empiricism to emulate instead a
modernist vision, especially reminiscent of the precedent formulated by French painter Paul
Cezanne. Taxco-Iquala echoes the horizontality and accordion-like flattening of deep
background and immediate foreground typical of Cezanne’s landscapes, especially his multiple
studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire as in the parceled surface of Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-4.
81

Informed by modernist, European precedent, Hicks found a landscape in Taxco, far from
Cezanne’s Sainte-Victoire that could still play such a role. Formally, Taxco-Iquala anticipates
the color-blocked ‘painting’ achieved by artist Chemi Rosado-Seijo via his El Cerro project
(2002-ongoing), where over 100 houses in a hillside Puerto Rican village have been painted
different shades of green for free in part to match the palette of the surrounding mountain,
underscoring the community’s present and historic interdependence with the historic and
contemporary landscape.
82
Acknowledging the expansion of infrastructure and habitation across
Latin America in the postwar period, Rosado-Seijo’s El Cerro project encourages an
identification of Taxco-Iquala as an image of the built environment as much as the natural.

81
Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte Victoire, 1902-4, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
82
El Cerro, Arte Útil, accessed April 4, 2021, https://www.arte-util.org/projects/el-cerro/.

41
“As I became aware of the art world there was more of an internationalist feeling than
there had been for some years,” Hicks has remarked of this period, identifying her decision to
venture abroad as a response to a trend set by those she admired. “Monet and the Abstract
Impressionists were being talked about. Joan Mitchell had left New York, gone over the border
as it were. It always seemed to me that to be a success you had to get over the border literally or
figuratively.”
83

Although it failed to achieve the widespread familiarity that the designation, “Abstract
Expressionism” still retains, the phrase, “Abstract Impressionism” that Hicks recalled offers a
formal language for understanding her painting at that exact moment—from how it may have
struck her contemporaries to the relationship it constructed to modernist precedent. Coined by
Elaine De Kooning in 1951, “Abstract Impressionism” gained traction as a term in 1956 as a way
of understanding the evolution of Abstract Expressionism and expressive, gestural abstract
painting generally, including its historical and formal relationship to the work of the nineteenth
century French Impressionists. Taxco-Iquala achieves what De Kooning characterized as typical
of the tendency, including a “quiet uniform pattern of strokes that spread over the canvas” and a
return to nature and landscape as a point of reference, potentially cultivating an eco-critical
pulse.
84
As Hicks’s statement shows and critics and curators like De Kooning, Lawrence
Alloway, and Louis Finkelstein concurred, Abstract Impressionism as an idea emerged from the
belief that the large-scale abstract painting of the Abstract Expressionists made more sense
especially as the fifties went on when backgrounded by Impressionist precedents, especially the
late work of Claude Monet and the exhibition of his Nympheas at the Museum of Modern Art

83
Sheila Hicks, in Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (Da Capo Press, 1979/2000), 366.
84
Michael Leja, “The Monet Revival and New York School Abstraction,” Monet in the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale University Press, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 1998), 107.

42
beginning in 1955. As Irving Sandler describes it, Hicks’s turn to “Abstract Impressionism”
echoes not only Monet and the Impressionist interest in nature but also its inheritance by the
sunnier eye of Pierre Bonnard, in works like Landscape of Haute Savoie, 1918 or Paysage de
Cannet, 1918. Hicks’s Taxco is well matched by Finkelstein’s diagnosis that, “the role of color
has become more important” for Abstract Impressionist painters. “The brokenness of color,” he
remarked, as if starring into Hicks’s Mexican landscape, “works to produce an over-all
activity.”
85

The phrase was also used in part to distinguish so-called “second generation” Abstract
Expressionists (as women like Joan Mitchell have often been described) from those who had
come before them (Pollock, Rothko) in the New York art world of the late 40s and early 50s.
86

Diagnosticians of “Abstract Impressionism,” detected a less violent, “more passive, detached,
and meditative” style. As Michael Leja has argued, such descriptions camouflaged a subtextual
sexism that greeted the greater presence of women among this emergent generation. As Leja
contends, “when juxtaposed to Cubist discipline and structure, Impressionism acquired a
feminine valence,” and as such, “reasons why [Abstract Impressionism] offered women easier
entrance into the avant-garde are not hard to imagine.”
87

For her part, Hicks deemed Mitchell worthy of emulation not because of her gender
(though she surely noticed this) but because of Mitchell’s ability, beginning in 1955, to leave
New York, to “get over the border literally or figuratively.” The phrase “over the border”
appeals, in part, as an interpretive touchstone because it sounds more appropriate as a description
of Hicks’s travel from the United States to Mexico, countries separated solely by a political

85
Irving Sandler, The New York School (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 52-56.
86
Sandler, Cockroft, Whiting, Leja, Alloway, Finklestein, William Seitz
87
Michael Leja, “The Monet Revival and New York School Abstraction,” Monet in the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale University Press, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 1998), 106.

43
boundary, a conceptual line—rather than the vast ocean (less of a border and more of an
expansive field unto itself) that separates Europe from the Americas and informed Mitchell’s
dislocation. Anticipating the diction and metaphors of transnational feminism, particularly Gloria
Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987, it recognizes the border as a
geopolitical reality forged by nationalism as well as a site of emergence for new identities forged
by and exceeding its differentiations. Amazingly, Finkelstein’s ArtNews feature on Abstract-
Impressionism is framed by advertisements for art schools (including, maybe of course, the
“hans hofmann school of fine art”), including two in Mexico (the only international option
beyond the United States): the “Guadalajara Summer School,” and the “Taxco School of Art.”
88

As such, readers like Hicks were encouraged to associate new directions in art with new
geographies “over the border.”
As Leja argues, the particular fervor with which, “Monet and the Abstract Impressionists
were being talked about” was historically noteworthy for those who witnessed it firsthand (not to
mention us in hindsight) for how it illustrated for contemporary discussants, “the dynamic
interrelations of agents and institutions in a rapidly expanding and increasingly powerful
artworld centered on New York.”
89
With this in mind, if Mitchell was exemplary, to “get over
the border” also meant emancipating oneself from the “taste bureaucracy” of New York which
threatened to render the American art world solipsistic, effecting its own kind of provincialism.
90

Abandoning New York for France, Mitchell’s literal geographic emancipation became a
metaphor for other acts of distancing that were more conceptual. It separated her from the male-
dominated “first generation” and effectively discouraged any understanding of her tied to any

88
Louis Finkelstein, “New look: Abstract-Impressionism,” ArtNews, March 1956, 67.
89
Michael Leja, “The Monet Revival and New York School Abstraction,” Monet in the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale University Press, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 1998), 102 (?).
90
Leja, ibid.

44
movement or group, positioning her as an individual unlike any other (anticipating the way most
contemporary artists position themselves today). Likewise, Hicks saw her as a pioneer in a more
“internationalist feeling.” Framed by the emergence of Cold War binaries, Mitchell was an
“internationalist,” embodying a transnational globalism rather than a nationalism—as Abstract
Impressionism as opposed to Abstract Expressionism did too. Mitchell need not align with one
side over another nor keep up with New York’s effectively provincializing self-obsession (which
continues still today). In this sense, to “get over the border” is also to ‘get over it’ in the
psychological sense, to be freed of hang-ups or mental limitations. For understanding Hicks,
‘getting over the border’ opened a space freer from hierarchies of gender and first-ness. Moving
to France, Mitchell and Abstract Impressionism’s association with Monet became a choice rather
a teleological development or assignment from external interpreters. Likewise, Hicks’s travels to
Latin America, beginning with her first trip to Mexico allowed her to choose her aesthetic
ancestors.
In addition to engaging with contemporary Mexico through the style of, “Abstract
Impressionism” in 1954, Hicks began to explore its ancient past, especially as registered by the
artifacts and monuments from it that persisted into the present. She visited several important
archeological sites for the first time during this trip, including Mitla, Monte Alban, and
Teotihuacan. The stacked logic of Taxca-Iquala reiterates the idea of an archeological site,
especially a relatively square-edged, zigzagging one like those the Zapotecs and other ancient
Americans crafted. Hicks’s Taxco locks the sight of a scenic vista, perception itself, into place
like carefully masoned stones. If the Monet revival that fueled “Abstract Impressionism”
demonstrated how the obscure and ignored “works of an elderly man [could be] transformed into
fresh young things,” through the “alchemy of art critics and historians,” but more importantly

45
artists, then Hicks took note. Reaching much farther than the comparatively recent past of
French Impressionism, Hicks’s travel and subsequent investment in the archeological heritage of
Latin America still dramatically present, and thus potently contemporary with her, raised the
stakes, preparing her likewise to “turn something that was an ending…into a beginning” and
negotiate her own relationship to the art and cultures that preceded and coincided with her.
91

With this first visit, made in a few short weeks after her friend’s death, Hicks began the research
and inquiry that would endear her to Josef and Anni Albers, as well as George Kubler at Yale in
the years to come. In them, she would soon discover mentors who not only supported her artistic
experimentation, but also shared her nascent interest in conceptualizing these experiments via
ancient Latin American art.
Ms. Hicks
Returning from Mexico, Hicks decided to continue to embrace the unfamiliar, and headed
to Yale. Arriving, Hicks was welcomed personally to her new home by Sewell (Si) Silliman, a
man she deemed “Albers’s protégé.” Sillman had followed Josef Albers from Black Mountain,
and taught his introductory design and color courses according to the master’s model. Not unlike
the stranger in a foreign land she had been for the last few months in Mexico, when Hicks
arrived at Yale in the fall of 1954, she became aware of her alterity, marked now by gender.
Indeed, during Hicks’s time in New Haven, “there were very few girls; it was practically all
boys.”
92
In lieu of a Yale dormitory for female students, Hicks took up residence in a small
house near New Haven Green along with a dozen other women, including several from the

91
Ann Temkin and Nora Lawrence, Claude Monet, water lilies (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 15-
16.
92
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.

46
drama students whom Hicks described as “people who were really in another world than I had
experienced,” exoticizing them in turn.
93

Until 1969 (more than a decade later), when the undergraduate college admitted its first
female students, women studied at Yale only in the more professionally geared art schools,
dedicated to visual art, architecture, and drama. Even there their numbers were far from equal to
their male peers. Thus, serious consideration of what it was to be a female student in the 1950s at
one of the leading universities in the world offers a prehistory of co-education and the
diversification of the University and similar institutions relevant not only to Hicks as a particular
case study. The prompt she was presented with—namely, to make use of an institution that
regarded her as either an insignificant outlier or forgot her existence there entirely (and designed
itself accordingly)—echoes the paradox many still face today.
94

As evidenced by Hicks’s housing situation, not only women but all art students were to
some degree inflected with alterity, segregated as they were from the normal undergraduate
experience of students at Yale College. As she has put it, “there was no place to live in university
housing because it was a professional school. Yale Art School was not the undergraduate
university with dormitories and eating facilities. It was like the drama school or the architecture
school.” Evoking a stark and relatively bare experience, markedly different from the cozy
stereotype of Yale’s storied residential colleges, Hicks described it as comparatively bleak,
stating, “you were on your own. In fact, you were totally on your own.”
95

93
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.
94
Inspired by his time at Yale, playwright Jeremy O. Harris has recently produced, “a rage play about what it means
to be in an integrated education system my entire life…the play asks, what does that do to the psychic life of a black
queer person — and what’s that like here at the Yale School of Drama?,” in Frank Rizzo, “Writing His Next Act,”
Voice, May 27, 2019, http://ctvoicemag.com/2019/05/27/writing-his-next-act/; see also, Jeremy O. Harris, “Yell: A
Documentary of My Time Here,” n+1 38, Fall 2020, https://nplusonemag.com/issue-38/fiction-drama/yell-a-
documentary-of-my-time-here/.
95
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.

47
Even inside the art school, to be a woman was to be exceptional, the odd one out, kept at
a distance or marked by difference even at the level of the everyday, down to the experience of
one’s own name. As Hicks’s friend and Yale peer, the sculptor and writer Barbara Chase-Riboud
described, “everyone else was John or David or Jim, I was always Ms. Chase, and Sheila was
always Ms. Hicks, and that’s the way we went through Yale.”
96
Josef Albers, for his part,
commanded the attention of both male students and colleagues by calling them all “boy,” a
gendering condescension that, along with his reputed tendency to become hotheaded, nasty, and
authoritarian, students found indicative of his “prussianism.”
97
Such shifts embedded in casual,
everyday speech reminded students of and reified their gendered difference. Although likely
intended to maintain a certain air of gentlemanly decorum, gentility, and respect, to be styled
consistently as “Ms. Hicks” also effectively would have created a comparative distancing
between Hicks, as well as any of her female peers, and their male teachers, rendering them
precious and fragile beside their male peers, who apparently could be handled more informally,
even, in the case of Albers, aggressively. While Albers’s “boy” may have condoned at times a
problematic hostility, it also suggests overall a masculine camaraderie, an environment where
male students were more directly engaged and ultimately at ease than their female peers.
In the face of this, Hicks describes a sense of identification with and devotion to her
coursework none-the-less, stating, “I just tuned out the rest of the atmosphere…this man’s
university, I dove into that class, and into that discipline.”
98
Applied and studious, Hicks
appreciated and emulated Albers and Sillman’s demeanor, which she and others describe as very
disciplined, and often regimented. As described by Irving Sandler, “Albers’ genius as a teacher

96
Barbara Chase-Riboud in discussion with the author, September 2017.
97
Irving Sandler, "The School of Art at Yale; 1950–1970: The Collective Reminiscences of Twenty Distinguished
Alumni," Art Journal 42, no. 1 (1982): 16.
98
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.

48
depended less on what he taught than on the example he himself set: his utter devotion to making
art and to teaching…his seriousness as a teacher inspired his students to be equally serious as
students.”
As such, “that discipline” that Hicks describes encompasses a double meaning (at least).
Hicks took comfort not only in the structure of executing assignments in a timely and structured
fashion, but also in learning and reinforcing the parameters of art as an intellectual field and
physical discipline enacted by the body as a conduit for the mind. She enacted art and learned to
perform the role of artist by rehearsing it through her own actions, learning to occupy a habitus
in the sociological sense, located at a particular intersection of class, gender, and racial norms. In
his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, its most thorough (if
not original) theorist defined the habitus, as, “the product of a dialectical relationship between a
situation and a habitus, understood as a system of durable and transposable dispositions which,
integrating all past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions,
appreciations, and actions, and makes it possible to accomplish infinitely differentiated tasks,
thanks to the analogical transfer of schemata acquired in prior practice.”
99
At Yale, Hicks and
her peers rehearsed such a coordinated, “matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions,” and
practiced art, a great task composed of many smaller more specific, “infinitely differentiated
tasks,” with serious intention and assiduous attention. Otherwise, especially according to Albers,
one fell short.

99
Pierre Bourdieu as quoted by Loïc Wacquant in “A concise genealogy and anatomy of habitus,” Sociological
Review 64 2016. As Wacquant explains, the concept may be traced to earlier works, including as far back as
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but emerged in the modern world as part of early sociology and anthropology, in
the work of Emile Durkheim, for example in Pedagogical Evolution in France, 1904–5, and his nephew Marcel
Mauss’s “Techniques of the Body,” 1934. Bourdieu’s investment parallels a similar elaboration (and more closely
contemporaneous to Hicks) of the ‘habitude’ and the “lived body,” by phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

49
Thanks to her high school years at New Trier, a suburban public school frequently
recognized as one of the best in the country—including by a 1950 Life magazine feature that
noted that 87% of students attended college and many teachers had PhDs—Hicks was well aware
of the Ivy League’s prestige.
100
Putting sexism to one side (“this man’s university”), Hicks
recognized any opportunity at Yale to be an “interesting idea, because I could challenge my
brother at Princeton. The idea of coming to Yale through the backdoor like this seemed an
entertaining idea to me.” Hicks embraced access by any means, going so far as to suggest that
when normative entry was not permitted she found it not only tolerable but “entertaining” to take
a queer route, “through the backdoor,” an idiom derived from the method of entry required of
domestic servants like maids, or those of working class or thrifty, as opposed to luxurious, means
(as is expressed by its use still today in the popular Rick Steves travel guide series, Europe
Through The Back Door). Such routes did not necessarily keep women out entirely—but with
Bourdieu’s “matrix of perceptions” in mind—kept them out of sight, cordoned off into particular
zones of behavior and occupation.
Even if one can imagine losing sight of the experience of gendered difference, Hicks still
found herself to be distinct from her peers. Hicks was also distinguished, albeit less severely, by
geographic origin, as a Midwesterner surrounded by a more East Coast demographic in New
England (a difference she noted too at Syracuse where the distinction, in her description, was
also a religious one). As geographic origin, unlike race or gender, does not necessarily register
physically, Hicks likely passed more easily and went partially unmarked by this difference

100
As the 1950s unfolded and more Americans moved to the suburbs, New Trier also became a case study for how
debates over the expansion of public education opportunities to accommodate new arrivals could become unsettling
flashpoints in local politics. “A Good High School: New Trier Illustrates a US Speciality,” Life, Oct 16, 1950; and
on the former: Louis H. Masotti, Education and Politics in Suburbia: The New Trier Experience (Cleveland: The
Press of Western Reserve University, 1967).

50
except maybe by her own self-consciousness on this score. That said, as Bourdieu’s habitus
insists, “taste classifies,” thus even if her origins were largely physically invisible amongst her
peers, Hicks’s difference would manifest in habits of dress, personal preference, fashion, and so
on.
101
Hicks saw herself marked not for her gender, but for her provincialism and self-described
behavior as a shut-in, a personality she saw in contrast to the more common type performed by
her peers, which she describes as more urbane and enterprising, as demonstrated in the following
passage:
I did everything I was told to do. I was not one of these Cooper Union smart New
York types. Let’s begin by saying I was born in Nebraska and educated in
Chicago, North Shore, very simple atmosphere compared to what I was running
up against [at Yale], because most of the students were highly driven, even in the
art school. They were laid back of course compared to the rest of the campus, but
they were highly driven, individualistic, career minded. They’d go down to New
York on the weekends. They’d seen Suzuki or someone speaking and were
inspired by all the shows that were going on.

Casting herself as a Midwestern outsider among the coastal elites, Hicks identified and
befriended another student from the American interior, Ernest Boyer of Dayton, Ohio.
Boyer’s photographs of Hicks at Yale, like ‘Hicks painting at Yale Art School,’ 1958,
document their intimacy, as well as Hicks’s own confident and intentional presentation of
herself as an artist in charge of her studio, powerfully positioned in front of and in
relation to her artwork [see figure 35]. Boyer, Hicks notes, had “a Greek mother, French
father,” and was “always wearing a bow tie—strange fellow,”
102
a description that
demonstrates that even though he was from Ohio, Hicks equally associated him with an
ethnicity informed by European geographies, and that she befriended him even though or
maybe because he seemed like a “strange fellow.”

101
Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, tr. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment
of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 271.
102
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.

51
To her, he was another outsider, like her. Here, we see Hicks keenly aware of not
only what distinguished insider from outsider—what discrete affectations, disclosed
origins, or performed interests might shift her position or style her as one or the other. For
example, she says her New Yorker peers were interested in Suzuki, a proper name that
conveys a good deal quite efficiently. D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) was a Japanese, Zen-
oriented public intellectual, an icon of East meets West intellectualism whose books and
lectures were instrumental in disseminating and popularizing Zen, Buddhism, and Eastern
intellectual history more generally in the postwar West. Suzuki lectured at Columbia
University in New York City from 1952-57, attracting large audiences via public lectures
that influenced artists like John Cage and several Abstract Expressionists.
103
Without
stating it directly, Hicks allows one sensitive to the allusion to ponder the seriousness of
her peer’s curiosity about Suzuki. Was it a superficial, pretentious, an Orientalizing
pursuit? A weekend fling, a thin excuse to visit the city?
Positioning herself in opposition to this cosmopolitanism, as Hicks recalled it, she
and Boyer “stayed on campus and worked all the time. We didn’t go anywhere.”
104
Their
shared static identity exists in contrast to the one she constructs for their peers, always
zipping off on a train to the city. Her peers were going somewhere in the figurative sense
too, she found them, “highly driven,” upwardly mobile if not upper class already, and,
again, “career minded,” with herself cast as antonym. Suggesting a bit of friendly
competition, she believed Boyer “became I think Albers’s favorite student. Albers adored
this guy.”
105
Albers may have loved Boyer, but Hicks was clearly a close second, if not

103
Bert Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations (University of Hawaii Press, 2001).
104
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.
105
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.

52
steady competition for his esteem [see figure 26]. And though future career ambitions
may not have motivated their actions, all their studious work would certainly lead
somewhere auspicious, leading one to question how different Hicks truly was from her
aspirational, savvy peers.
When she did venture into the city, Hicks would have seen several shows that
would have encouraged her burgeoning interests, including Built in USA: Post-War
Architecture, 1953, Ancient Arts of the Andes, 1954, Textiles and Ornamental Arts in
India, 1955, Latin American Architecture Since 1945, 1955, Textiles U.S.A., 1956—all at
the Museum of Modern Art. Meanwhile, returning to family in Chicago, she could survey
MoMA’s recurring Good Design series on view at Chicago Merchandise mart (a venue
that would host her own postgraduate work in the early 1960s). Such exhibitions
demonstrate a cosmopolitan program distinct, easily more diverse in any sense of the
word, than the MoMA that would come after. At this MoMA, the moniker “modern” was
applied generously and capaciously
106
, to topics as temporally and medially disparate as
postwar architecture, ancient Latin American art, and contemporary textiles.
107
The
embrace of Indigenous, pre-colonial cultures to be found in Hicks’s Andean Textile Art
and MoMA’s Ancient Arts of the Andes (which extended well beyond the region of its
title, including Panama and Costa Rica), was more regularly on view and available to the
general public in the late 1950s just across the street from MoMA, at the Museum of
Primitive Art, founded by Nelson Rockefeller in 1954 after his efforts to incorporate such

106
Nancy Lutkehaus, "Rene d'Harnoncourt, 20th Century Cultural Broker: Bridging Art and Athropology Through
the Display of Indigenous Art," in Regarding the Unknown: Encounters of Art History and Anthropology from 1870
to 1970, Peter Probst and Joseph Imorde, eds. Los Angeles: Getty Publications. In Press.
107
”MoMA Exhibition History List,” Museum of Modern Art (website), https://www.moma.org/research-and-
learning/archives/archives-exhibition-history-list [accessed on March 3, 2020].

53
material at existing institutions, particularly the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reached a
stalemate. Meanwhile, a new museum value for craft was signaled by the Museum of
Contemporary Craft (now the Museum of Art and Design), whose inaugural exhibition,
Craftsmanship in a Changing World, 1956 featured work by Anni Albers and Leonore
Tawney.
Over time, Hicks maintained her spot at the top of her class while others faded, as
the graduating class of 1957, her own, dropped by almost half between their
matriculation and commencement. Settling into a studio space with Boyer in the Art
School’s Street Hall, Hicks contends they spent most of their time there between the fall
of 1954 and the spring of 1957, “day or night,” working, working, working, with “no
extracurricular activities,” and only small breaks for humble meals of simple things like
toasted cheese sandwiches, Hershey bars, and coffee.
108
On one of these breaks, Hicks
met the man, a law student and future lawyer, who would become her third husband
roughly thirty years later, an indication that there was at least some time for something
other than reclusive study.
Ad Absurdum
A photo-essay in Look from the spring of 1950 shows three undergraduate men in one of
those well-appointed dorm rooms from which Hicks was excluded [see figure 27].
109
Cozy
beside a roaring fire decorated with beer steins hung from the mantle, they pose carefully,
evoking a casual, lavish studiousness, far from the humble, thrifty picture Hicks paints of
bohemian Street Hall or her women’s boarding house on the Green. Above them, supinely
surveying the room is a painting of a buxom, nude woman, an image that calculatingly straddles

108
Oral history, February 2004.
109
Look 14, no. 9, April 25, 1950.

54
decorum and good taste on the one hand and cartoonish, raw teenage male desire on the other.
Her pose and available posture echo the precedent of Titian’s Venus, a slight camouflage for her
otherwise lucid eroticism—that of an illustrated pin-up girl. Surrounded by an unarticulated
white field, she is all flesh with no surroundings. She rests upon pure neutral space like a
goddess on a cloud.
The photo’s caption plays off the banner hung at the top of the frame. “‘For God for
Country and for Yale,’” it explains, “is frequently expanded to read: ‘And for Louise’ ”—a wry
allusion to the nude. Such guidance for the reader makes it clear that we are not to overlook or
even feign embarrassment over this naked lady exposed for casual company (not to mention the
worldwide readership of Look). Dedication to her image, the caption implies, is an essential part
of these young men’s education and socialization at Yale (possibly even tied too, in keeping with
the motto, to their role as good Christians and dutiful Americans). The caption makes a joke of
the interior’s combinations—charged with repressed desire and homosocial camaraderie—but
also, embedded in its tone of light aside, encourages us to be comfortable with and calm about
the implications of this interior scene. Noting décor such as this, not hidden away but featured
prominently as part of a several page editorial in Look calculated to broadcast the historic
college’s undergraduate culture, it is hard not to imagine how quickly the few female
undergraduates arriving at Yale would become objects of awkward desire and ever-present
surveillance by their much more plentiful male peers.
A not imprecise counterpoint to this photograph is the prototypical scene staged by a
room of art students, eyes trained upon a model in a studio, one (often female) body scrutinized
by the gaze of a crowd of mostly (if not exclusively) men. Except, in this instance, the observed
object is not an image but real flesh and mind embodied. Such exchanges were sanctioned and

55
normalized by the conventions of the nineteenth century art academy. Similarly, before co-
education, with its unequally gendered undergraduate population, Yale created an environment
where a handful of women confronted and learned to navigate within a much larger cadre of
young men, as well as their teachers, and administrators, who were also predominantly male.
Such implicit institutional hostility would later be imperfectly tackled by policies like Title IX
and those it informed many decades later. But until then Yale’s women had to fend for
themselves, as the odd ‘man’ out.
As practicing artists, Hicks and her female peers both revised and had to subscribe to this
academic heritage in order to benefit from it, reinforcing while also rewriting this institutional
logic by their participations in it. In order to reap the institution’s rewards, they were also subject
to its inherent power dynamics, its sophisticated normalization of often sexist thought and
objectification.
110
Like the studio models (nude or otherwise) of the nineteenth century and
Beaux-Arts tradition, Hicks and students like her remained subject to the contemplation and
imaginations of their male peers. As artists they were aligned with making, looking, and, by
extension, being looked at. Associated with the art school rather than the more bookish college,
Hicks and her female peers were further differentiated and divided from the supposedly more
cerebral tradition of the liberal arts, a separation that reinforced a sexist stereotype, associating
women with the irrational or effete as opposed to the rational and masculine. As de Beauvoir
prefaced The Second Sex, “There is a good principle that created / order, light, and man / and a
bad principle that created / chaos, darkness, and woman. -Pythagoras.” In keeping with de
Beauvoir, as well the invocation of Pythagoras, father of geometry and its forms (a symbolic

110
These theorization derive from exposure to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, particularly the intersecting
themes of surveillance/sight/observation and education/examination in “The Means of Correct Training.” See
Michel Foucault, "Docile Bodies’ and ‘The Means of Correct Training’," The Foucault Reader (Pantheon Books,
1984): 179-205.

56
language appropriated by twentieth-century abstraction), to be an undergraduate woman at Yale
meant being apprehended as a modern object as often as a modernist subject.
Yale’s young men too were subject to an empirical, normalizing gaze. In the same Look
photo essay, a nude undergraduate stands before a black background with a white grid, his skin
whitened to an almost monochromatically flat tone by studio lighting [see figure 28].
Metaphorically ‘pinned’ to the metered, gridded wall by the camera that captures him, his back
and chest are also literally punctuated by thin white pins. As the caption explains, “Every Yale
student is marked and photographed naked, then encouraged to correct posture faults.” This
objectification and processing heightened the already awkward ritual of freshman orientation
into a hostilely clinical process, communicating from day one that college was about being
corrected, not only in mind but also as a body, a carefully observed human specimen.
111
In its
anticipation of the abstract pattern of the textile’s grid, the quantifying background also
thematizes the role of weaving as a potentially organizing interface for processing the unruly
irregularity of human subjects. Recalling the metaphor of the border introduced earlier, the
specter of the grid (like one overlaid upon a map) metered out the profile, the borders of the
body.
Thinking of the art school and its students subjected to this gaze, the image of the nude
student against the geometric grid recalls not only the motion studies of Edward Muybridge and

111
Such screening was not unique to Yale, and occurred contemporaneously at Harvard, Syracuse, Purdue, and
women’s colleges like Vassar and Wellesley, correcting both male and female students. Even worse, the “posture”
story was largely an alibi, a smokescreen for the research of William Herbert Sheldon, a psychologist who used the
nude photos to build a taxonomy of body types. Sheldon’s research would be popularized as the so-called
somatotypes of ectomorph, endomorph, and mesomorph, a system of categorization that became familiar to the
general public and continues to be used today. Later falling out of favor, Sheldon’s research was motivated in part
by a eugenic and social Darwinist philosophy, a belief that the bodily form would correlate meaningfully with
intelligence, social class, morality, and other behavioral or psychological traits. See Patricia Vertinsky, “Physique as
Destiny: William H. Sheldon, Barbara Honeyman Heath and the Struggle for Hegemony in the Science of
Somatotyping,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 24, no. 2 (December 2007): 291–316.
doi:10.3138/cbmh.24.2.291.

57
Jules Marey but also the conceptual and pedagogical transition between nineteenth century
Beaux-Arts academies and the modernist Bauhaus model. Nineteenth-century students observed
live models until they could render the human form with perfect ease, a task motivated by the
belief that such skill would form the bedrock of further study and eventually professional
practice from painting to architecture. Whereas modernist art schools or new industrial design
curricula largely displaced study of the human form (in effect, repressing it) with a new focus on
geometric ideals: cubes, spheres, cylinders, and other forms projected, via drawing, into virtual
space administered by a two- or three-dimensional spatial grid. Hicks encountered both
pedagogical models at Yale, the former held onto by its old guard figurative, classicizing faculty,
and the latter pursued by its new revolutionary hire and Hicks’s mentor, Josef Albers.
In their respective studies of modern art education and this transition, scholars Howard
Singerman and Molly Nesbitt have pointed to this pedagogical shift as productive of the
obsession with the purified geometric forms typical of modernist styles from Cubism to
Minimalism.
112
Becoming an artist, like taking on any persona, requires not only a mental
adjustment and education, but also a physical one. One learns and begins to rehearse not only a
suite of sophisticated ideas and concepts, but also a set of appropriate bodily practices,
comportments, movements, techniques, postures, and poses, from the increasingly skilled, and
confident hand of the draughtsman or painter to the strength and stance, the pushing, pulling, and
twisting of the sculptor. Building on Singerman and Nesbitt’s largely conceptual focus and with
Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus in mind, art school for Hicks and others was not only a mental
but also an embodied experience, where one learned to interface one’s own form meaningfully
and productively with the obstinate matter of the physical world beyond it. Hicks and her peers,

112
Molly Nesbit, Their Common Sense (Black Dog Pub Ltd, 2000) and Howard Singerman’s Art Subjects: Making
Artists in the American (Univ of California Press, 1999).

58
artists, as well as future doctors, politicians, engineers, and businessmen were rehearsing,
learning the steps and memorizing the scripts for the roles they would play for the rest of their
lives.
Amid the larger university, the art and drama schools evoked a comparatively festal,
liberated setting within New Haven’s local imagination. Even if in reality their work was equally
rigorous, their private lives similarly banal, period publications foster a slightly more raucous
image of the art school and its students. In another image from Look, we see “an after-the-show
party,” men in fireman and cowboy hats, a woman in a grass skirt and bandana bikini top, her
stomach exposed at the center of the picture [see figure 29]. For a college undergraduate in
1950s America, or even today, this is a suggestive amount of gendered role-play, men as
masculinist hero-types, women as Hawaiian dancers undressed for a sexualized performance,
especially when surrounded by a watching ring composed mostly of men. The Dramatic
Association (an all-male undergraduate group, we are reminded), “‘borrows’ girls for its
productions,” a verb choice that not only renders the infantilized “girls” object but also positions
the men as having all the agency. These women came from the only place on campus that they
could, the drama or art schools (and if not there, from the surrounding area, its women’s schools,
local towns, or even the homes of already married male students). As evidenced here, the arts
represented and literally created spaces for some bit of liberated behavior, including celebration,
role-play, and a casual mixing of men and women.
Along with clippings celebrating the hiring of Josef Albers by the Yale Art School in the
New York Herald Tribune, New Haven Register, New York Times, and the Harvard Crimson,
which deemed him, an “international authority on painting and the graphic arts”
113
, a scrapbook

113
The Summer Crimson, July 27 1950

59
dedicated to the documentation of the art school in the 1950s repeatedly includes news clippings
chronicling the annual “Beaux Arts Ball.”
114
Featuring “exotic vestments,” in keeping with “the
theme of weird people and umbrellas,” the ball is described as an “annual Bacchanal,” with
themes like “Ad Adsurdam,” meaning, “Anything goes.” Encouraging our sense of the Ball as an
opportunity for not only silliness but also sex, we are told that, the “Prize winner of the evening
for the most original costume was Leonardo Allesandro who wore nothing at all.” The sponsors
of this festivity were not only horny young men, but also Yale’s young female artists, painters
and sculptors in training, as demonstrated by the decorations at one such ball where, “the motif
of the evening was further enhanced by the eminently obscene mural designed by the students of
the school of Painting and Sculpture. Priscilla Small was instrumental in the design of the
mural.”
In another feature on the ball a few years later, we see “four students combine to make
many-limbed Hindu god Shiva…Doris Robertson, Michael Ralston, Fred Blumbert and Hilda
Abrevaya” [see figure 30]. Whereas an image or mention of a religion beyond Christianity or
culture other than those of Europe and the United States is hard to find in Yale’s everyday
ephemera of this period in the ‘once-a-year-day,’ topsy-turvy spirit of the ball, the most
important Hindu deity suddenly moves from the space of the latent unconscious to the
performativity of the explicit. The imaginative excuse of the ball, hosted by and associated with
the art students, furnished an unusual opportunity for experimentation, where religions
understood as foreign might be appropriated performatively, if only for the evening. In a more
imaginative, psychological register, as this costume demonstrates, bodies might defy their usual
behavior and logic under the sign of the Beaux Arts Ball. Out of costume, they would once again

114
School of Art, Yale University, Memorabilia: Scrapbook documenting the School of Fine Arts and the School of
Art; Yale University Archives.

60
be two women and two men. But for the night, one persona might be the product of four bodies,
whose usual gender identities dissolve into the potent persona (at times polygendered) of the
Hindu god of gods.
115

Although, even through the lens of the ball, one notices the typical 50s gender roles
prevailing, if a little skewed. In another picture, we spot a woman in a Grecian style dress, “Mrs.
Edward Gilmour, impersonating Salome, serves up head of St. John the Baptist to her husband, a
graduate student in philosophy, playing Herod” [see figure 31]. Mr. Gilmour’s Herod is made
WASPish and silly by his slip-on leather boating shoes and horn-rimmed glasses. Meanwhile his
wife’s offering, a convincingly modeled head, looks like a decorated cake on a baking sheet
covered in aluminum foil, encouraging the whole picture to slip back into the idealized image of
the doting, subservient housewife to be found in many popular magazines of the time.
The New Art School, By Design
“To follow me, follow yourself.” -Josef Albers
116

At the time of Hicks’s arrival in 1954, Albers was four years into his chairmanship of the
Department of Design, what had been, up until his arrival, the Department of Painting and
Sculpture, and would teach at Yale until his retirement in 1961.
117
Having taught since 1908
across three continents, including Europe, North, and South America, all before arriving in New
Haven, Albers assumed his post as an experienced and recognized pedagogue (if not yet as an
especially recognized painter, which would happen largely after his retirement). Yale’s
recruitment of Albers represented a calculated appointment, a move to bring modernist art to the

115
Wendy Doniger, "God's Body, Or, The Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the Representation of the Sexual Body of the
Hindu God Shiva," Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011): 485-508.
116
Josef Albers as quoted by Anni Albers, “Guggenheim Revisits Abstractions of Albers,” The New York Times,
March 24, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/24/garden/guggenheim-revisits-abstractions-of-albers.html.
117
Brenda Danilowitz, “Teaching Design: A Short History of Josef Albers,” Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (New
York: Phaidon, 2006), p. 70.

61
American research university, at a time when the research university at large was not only
decidedly ready for it, but increasingly saw modernist art and its avatars in both culture and
industry as part of a confluence of cohesive social advancement. Encouraged by university
administrators who had recruited and hired him, Albers revised the school, not only by
rechristening its major department, but also by fostering a radical new pedagogical and aesthetic
precedent within it, one in conflict with the traditional Beaux Arts model that had been in play at
Yale up until that point and which proceeded apace elsewhere.
118

In a Yale Daily News article from February 28, 1951, on “the New Art School,” we get
the impression that Albers wasted no time at all, transforming both theory and practice,
reshaping the thinking and making of eager students in a matter of months. An undergraduate
reporter, Mark Potter, describes how, “a stroll through Street Hall (commonly known as the Yale
Art School) would seem to indicate a certain unanimity among the students, for the great
majority are producing non-objective or near-non-objective abstractions. Their similarity,
however, exists only in the fact that their paintings do not attempt to represent anything but are
created solely for themselves.”
119
Potter notes that before this paradigm and stylistic shift, these
abstractions were preceded by a generation of figurative painters, pursuing a kind of veristic
surrealism in the vein of what sounds like (the article is unillustrated) Dali or Magritte. As
experts on this new state of affairs, Potter quotes several students, including one who describes
how they occupy, “a complex psychological era, and what we want is to get away from emotion.
We want functional, well-designed homes and non-representational painting to go with them.

118
The nineteenth-century model would persist even at Yale, carried on in courses taught by more established or
tenured faculty that Albers failed to convert and was in fact never empowered to fire.
119
The referent here is unclear, as themselves could apply to the artists, who create solely for their own satisfaction
or interior barometer, or for the satisfaction of the abstract art, the paintings and sculptures “themselves.”

62
People must learn to appreciate painting for its own objective self without referring to the life
they know around them.”
120

While Hicks does mention informally witnessing architecture critiques during her time at
Yale, carried on by noteworthy figures like Louis Kahn, or helping a model-building architecture
student and friend with his homework, architecture and art classes were largely separate affairs.
As such, this call for “well-designed homes” would have been largely aspirational rather than
practically pursued at Yale at least by Hicks. As for the student’s evocation of autonomy, his
statements indicate a paradox of wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too. Paintings were not
autonomous in that they were imagined as functioning cogs intended and imagined for the
destination of the private home. And yet, painting was autonomous in that it was to be
appreciated “for its own objective self” rather than because it approximated something external
to it.
Here, we begin to understand what was embedded ideologically in the shift of the
Department’s name from ‘Painting and Sculpture’ to ‘Design,’ evidence that “Albers’ general
commitment was to art, and not, as often believed, to design.”
121
While the name of separate
media had been erased from the department’s title, they were not abandoned as actual practices,
not abolished but rather blurred into a synthetic practice that superseded medial distinctions, by
“design.”
122
No exception to the rule, students like Hicks would continue to ultimately create
what was effectively ‘Painting and Sculpture’ (as demonstrated by paintings like Taxco-Iguala,
1954 or Snow Garden, 1957), and graduate in these tracks as BFAs or MFAs, but Albers’s

120
Mark Potter, “The New Art School,” The Yale Daily News, February 28, 1951.
121
Sandler, “The School of Art at Yale.”
122
Adrian Forty, “Design,” in Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (Thames and Hudson,
2012).

63
curriculum would encourage them to consider these historic media as universally subject to the
principles of ‘design’ that he argued governed all visual experience and phenomena.
As such, Hicks would graduate with an MFA in Painting in 1959, even though her
thesis exhibition included both oil paintings on canvas, and weavings made from yarn and
other fibers. While the former object categorically reinforced the usual definition of
painting, the latter simultaneously ignored, defied, and expanded ‘painting’ to include what
would otherwise be recognized as a distinct medium, weaving, as well as possibly, as a craft
practice, what is beyond art entirely. Radically inclusive, Albers’s ‘design’ governed all of
this, both two- and three-dimensional media, and could be applied to any phenomenon
apprehended by the eye, thus making the notion of medium to some degree obsolete or out-
moded. If “design” did indeed accomplish the latter score, it was in a manner much distinct
from that achieved by conceptualism or post-studio practices more than a decade later by
opening art to include more, rather than less matter. Thus, the shift to ‘design’ was less
about producing ‘designers’ in the more contemporary sense of the word but rather
encouraging a way of thinking that could apply to any media (or better yet, simply matter)
conscripted into the service of art. Albers’s young ‘design’ students produced objects,
indeed often resembling paintings or sculptures, intended to succeed in interiors, ‘designed’
environments that assumed abstract and non-representational form as their universal
language. Thus, Hicks could logically engage fiber as an aesthetic (rather than strictly craft)
media, without violating Albers’s teaching.
Following this logic, Hicks has often articulated weaving as like drawing with
thread, regarding thread as a readymade artistic material, much as one would a pencil, tube
of paint, or stick of charcoal. This thinking is reflected in passages like the following, where

64
Hicks’s claims that, “in taking threads, lines remember lines, colored lines, colored threads
that I had bought in the dime store downtown, the kind of things they use for knitting or
crocheting and I was winding them around my painting stretcher, winding the threads
around so I had lines, I had parallel lines, and then I was trying to find ways to connect those
parallel lines on this painting stretcher.”
123
As they are linguistically here, the thread and the
line are interchangeable—even though one is an abstract formal concept whereas the other is
defined by a specific, materially real thing we can find in the world (notably a “dime store”
rather than an art supply store, where thread would have likely been excluded). Critically,
Hicks understands these lines as better not only for this Platonic exchange value (is a line a
thread, or is a thread a line? which came first?
124
) but for being readymade and found rather
than drawn. This is a model of abstraction ‘found,’ already in and of the world, as opposed
to derived or at a distance from it. By way of thread, Hicks could employ the structure of a
readymade line that was not additively but constitutively colored. Threads, understood as a
formal element, thus became an abstract universal, unburdened by the specificity, as well as
the possible lowliness of weaving, sewing, or embroidery as existing craft media.
As described above, instead of a proper or readymade hand loom Hicks used a small
painting stretcher augmented with nails to hold the warp and weft, a practical convenience
that also neatly predicates her first weavings upon the traditional support mechanism for
painting on canvas. As such, Hicks understood her work through the lens of Albers’s
pedagogy rather than as a break, or some nascent attempt at the thoroughly established craft
of weaving. At least in her mind at first, her activity was a bit of a sui genesis act, either

123
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.
124
Tim Ingold differentiates between “the thread” and “the trace,” and ties them respectively to the juxtaposed
arguments of Gottfried Semper and Alois Riegl. See Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Routledge, 2007), 41-44.

65
springing from no precedent, or if not expanded logically from an investigation of color and
materials already underway for her in the space of oil painting.
Hicks’s first weavings thereby followed the logic of Albers’s famous color course,
whose rules were recorded in Albers’s well-known publication, The Interaction of Color.
Particularly, students were forbidden from using paint or other mixable colored media.
Instead, they spent the entire semester primarily creating collages from a readymade set of
standardized colored paper. Students inherited and understood color as a material thing
already made, set and unwavering except for shifts in perceptual effects occasioned by
combining colors. Hicks’s threads then, bought already dyed in synthetic, industrial hues,
took the place of the color theory paper cards, allowing her to ‘mix’ colors to an almost
microscopic degree without ever actually dissolving them into one another. Drawing from
Albers’s own anthropomorphic analogy of his colors to social agents, Hicks’s usage
seductively extends the social metaphor. If each colored thread represents an individual
subject, working in thread rather than paint (or any other soluble media) allows for the
preservation of individuality and autonomy even under conditions of intense heterogeneity;
assimilation or leveling never occurs, individual colors (read: subjects) are always preserved
as such, and if need be the “interaction” can always be undone.
This logic, of an expanded material field superseded by design, would have been
reinforced also by Albers’s readymade assemblage assignments. The so-called “matière” studies
mixed found elements like, “coal, straw, and butter; grease and carbon paper; pink gum, silver
metal, and black velvet; and green glass, butter, and tobacco,” to produce an aesthetic effect.
125

Bauhaus, Black Mountain, and Yale matières made under Albers direction used the stuff of both

125
Frederick A. Horowitz, “Design,” Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (New York: Phaidon, 2006) p. 108.

66
the natural and the made world, from stones, leaves and eggshells to gears, steel wool, fabric,
and construction paper, to some degree collapsing or confusing this distinction between nature
and culture (as well as, implicitly, the distinction between art supplies and all other matter).
126
At
one point, Albers prized an arrangement of cigarette ash that fooled the eye into seeing a textile,
a particular matière anecdote relevant to Hicks (as well as his wife, Anni Albers’s primary
medium).
127
In addition to the mixed media matières, Albers tasked students with a kind of
economy of means assignment (one that similarly conjures a Depression-era ethos), where they
were expected to transform a single material (often cardboard) into a compelling form that both
rose above the banality of the everyday material as well as proved the unexpected dynamism it
was capable of when worked by sensitive hands. In one image of Hicks and Albers in the
classroom, we see what is likely one of these cardboard assignments stretching and curling above
their heads just below the edge of the ceiling [see figure 26]. Its luscious Baroque curls do indeed
defy the usual associations one might expect from a roll of cardboard or butcher paper. The form
also anticipates, even at its classroom scale, the lyrical monumentality achieved by Hicks’s
corporate commissions decades later (as detailed further in chapter 5).
Albers would also normalize the comparison of the natural world and the abstraction of
the art studio in his leaf study assignments. Students in his color theory course collected leaves to
be used as collage elements, pasted atop sheets of readymade colored paper. These collages
encouraged students to see two distinct kinds of readymades as available to them, one made and
industrially standardized, the other afforded by nature but still capable of a relatively constant
repetition of color and form, both existing in a productive and dynamic relationship. By
implication here, Albers encouraged students to see the elements of nature, like leaves and other

126
Frederick A. Horowitz, “Design,” (op. cit.), p. 130.
127
Ibid., p. 88.

67
botanical forms, as very much akin and consistent with the ‘design’ rules and color theory that
apparently governed the carefully standardized grammar of the modern art studio and
abstraction. Hicks would carry these principles forward in works that weave with feathers
(Foray, 2015), shells (Rivage de Chablis, 1988 or Écailes, 1976), corn husks (Ida Weingart,
1996), wood (Gorges du Daoulas, 2010), and seed pods (Araucario, 2015).
As Frederick Horowitz summarizes, “Design, to Albers, was not confined to the optical
sense; it also entailed experiencing form through the skin.”
128
Not only endowed with a haptic
potential beyond the strictly optical, Albers’s “design” carried an ecocritical potential, proposing
artists engage with a much broader material field, in effect offering to them what we might call
the whole world as an aesthetic material. Albers, and Hicks as his student, modeled a form of art
education and artistic practice that anticipated the much more recent scholarly re-orientations of
new materialism and what Jane Bennett calls, “vibrant matter,” as a possibility for radical
engagement with the material world with not just artistic but also radically revisionist cultural
potential.
129

Matter from the Inside
Returning to the Daily News article, a second student describes how abstraction produced
a greater degree of participation, moving the viewer from passive to active spectatorship: “in this
type of painting the observer becomes a participant in the painting itself. Take that one over
there. Those planes tilted at different angles produce a sort of shuttling motion and the observer
participates in this movement.”
130
Art, making and viewing, was understood to be not just an
experience of the disembodied eye but also an activated body, both for the making artist and the

128
Frederick A. Horowitz, “Design.”
129
Jane Bennett, Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things (Duke University Press, 2010).
130
Mark Potter, “The New Art School,” The Yale Daily News, February 28, 1951.

68
consuming spectator. Again, Hicks would extend such logic in creative ways. By pursuing
weaving techniques like that of the backstrap loom as she eventually would, Hicks identified a
way to connect herself and conscript her body into the experience of the artwork in a way
distinct from that available in easel painting or more traditional sculptural methods. In a
prosthetic manner, by employing the back-strap loom Hicks insisted on a real material conduit
that linked her bodily subject to her aesthetic object, blurring the boundary between them. To
connect the materiality of one’s subjectivity, the body, to the objects one produces leads, this
logic suggests, to a greater engagement with the material world. More palpably than the
aforementioned painted angles that shuttle the viewer, Hicks’s loom would tense in response to
her pull, and relax as she leaned toward it, shaping the nature of the weaving underway. As such,
the weaving engaged the artist’s body and recorded its disposition, as well as, like the described
painting, providing a prompt for the subsequent viewer to be activated, literally moved by its
colors, patterns, and textures.
Potter, our undergraduate journalist, gives credit explicitly to Albers for encouraging all
of these new perspectives, catechisms against representation, as well as those in search of an
appealingly haptic aesthetic that believed that the movement of the eye was tied to our
experience of the body, of physical sensation and the rest of the human sensorium. Potter also
reports rumors that “life-drawing would be dropped as unnecessary,” reflecting that the transition
from live models to geometric constants was a point of concern not only for modernizing artists
but also the everyday undergraduate. Discussing this debate, he notes the mocking slur against
figure drawing, those who demean it as “busts and buttocks,” a moniker that recalls the sing-
song jibe against a supposedly easy-A geology lecture I once knew, dubbed “rocks and jocks.”
Such anxiety leads one to consider how, for Yale (or any) undergraduates troubled by their

69
emergent desires for fleshy bodies, abstraction was a way to get away, or at the very least
transfer such anxieties onto an abstract, apparently inhuman body.
As Howard Singerman has described, Albers, due in large part to his affiliation with the
Bauhaus, was an especially high-profile progressive in a shared recalibration of art education
throughout a preponderance of institutions at the time.
131
His pedagogy and approach were
featured in major mainstream publications like Life, attracting future students and PR-savvy
administrators. Yale’s embrace of Albers parallels the installation of Walter Gropius as the
Chairman of Harvard’s Department of Architecture, there since 1938 and as such indicates a
game of Ivy-League catch-up.
Although it surveys this national transition well, Singerman’s narrative unfortunately
narrows the “horizon of possibility” it describes for art education at midcentury.
132
In its
emphasis on an optical narrative as primary, Singerman’s text hews too closely to a certain
Albers truism, his smart but too simplistic self-branding, “to open eyes.”
133
As commonly
summarized by others, “it was not painting or drawing that he taught, but seeing.”
134
Biased
toward questions of perception (indicative of its emergence following questions instigated by the
rise of ‘visual studies’ in the 1990s) Singerman’s history loses sight of the physical dimensions,
the embodied experience I have explored at Yale as well as the investment in materials that also
informed learning to make art in the postwar period, especially for Albers and his students.
135

Indeed, Hicks herself casts her experience at Yale as a transition from opticality to materiality,

131
Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1999), p. 115. Life article is mentioned in Sandler, “The School of Art at Yale.”
132
Though the precise phrase belongs to his interpreters, this idea derives from the philosophy of Ernst Bloch. See
Ernst Bloch, citation TK; Jose Munoz Cruising Utopia; Bill Ashcroft, TK.
133
Josef Albers, as quoted by Frederick Horowitz, To Open Eyes.
134
Wolfgang Wangler as quoted by Singerman, 101.
135
Ibid. p. 101.

70
stating “when I was studying fine arts at Syracuse, I was working on appearances, on the outside;
my practice changed radically with Albers. It was like working with matter from the inside.”
136

Singerman’s overly optical history reinforces the familiar history of postwar art, one
influenced greatly by the criticism of Clement Greenberg and histories that have both inherited
and revised his model of modernism. Too eager to stage a historical shift, but also a continuity,
between modernist opticality and postmodern conceptualism’s textuality, Singerman’s study is
too sited in the mind of the artistic subject at the exclusion of the aesthetic object or simply the
question of the physical world. In fact, by advancing from Abstract Expressionism not to the
stain painting of Helen Frankenthaler but instead to weaving, Hicks’s work breaks with the
established, Greenbergian and Friedian teleology of ‘post-painterly abstraction.’ And yet,
Hicks’s weavings would ultimately demonstrate Greenberg’s call for ‘flatness’ another way, by
utilizing a material that need not be stained because it already carried pure color in it. In this
way, Hicks’s trajectory in the late 1950s is both Greenbergian, and defiantly not.
Hick’s abstraction, free from image imposed atop support, connects her efforts to the
‘purity’ Greenberg described as the logical development of modernism’s “self-criticism” of the
pictorial.
137
If Greenberg desired flatness enough to discourage paint atop a canvas, weaving
succeeded by creating a plane with no need to stain, coming colored readymade. Predicated on
the union of a warp and weft, weaving is always already a grid, and in this way is inherently and
conceptually always two dimensional, like the theoretical matrix of an x and y axis. In fact, even
when weaving did attempt to mimic the illusionism of painting, as in historic tapestries, the
insoluble quality of thread (where each colored line remains visible and palpable as separate to

136
Hicks, as quoted by Frédéric Bonnet, in “Painting with Thread and Fiber,” Sheila Hicks, Free Threads: Textiles
and Its Pre-Hispanic Roots, (Museo Amparo, 2018), 46.
137
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas,
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, edit. (Blackwell Publishing, 2002): 775.

71
the naked eye) that for Hicks aligned it with the line of drawing kept the woven surface from
ever achieving the transparent resolution, so to speak, of illusionistic oil painting, and for that
matter the dissolution of more palpable bravura paint strokes too, always into one another.
Instead of Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, or Kenneth Noland’s need for paint as a stain that
imbues the flattened canvas, Hicks’s planar weavings arguably manifested an unstretched
canvas, another in fact woven surface, that is always already natively colored, with no need for
painterly application of any kind. Hicks’s refusal of tapestry and its usual pictorialism, allowing
the viewer to see only the incident of the warp and the weft (what we might call weaving’s
“deductive structure”
138
), in effect performs a purer demonstration of Greenbergian criticality
than contemporaneous reductions in painting had yet achieved.
Greenberg describes how painting “can never be an utter flatness…it does and must
permit optical illusion…a strictly pictorial, strictly optical third dimension.” In contrast to this
fetishization of opticality’s persistence, Hicks’s weavings allow the viewer no such fantasy of
optical space, stopping the eye upon its surface. Here, sensing the texture of the woven thread,
the eye is encouraged not to imagine itself in “travel through only with the eye” but in concert
with the other senses, particularly that of touch. The weaving encourages a haptic dimension, a
third dimension drawn from another bodily sense in place of Greenberg’s optical dimensions. As
such Hicks’s weaving evidences the charm of thread as a material experience in its own right,
not as a functional servant in the service of cloth, or as a conduit for a tapestry’s picture, but as a
thing, a form of matter charming even when not in the service of other gods.

138
These words are Michael Fried’s, from his structuralist reading of Frank Stella’s black paintings of the early
1960s. See Michael Fried, “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and
Reviews (New York), 252.

72
In outlining the origin of Fiber Art in the early 1960s, Jenelle Porter reaches for Lenore’s
Tawney’s evocation of “woven forms” contextualized by the experiments of her friends in other
mediums such as Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin in painting.
139
“Much of this artwork
developed out of painting,” Porter remarks and that, “often cited is a perceived conceptual
shortcoming in the facture of a painting: color must be added to a support. With fiber, as with
sculpture, color and support are generally one and the same, embodying what color-field painters
tried to emulating by ‘staining.’” Unlike sculpture, fiber, and thread comes or can be dyed to
emulate the variety of pure hues to be found in mass-manufactured paint. Whereas sculptors like
Eva Hesse would limit themselves to the often-drab neutrals of their experimental materials like
latex, Hicks would continue to have the painters’ palette, keeping pace with the stain painters
first and then the colorful minimalism of Judy Chicago or Donald Judd later, retaining a painterly
colorito for her practice.
That said, if we recognize Hicks’s efforts in weaving as connected transmedially to her
painting practice at Yale, her weavings evidence a hybridity of genre that rejects Greenbergian
medium specificity in a novel way, several years earlier than how this tendency would be
identified and articulated in the “specific objects” of Donald Judd or the “structures” named by
Lucy Lippard or Kynaston McShine. Anni Albers herself alluded to this interdisciplinarity or
transmediality when in her introductory note to On Weaving, she wrote “this book is not a guide
for weavers or would-be weavers,” instead “by taking up textile fundamentals and methods, I
hoped,” Albers writes, “to include in my audience not only weavers but also those whose work in
other fields encompasses textile problems.”
140

139
As discussed in chapter 3, Woven Forms would be picked up as the title for an exhibition featuring Tawney, as
well as Hicks, Claire Zeisler, Dorian Zachai, and Alice Adams in 1963 at the Museum of Contemporary Craft,
NYC—which subsequently traveled to Caracas and Zurich.
140
Anni Albers, On Weaving, ix.

73
Albers leaves the question of who these others might be relatively vague, but one
assumes they would include artists like those molded by her husband Josef, working in a
department named not for a medium (painting or sculpture) but for an approach, a concept, a
department of ‘design.’ Textiles, and weaving as its bedrock, had things to teach beyond the
community defined by the craft medium, to others engaged in other media and other tasks—and
Anni knew it. Not only that, she also gave this intermedial and interdisciplinary potential a
global and cosmopolitan spin: “just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also,
starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending
relationships.” Here, she echoes her husband’s claim that color is “the most relative medium in
art,” not only that it is a medium like painting or sculpture had been, but also that its essence is to
be relational, a force akin to transcultural relationships or Einstein’s relativity. Weaving here
becomes not only a practice that can incite discoveries in other fields and pursuits, but also a
metaphor for worldly connection, weaving is the beginning of an interweaving with things and
conceptual fields well beyond itself.
As the painter Tomashi Jackson has recently discussed, Albers’s pedagogy was “a
proposal for a way of thinking” forged by his experience as a:
World War II refugee living, educating, and making art in the United States from
the early 1930s until his death in 1976. He spent the majority of that time at Black
Mountain College in North Carolina and Yale University in Connecticut. The
American South and New England are hotbeds of racialized inequity across
public and private realms, then and now…Sixty years ago, there was a need for
anti-lynching legislation because people had to be told that there were
consequences for kidnapping people and hanging them from trees, cutting babies
from pregnant women, castrating men, and setting them on fire. And it was
opposed. The Tuskegee syphilis experiments ended in 1972. This is the social
backdrop of Interaction of Color. Whether or not Albers spoke frankly about it,
European ex-patriots were aware and more willing to acknowledge the fact of this
horror than many Americans for whom such violence was normal.
141

141
Jackson as quoted in Risa Puleo, “The Linguistic Overlap of Color Theory and Racism,” Hyperallergic,
December 14, 2016, https://hyperallergic.com/345021/the-linguistic-overlap-of-color-theory-and-racism/.

74

As Jackson’s powerful reading underscores, by the time the Albers’s arrived at Yale, his method
had already been road tested in Weimar Germany and the rural American South, where
(especially by the time of their arrival in North Carolina) it was undoubtedly conditioned by
traumatic experience, fleeing the rise of Nazi Germany in recognition of Anni’s Jewish heritage.
His life, and the teaching that emerged from it was designed to serve and provide an adequate,
flexible means of addressing the trauma and pluralism of a mobile, diasporic life.
Indeed, as much as he may have helped steward along what would become
conceptualism, and “appealed directly to perception,” Josef Albers’s pedagogy was insistently
predicated on an idiosyncratic engagement with materials, real stuff, as much as if not more than
the life of the eye and mind. Inheriting the philosophy of John Dewey, his teaching insisted that
students learn via direct experience with the immediate locality that surrounded them, rather than
through exposure to theories, dogmas, or other aesthetic principles. As Irving Sandler explains,
“in the color course, for example, students learned about color by studying color, not ideas about
color, and that changed how they saw color.”
142
Even when the topic or teaching objective was
as abstract as color, students learned not by reading about color but by working with colors,
through trial and error that changed their engagement and perception of the rest of the world
when they left the studio.
This recovery informs not only a study of Hicks but also her peers, fellow Albers students
like Robert Rauschenberg, Ruth Asawa, Dorothea Rockburne, Richard Serra, or Eva Hesse. Such
excavation is urgent not only for a revised sense of these histories but also in order to chart a
precedent, a legacy for younger generations of artists with no direct connection to Albers but

142
Irving Sandler, "The School of Art at Yale; 1950–1970: The Collective Reminiscences of Twenty Distinguished
Alumni," Art Journal 42, no. 1 (1982): 16.

75
whose work, in its insistent materiality, urges critics and historians to push back collectively on
narratives too singularly focused on conceptual or postmodern trajectories. To explain those
committed to materials today, one must excavate other routes between the past and the present
that fostered making, objects, and things, much as Hicks has done all the while between then and
now.
Like any good teacher, Albers made not one but many trajectories possible. By pushing
students to confront materials in themselves and in combination via the all-inclusive paradigm of
“design,” Albers fostered a more worldly and plural definition of art. He suggested a direct
intervention with the matter of the real world, rather than a mimetic reflection of it, as the ideal
artistic practice. This too was a particular notion of abstraction, not as something at a distance
from the real or figurative world, but as always already bound up physically in it.
Prehistoric Postwar: George Kubler and the Art of Latin America
Hicks’s relationship with George Kubler began with her enrollment in “HISTORY OF
ART 55b, The Art of Latin America,” a lecture course led by the prominent historian of Latin
American art. Having taught at Yale since the early 1940s, following his consecutive pursuit of a
BA, MA and PhD at the university, Kubler was one of only a handful of art historians in the
United States dedicated to the still very nascent subfield of Latin American art, effectively
dwarfed and obscure compared to historians of the Renaissance or other European concerns. As
such, though Kubler rarely underscored it as such, simply articulating the phrase Latin American
Art or Art of Latin America was a major declaration of alternative thinking, when most, from
amateurs to experts, proceeded according to the assumption that art came from Europe. As such,
Kubler’s teaching at Yale complimented the more inclusive definition of art encouraged by Josef
Albers under the umbrella of “design” at the School of Art. While significant anthropological

76
work and institutions had invested in Latin America as a topic of scholarly investigation,
especially as a site of archeological and ethnographic research, Kubler was the rare Latin
Americanist trained and later housed as faculty within a department of art history. His research
emerged at a time when if the visual and material culture of this region was appreciated in the
West it was generally either positioned as an anthropological artifact or collapsed into the
undifferentiated discourse of “Primitive Art.” While connected to discourses and institutions of
“Primitive Art,” Kubler rarely used this umbrella term to identify his own subjects of study.
143

While Hicks had been developing under Josef Albers’s eye for several years, it may be
Kubler who cast the decisive die, setting Hicks on a distinct course of scholarly research coupled
with material inquiry that would begin to lay the groundwork for her mature career. Describing
Kubler as, “like a walking mummy bundle, very gaunt,” animated by an “amazing unforgettable
personality,” Hicks took great interest in the course’s survey, especially objects from the many
Indigenous cultures of the Andean region that preceded the Inca.
144
In one lecture, she witnessed
“beautiful old Peruvian mummy bundles,” recalling that, “the textiles in them made a strong
impression on me.”
145
She saw Kubler too, “like a walking mummy bundle,” and thus according
to the metaphors of his objects, particularly the deathly ones.
George Kubler is possibly most remembered for The Shape of Time: Remarks on the
History of Things, a small but impactful book he published in 1962, shortly after Hicks’s time at
Yale. A small theoretical work, it re-considers art history’s method as a whole, rather than
attending to particular cultural contexts or objects. The Shape of Time imagines how art history

143
See, for example, the specificity of the title of George Kubler, The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The
Mexican, Mayan, and Andean Peoples, 1962; Alisa LaGamma, “The Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision,” The Nelson A
Rockefeller Vision, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (The Metropolitan Museum of New York, 2014).
144
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.
145
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.

77
might stretch beyond its usual approach and archive, predicated on the visual culture of Western
Europe, particularly the Italian Renaissance. One major move away from art history’s status quo
comes in the book’s first sentence: “Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to
embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the
useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world.” This founding postulation was and remains
revolutionary, but for a Latin Americanist like Kubler it would also to some degree have been
obvious to move beyond the rigid canons and categories of European painting and sculpture,
something he had already been doing regularly in his research and teaching for decades.
Such an expansion was necessary to recognize his sub-field’s canon as such, filled as it
was by a greater variety of objects than those focused on Western Europe, especially in terms of
media and function. While some objects were decorative, others were more functionally
oriented, and painting on canvas was unprecedented before colonial contact. Many objects, like
the elaborate garments that impressed Hicks, ignored a European or modernist distinction
between art and the functional or decorative. Most provocative and unique still today in this first
sentence is Kubler’s inclusion of “writing,” reminding the reader that language is not a natural
but a “man-made” thing, and also giving it the material, physical presence we might associate
with “things” and “tools.” This idea bedrocks Hicks own appeal to metaphor across her work as
a construction for connecting and understanding the physical world, (as well as and particularly
her invocation of letters and hieroglyphs discussed in my third chapter on Hicks’s time in
Mexico).
Contemporary scholars describe the art of pre-colonial South America as an “art without
writing,” a compelling diagnosis considering Kubler’s own mention of the written word. The
absence of writing south of Central America preceding the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth

78
century, including the preserved texts (documents, chronicles, ledgers, etc.) often understood as
essential for the writing of history thus means depending more completely on purely formal
forms of analysis directed toward the copious visual texts that exist. As curator Joanne Pillsbury
summarizes, “the absence of historical particulars…encourages a focus on formal choices and
their potential associated meanings.”
146
As a past accessible only through the analysis of material
culture rather than the examination of written chronicles, this was a domain especially
sympathetic to an artistic and formal rather than strictly bibliographic mind. As such, the pre-
Incaic art that interested Hicks in the postwar period (fifty years before the “younger” field of
ancient Andean art history described by Pillsbury in 2009) existed according to the conditions
idealized for formalist, supposedly autonomous postwar modern art by critics such as Clement
Greenberg. Absent of historical distinctions and such contextualizing information, Hicks was
able to relate to these objects as close, formal cousins, as if they were not ancient but
contemporary, “comrades” in a prehistoric postwar moment.
147

In keeping with this filial feeling, Kubler’s other big objective across The Shape of Time
is to encourage an open-mindedness about the structure of time, discouraging a notion of the past
as remote, and pointing to material objects, artifacts and art, as ways in which the past literally,
materially makes contact with the present. Likening works of art to stars, he states that,
“However fragmentary its condition, any work of art is actually a portion of arrested happening,
or an emanation of past time. It is a graph of an activity now stilled, but a graph made visible like
an astronomical body, by a light that originated with the activity.” Important here is Kubler’s

146
Joanne Pillsbury, “Reading Art without Writing: Interpreting Chimu Architectural Sculpture,” Dialogues in Art
History (National Gallery of Art, 2009), 73. By contrast, I turn to the significant linguistic development and
elaborate writing systems of Mayan hieroglyphs in chapter 3.
147
Boris Groys, “Comrades of Times,” e-flux 11 (December 2009), https://www.e-
flux.com/journal/11/61345/comrades-of-time/.

79
remark that material objects, works of art, are traces of immaterial activity, particularly the
embodied practices of human beings. By studying objects, we can retrace the steps, the gestures,
the activities of temporally, or otherwise separated peoples. This accords with the concept of the
artistic habitus introduced earlier in The Yale Daily News article, that described Yale artists (like
Hicks at her easel or loom) as involved in creating images that recorded a bodily disposition and
encouraged that disposition in the object’s subsequent spectators. Kubler’s point can be
expanded to articulate that works of art, often more transculturally, geographically, and
temporaly mobile than the people who may have made them, are a way of collapsing not only
chronological distance but in this ability also spatial and cultural distances, allowing the alien,
the philosophical or anthropological Other to become materially present, available for study and
understanding from afar in the form of an object. This is transcultural exchange, diplomacy
through objects rather than direct person-to-person contact, an idea Hicks would demonstrate in
her own transcultural objects in the years to come. It also anticipates what the political scientist
Joseph Nye would call, “soft power,” or the ability of cultural diplomacy to shape international
identities not only more peaceably but at times more effectively than person-to-person
interaction.
Kubler’s revisionist approach to understanding time and the relationship between distinct
moments in the history of art had undoubtedly been formulated well before the appearance of
The Shape of Time and contemporary to Hicks’s time there. In Kubler’s teaching notes from
October 10, 1955, one finds an interesting diversion: “Today’s experiment: to chart modern art
before instead of after the body of the course, in order to have its aims and achievements in view
throughout the year.”
148
Instead of teaching the basic art history survey ‘from the beginning’ of

148
Though every work of art is unique in conception and in physical properties, the aims of artists are few in
numbers. Some imitate nature, others express feeling; still others make magic spells.”

80
time, Kubler decided at least in this particular semester but likely in other instances too, to
destabilize students’ sense of the ancient past as the inevitable beginning. Instead, he placed
twentieth century modern art into the moment of the course usually occupied by the prehistoric
past, things like the caves of Lascaux or Stonehenge, or in other more focused art history
surveys, by whatever is the most temporally distant material according to a linear model of time.
Such reorientations of chronologies otherwise apparently fixed or taken for granted
naturally arose from the conditions of Kubler’s subfield as well as the question of how to
interface it with the art historical establishment. As such, Kubler’s intervention anticipated
similar correctives offered by postcolonial theorists like Geeta Kapur, who (via Raymond
Williams) asked, “When Was Modernism?” In answering this rhetorical question (particularly as
manifested by Indian art), Kapur articulated the uneven, non-synchronic arrival of modernism
throughout the postcolonial world. “It is crucial,” declared Kapur, “that we do not see the
modern as a form of determinism to be followed…to a logical end. We should see our
trajectories crisscrossing the western mainstream and, in their very disalignment from it, making
up the ground that restructures the international.”
149
The international, Kapur argues, arises not
despite but out of “disalignments” between the west and the rest, postcolonially free from its
determinisms, modern or otherwise. “We have to introduce from the vantagepoint of the
periphery the transgressions of uncategorized practice,” writes Kapur. Such introductions
announce a critical corrective, ideally “before the west periodizes…entirely in its own terms.”
150

Because Kubler’s teaching and writing in The Shape of Time emerged from his investment in
Latin America, another “vantagepoint of the periphery,” it led him similarly to articulate a

149
Geeta Kapur, “When Was Modernism in Indian Art?” When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural
Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Press, 2001/2007), 297.
150
Kapur, 297.

81
“disalignment” from European periodizations and definitions of artistic practice. As captured by
Andean Textile Art and her subsequent practice, Hicks too appreciated this peripheral position.
Weaving and work in fiber’s status in the west would also present what Kapur calls a
transgressive, “uncategorized practice” which echoed its potentially “peripheral” origins and
found advantage in this status.
For his part, Kubler’s argument for entertaining the possibility of more than one timeline
for art, including nonlinear structures, informed by significant breaks or hiatuses, or where the
present even is organized not to follow but to precede deeper pasts, posits a flexible theory of
time and art’s history that evades the hierarchies otherwise encouraged by trying to hew all of
world history and making into a singular timeline. When we insist that something as powerful as
modernism can occur “first,” and only for a certain period in a particular place, we inevitably set
other events into a relative status, premature or belated, either one implicitly lessening their
significance. Instead, embracing more than one “shape of time,” and accepting that they may
never fully cohere, we create a cultural and historical model that is more lateral and expansive,
“international” and plural rather than hieratically singular. Made visible as they were, beginning
in the colonial period but especially still excavated throughout the twentieth century and into the
present, the prehistoric art of Latin America that Kubler and Hicks attended to effectively arrived
in the present as new and mysterious as contemporary modern art did. In this, the intersection of
twentieth-century actors like Hicks and Kubler with such ancient objects occasioned a
powerfully alternative periodization (and maybe an attendant style too) that we might
paradoxically call the “prehistoric postwar.” This temporal looping constructed a liberation of
the present and the future emerging from it by connecting them to a moment and extant archive
emergent before and beyond the imperial expansion of European colonial powers.

82
Kubler was interested in new shapes for time, ones other than straight lines moving in
one direction, an investment he clearly made real not only for his more advanced colleagues, but
also experimented with in educating his novice students. Not just an imaginative fantasy, Kubler
styled modern art and culture as something not only conceptually, but also materially, viscerally
in touch with and informative of our sense of the past, recognizing it as part of our lens onto, and
better yet, a mechanism for revising history.
Central to Kubler’s method is the articulation of two related concepts, the “series” and
the “formal sequence.” Both the series and the sequence are identified by sorting through the
accumulations of a “form-class,” which he describes as “the entity composed by the problem and
its solutions.” Whereas the “sequence” is an active problem, “an open-ended, expanding class,”
still actively attended by solutions in the present, Kubler’s series is a “closed grouping” a
sequence that at least for the moment has come to rest.
151
Once identified by the historian, both
the sequence and settled series of made things answers the riddle and informs the shapes of time,
affording a concept of historical development. “The chain of solutions discloses the problem,” a
sign of what instigates a historically recurrent form and repeatedly encourages it into being, he
suggests.
152

Kubler reminds that “any past problem is capable of reactivation under new conditions.”
Importantly, he allows that the closed series can effectively become an open sequence once more
if animated by an attentive present under the right conditions, problems that necessitate the
return of such a solution. His example is encouragingly expansive, global, and Indigenous in its
reach:
Aboriginal Australian bark-painting is an open sequence in the twentieth century,

151
George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1962), pp. 33
152
Kubler, pp. 33.

83
because its possibilities are still being expanded by living artists…the transparent
animals and humans of Australian painting, and the rhythmic figures of African
tribal sculpture correspond more closely to contemporary theories of reality than
to the opaque and unequivocal body forms of Greek art.
153

All of the past is not unilaterally useful or active in the present, but certain decisive pasts are.
They are urgent not because of some random accident of historical encounter, but because of a
meaningful intersection, when the conditions of making and makers, and the “theories of reality”
traced by thinkers in the present align with the conditions of makers of the past or a more
relevant elsewhere that may in fact be contemporary temporally if not spatially. Put simply:
when the present needs the past, it returns. Kubler’s example importantly discards the usual idea
of tidy Western cultural history, where the most relevant and proximal ancient cultures are those
of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean inherited by the cultures of Europe from the Renaissance
onward. Rather, it is the idea of two extra-Western form-classes or series, those of Africa and
aboriginal Australia that Kubler sees as especially relevant to and active in the twentieth century.
We might describe this re-animation of a past temporality in the present as a kind of
contemporaneity or making contemporary. What was previously some past, from the remote to
the recent, becomes adjacent to the present, because the very qualities of the now keep it on the
plane of becoming rather than letting it pass into the realm of has been.
Andean Textile Art
Under Anni Albers’s mentorship (a topic explored further in the following chapter),
and informed by Kubler’s teaching and advisement, Hicks submitted Andean Textile Art,
1957 as her undergraduate thesis. Hicks’s recreations—fragments woven, knitted, and
knotted in synthetically bright pink, orange, and purple readymade yarn, collaged beside
black-and-white photographs of artifacts they imitate—are unmistakably colored according

153
Kubler, The Shape of Time, pp. 35.

84
to the palette of midcentury hobby, free of the patina of a deeply antique object or even its
palette of natural dyes. Electric pink and orange, her palette is downright funky and mod,
injecting these recreations with something flamboyant, and, as epitomized by a small pink-
on-pink swatch, something treacly, and stereotypically feminine. No one would be fooled by
these as actual objects of the past, they are clearly creatures of their time.
What matters is how these early experiments provide a treatise for what comes after,
a document that explains what drew Hicks to weaving and especially how it demonstrates
her decision to align herself historically and biographically with the precedent of ancient
Andean textiles. Under the sign of Kubler’s alternative archive of Indigenous American art,
made contemporary via attendant models of time and Josef Albers’s expanded field of
“design,” Hicks shifted “the series” evidenced by the woven objects, the “form-class,” she
witnessed in his lectures into a “formal sequence,” making the problem active again by
committing herself to working as an inheritor of its precedent. Andean Textile Art reflects a
faith in direct experience as a form of research and knowledge production and recovery,
insight possibly beyond that offered by textual descriptions or photographic documentation.
In the photographs of Andean Textile Art, we see ceremonial headgear, a wig made
of both animal fiber and human hairs, and a bas-relief of humanoid figures and copious
fringe exploding from tassels and tufts. On another page we see two Andean weavings
frozen in the middle of their construction on backstrap looms.
154
As discussed earlier, Hicks
would learn and embody this technology, as documented in photographs from 1960 (taken
while she was living and working in Mexico) [see fig. 1].
155

154
Sheila Hicks: 50 years, pp. 48-49.
155
Sheila Hicks: 50 years, pp. 228. Looking at such interfaces, analogue technologies predicated on the body that
produce objects of care and comfort recalls one of Payne’s driving question: “Were the objects surrounding the body

85
Uncovered intact from sacred sites of burial and major centers of cultural exchange,
these objects demonstrate how central textiles were to ancient Andean life, essential and
pervasive in all daily activities and rituals. Not at all coded as lowly or common (as textiles
often were by twentieth-century commodity culture in the United States), these textile
objects were elevated as a sign of wealth and spiritual, cosmic significance. They were so
important that they persistently accompanied the dead in often lavish quantities, suggesting
that many cultures considered them crucial for a successful afterlife.
Andean Textile Art reflects a moment when an education in the arts, including art
history, meant making as well as reading and looking.
156
As the eye plays between textile
and photograph, the project puts pressure on evidentiary hierarchies: the sanctity of the
textbook image, the traveling object or souvenir consecrated by museum accession, the
informed reconstruction. Which is the “Andean Textile,” we might ask, in Andean Textile
Art? What material object can scholarship depend on: a thing absent except as a photograph,
or an actual woven object, albeit made by a young woman from Nebraska in the middle of
the twentieth century?
It is important to stress that Andean Textile Art was conceived as scholarly research,
a work of art historical interpretation and anthropological reconstruction, more so than art.
Even so, it materializes a real faith embedded in object making and formal analysis. Not just
a thing stuck in or defined by its own moment, the act of creation in the present is seen to
produce historical or archaeological knowledge about the past, ancient, extra-Western

and in the most intimate contact with it—from clothes to domestic tools to furniture—seen to create an in-between
layer that permitted it to interact more knowledgeably and more insightfully with the outermost layer, architecture?”
156
Richard Meyer discusses a version of this experiential or practice-based pedagogy at Wellesley College, known
as the laboratory method, (that continued at least through the education of art historian Rosalind Krauss) in “What
Was Contemporary Art?” (lecture): http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/ccma/american_school/symposium/10/
(accessed 10 April 2015).

86
practices, technologies and cultures. This early project suggests a way of thinking about
Kubler and Hicks, and by extension all making, that underplays the significance of
authorship, as well as the temporal or spatial origin of individual made things in favor of a
belief in a kind of historical kinship engendered by the rehearsal of ancient technique. It is a
model of ecological relation rather than autonomous exceptionalism, for us and our things.
By uniting her individual practice with a particular formal sequence, Andean Textile Art
forged a connective tissue to that removed place and time. As Kubler put it, “Each man's
lifework is also a work in a series extending beyond him in either or both directions.”
157

157
Kubler, pp. 6

87
Chapter 2 — “My Great Teachers”:
Anni Albers, Andean Textiles, and the World in Miniature, 1957-1959
Whereas the preceding chapter sought to explain the decisive conditions that informed
the experience of Hicks ‘on-campus’ (from Yale’s severe gender imbalances to the experimental,
progressive pedagogy of Josef Albers and George Kubler), what follows explores her decisive
life off-campus, first in the living room (and home studio) of the weaver Anni Albers, and then
much further afield during her Fulbright year in South America. Stepping off campus, Hicks
realized not simply an interdisciplinary (what was possible on-campus) but extra-disciplinary
practice, that engaged disciplines and bodies of knowledge either minimized or completely
excluded from the institutionalized disciplines a university such as Yale acknowledged. As
examples of Hicks’s early weavings created during her South American travels will show, this
chapter considers artworks, specifically abstractions proposed as a tool for reconciling one’s self
with the variety and vast scale of the world, a problem presented by the abandonment of the
limited geography of the studio, classroom, or campus.
At the intersection of Hicks’s education, between Josef and Anni Albers as well as
Kubler, Hicks recognized that weaving was tied to a compelling past, a Native American
material history that offered an alternative space of production for the motif of the grid, arguably
the prime object of modern art. Arriving in South America, she also witnessed a diversity of
weaving practices very much alive in the present and informed by Indigenous precedents.
Drawing on historic and more contemporary feminist theory, from Simone de Beauvoir to
Kimberlé Crenshaw, I posit Hicks’s movement off-campus and simultaneous occupation of the
grid as a journey from textiles in theory to textiles in practice, from secondary sources to direct
exposure and active production. Beginning with the recurring prompt of warp and weft, the

88
central structural premise of weaving, I argue that this worldly medium materialized a way of
thinking through and visualizing intersectional difference as Hicks located herself in relation to a
temporally deep and geographically vast hemispheric American cultural archive and unfolding
present. Recognizing the greater universality of thread over paint, Hicks underscored the resilient
mobility of weaving as a medium for a present that aimed to scale from local to global.
“A Kind of Housewife”
“You can get anywhere from anywhere.” -Anni Albers
158

Although Kubler’s institutionally ordained thinking would ground Andean Textile Art (as
discussed in Chapter 1), Hicks would need to leave campus, in search of the extra-institutional
expertise of Anni Albers to materialize it. Hicks decided to write about the ancient textiles that
fascinated her in lecture, but more importantly, she aligned theory and scholarly research with
studio practice, explaining, “when I tried to write about them, I thought I’d have to learn how
they were made – not just how they looked.”
159
Recalling the handiwork in “yarn-based things”
she had “learned, from my grandmothers and from my mother, to sew, to embroider, to knit, to
crochet, to cut patterns, to drape,” Hicks began in earnest to try her hand at weaving as an
extension of her studio practice, working “on improvised looms that were not looms; they were
just stretchers – painting stretchers that I used to tie yarns into tension.”
Recalling this matrilineal inheritance of craft skill and knowledge, a childhood home-
schooling that also occurred beyond the academic environment of the twentieth-century public

158
Anni Albers, as quoted by Patricia Malarcher, “Anni Albers and the Thread of Art,” The New York Times, Aug.
25, 1985.
159
Art historian Pamela Smith has coined the term “artisanal epistemology” as a theoretical conceit for
understanding this alignment of theory and practice, derived by thinking through an early modern European context.
As part of the larger early modern art historical investment in art as a producer of knowledge and participant in
scientific and technological revolution, Smith’s intervention has advocated particularly for the ability of embodied
artisanal work to produce unique knowledge otherwise unavailable. See P.H. Smith, “Epistemology, Artisanal,” in
Sgarbi M. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (Springer, 2018).

89
school, Hicks echoes various feminist recoveries (both in historical revisions and artistic
practice) via her own biography of craft and domestic skills like sewing, embroidering, knitting,
crocheting, pattern-making, and draping, as skills and bodies of knowledge historically
associated with women, both in the United States and beyond. As such, these were bodies of
knowledge women could enact and sophisticate beyond the consecrated spaces of education (as
well as the male-dominated art market and museum) from which they were historically
excluded.
160

As the story goes, Hicks’s library research was frustrated by the unavailability of “the
only book that existed” on her new-found research topic, Raoul d’Harcourt’s Textiles of Ancient
Peru and Their Techniques, 1934 at the time still available exclusively in French. While “only”
may be a bit hyperbolic, it reflects the inequality of coverage and serious scholarly attention—
not to mention the critical element of photographic documentation—that attended the subject and
informed its status then and still now. Competent in French and Spanish, Hicks could appreciate
d’Harcourt’s comprehensive descriptions of the variety of forms and techniques he deciphered
through close study of the many artifacts by then discovered. Exemplifying the notion of an “art
without writing,” Textiles proposes direct observation and structural analysis of objects as its
primary method. As such, it demonstrates how analytical attention to material objects in and of
themselves can inform both a formal and historical account without recourse to textual sources,
one attentive to and evocative of cultural and geographic diversity in addition to change and
technical development over time. Organized according to recurring structures and techniques,
d’Harcourt classified objects into compelling linguistic categories, many of which sound

160
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, “Craft women and the hierarchy of the arts,” Old Mistresses: Women, Art,
and Ideology (I.B. Tauris, 1981), pp. 50-81.

90
surprisingly modern, including “gauzes” and “network,” predicting textile’s conscription as a
metaphor for immaterial digital and international connections decades later.
D'Harcourt’s text is remarkable for many reasons, from the swaggering confidence it
takes with what was then and remains a niche, specialist subject, to the copious diagrams that
accompany the text in addition to the photographic plates, idiosyncratic graphic abstractions
specific to attempts to graph and map textiles structurally that introduce the novice reader to a
new language unto itself. Following the main body of the text and these diagrams, a generous
collection of photographic plates provides amble examples of real objects, several of which
Hicks reproduced in Andean Textile Art.
Clearly, Hicks would not be deterred for long. Asking the librarian when she might
expect the book to be returned, she was told she was likely out of luck, as the book was out on
long term loan to a faculty member’s wife, Anni Albers.
161
Albers was a surname Hicks knew
well but Anni Albers was a woman she claims not to have ever met, never even heard of, until
after she herself had begun experimenting with thread. Witnessing Hicks at work in her Street
Hall studio on her improvised looms, Josef took note, asking, “Was is das gurl,” and offered to
introduce Hicks to his wife. In at least one telling Hicks has characterized this fateful
introduction as framed by the threat of midcentury impropriety, recalling that her studio mate
and friend Ernest Boyer, overhearing Albers’s invitation, reminded her, “now Sheila you don’t
go home with your professor.” To which Hicks explained, “Albers was a very strong leader, and
you learn to follow.” No matter who is telling the story, it does not take much to recognize this

161
Virginia Gardner Troy has asserted that Anni Albers in fact owned her own copy of d’Harcourt’s volume, a fact
that potentially confuses the logic of the library anecdote. She also directs attention to other potential sources
unacknowledged by Hicks: Philip Ainsworth Means’s A Study of Peruvian Textiles, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts,
1932 and Mary Meigs Atwater, Shuttle-Craft Book of American Hand-Weaving (New York: Macmillan, 1928,
revised 1951). See Troy, Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles (Ashgate, 2002), 163.

91
threesome as a symbolically freighted triangle, positioning Hicks as the curious child between
Anni and Josef as modernist mother and father.
Although Yale had recruited Josef while both he and Anni were teaching at Black
Mountain, only he had been offered a position, and Anni Albers was (besides her artmaking)
effectively unemployed during their time in New Haven. Compared to her own company as a
female undergraduate, Hicks found the faculty’s gender parity to be even more discouraging,
remarking, “no women on the faculty, none, zero, not even in the art history department, it was
kind of strange the whole atmosphere.”
162

Hicks recalls no women faculty during her time at Yale, and it is certainly possible that
none crossed her precise path. That said, female faculty were not unprecedented at Yale, albeit
they existed in very small numbers, and were encouraged particularly only in disciplines
gendered female such as education and nursing. Hicks’s overstatement reflects, because of her
gender, not only the intensity of the disparity but also her embrace of understanding herself not
only as an outsider but as completely singular in that identity. Florence Bingham Kinne was the
first female instructor at Yale, beginning in 1905, in the Pathology department. Two decades
later, Yale’s first female lecturer was Anna Maria Rhoda Erdmann, in Biology. In 1920,
Education appointed its first female Assistant Professor. With the establishment of Yale’s School
of Nursing in 1923 came its first female dean, Annie Goodrich. Hicks passed through Yale at the
same time as Marie Boroff, a PhD graduate in English in 1956, and in 1959, the first woman to
teach in the English department. Boroff became the first tenured female faculty in the College of
Arts and Sciences that same year, along with Mary Clabaugh Wright, who achieved the honor as

162
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.

92
a new hire (rather than an internal promotion), arriving along with her husband, as associate
professors of history.
163

Josef and Anni Albers arrived in 1950, a decade earlier and thus apparently too soon to
receive similar treatment. Indeed, the Wrights provide an instructive comparative example for
trying to understand the Alberses at Yale, in light of the fact that Anni’s accomplishments and
teaching experience would qualify her as much more than a spousal hire in a different historical
context (both temporal, but also ideological—for example, Anni may have had better luck at a
school such as the Cranbrook Academy of Art). Noting the comparative welcome of female
teachers in Education and Nursing, had the art school, or the administrators that supervised it,
understood art to be a feminine discipline, or at least implicitly open to the possibility of female
instructors and even administrators, then maybe an appointment for Anni would have arisen. But
it did not, making it clear that art, at least at Yale, was implicitly gendered male, and generally a
man’s domain.
One might go further and suggest that Anni’s medium (in addition to her gender) as a
weaver rather than a painter doubly feminized and othered her, inflicting both her person and her
medium with an air of alterity—and thus impossibility as faculty. As Rozsika Parker and
Griselda Pollock have shown, weaving, as well as crafts like embroidery, quilting, and other
related pursuits have consistently been awarded either a non-art or lower rank compared to other
media such a painting often because of their appearance by way of female skill.
164
This would
especially have been the case within the context of the Yale Art School, a place where no craft

163
The problem of gender parity is far from solved at Yale, whereas of 2009-2010, only about a quarter of tenured
faculty were identified as women. “Women Faculty Forum,” Visitor Center, accessed April 5, 2021,
https://visitorcenter.yale.edu/book/women-faculty-forum.
164
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, “Crafty women and the hierarchy of the arts,” in Old Mistresses: Women,
Art, and Ideology (I.B. Tauris, 1981), pp. 50-81.

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media, from weaving to ceramics, were particularly fostered, unlike their comparative embrace
elsewhere at Black Mountain College, Cranbrook, or the Bauhaus. As not only a woman but also
primarily a weaver, Anni Albers was not recognized as a useful teacher not only due to her
gender but also because Yale saw itself as normatively led by and productive of painters,
sculptors, photographers, or graphic designers, as opposed to weavers, or other crafts
practitioners like ceramicists, or scions of sewing, embroidery, or even fashion.
Acknowledging all of this, it remains hard to fathom now, that Anni could have fallen
into such obscurity. At this moment, Anni, who fled Europe not only because she was Jewish but
also because she was associated with what was then, and had by midcentury been effectively
consecrated as the most progressive art school in modern Europe, should have been as attractive
and exciting as men like her husband, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, or György Kepes
were becoming in 1950s America and higher education.
165
How could she have been so
completely neglected, left to her own devices in a suburban house in Connecticut, like a
glistening shard of modernism’s living history?
At the Albers’ house, Hicks witnessed Anni’s work on a floor loom, and recognized,
“textiles that didn’t appear to be utilitarian.”
166
Entering what Albers scholar Virginia Gardner
Troy has described as “the culmination” of her career alongside Hicks’s time at Yale, Albers
orchestrated “visually and conceptually stunning” works like Red and Blue Layers, 1954 that
juxtaposed seductive combinations of saturated color animated by delicate and puzzling surface
techniques, dramatized by the expansion and contraction of white threads from separate
trajectories into raised hourglass bundles.
167
In Hicks’s estimation, Albers “was giving meaning

165
John Blakinger, Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus (MIT Press, 2019).
166
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.
167
Virginia Gardner Troy, Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles (Ashgate 2002), 4.

94
and expression to this soft, pliable material,” and as such achieving what Hicks had otherwise
been taught to expect solely in the arena of oil on canvas.
168
She was also imagining weaving as
a space for escape and imaginative travel in works like South of the Border, 1958, whose title
recalls Hicks’s invocation of the border in her admiration of Joan Mitchell as discussed in the
preceding chapter. Learning that Hicks was enrolled in Herbert Matter’s photography course,
Anni asked Sheila to photograph her work. Showing Anni her nascent weavings, Hicks gauged
that the expert, “thought they looked pretty amateur obviously…none of the lines were holding
together very correctly, none of them were straight.”
169
Even so, Anni told Hicks she could
return next week if she liked, and they would check up on her progress. Needless to say, she did.
While Hicks describes Josef as: “just terrific, he had so much patience and he was so
invested in trying to help people to do what they wanted to do, not what he wanted to do but
what they wanted to do. He was trying to help them, to assist them to find a way to do what they
wanted to do. It’s amazing when I think back, I’ve never run across another teacher since like
this.”
170
Her take on Anni is a bit murkier, deeming her:
More reticent, more reserved, and I think quite resentful in a way; why is it that
she couldn’t teach, you know why is that that she coming from the Bauhaus and
Black Mountain that she all of a sudden found herself out? It’s kind of pitiful, as a
kind of housewife waiting for her husband out in a little white clapboard house in
the suburbs of New Haven.
171

Hicks’s description of Josef and Anni, as a couple, whose lives and impacts on history were both
ideologically and pragmatically intertwined encourages a comparison with another midcentury
couple, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. Recalled not necessarily as a “housewife” but
a “midwife of Sartre’s existential ethics,” De Beauvoir emerged in her own right as the author of

168
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video. Ibid.
169
Ibid.
170
Ibid.
171
Ibid.

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The Second Sex, 1949 where she famously delineated that “one is not born but becomes a
woman,” a line often interpreted as importantly distinguishing between sex and gender.
172
Hicks
would acknowledge de Beauvoir as part of her intellectual formation, an intersection that makes
sense for many reasons, including the publication of The Second Sex’s English translation in
1953, contemporaneous with Hicks’s undergraduate education and arrival at male-dominated
Yale.
173
For my purposes, and as a lens unto Anni Albers and Sheila Hicks, I am interested in de
Beauvoir’s elaboration of the concept of the Other, a theory and critique that would subsequently
animate the texts of many authors dedicated to the critique of systemic oppressions of the
colonized, enslaved, and other subaltern peoples worldwide (as in Franz Fanon’s Black Skin,
White Masks, 1952). Acknowledging the circulation and signification of this “Other” described
and elaborated by de Beauvoir well beyond her own text, especially as a term of midcentury
Anthropology and Psychoanalysis, I invoke de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as a text wherein we
see an intellectual construction that aligns women worldwide and postcolonial subjects no matter
their gender. As such, it provides a historic, intellectual framework for understanding weaving as
a tool for understanding, and to some degree reconciling differences without dissolving them—
in particular, an alignment between the distinctly feminine and American Indigenous valences
weaving evoked, and Hicks and Albers aligned via their work.
In another instance, Hicks remarked that she “realized that Josef had awakened me to the
world of color and ways of using color. At the same time, Anni had helped me to think about
structure. There’s a basic structure to everything. Biologists know this, but artists don’t
necessarily see this right away…There I was thinking color and thinking structure

172
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949, English translation: 1953); Debra Bergoffen and Megan Burke,
“Simone de Beauvoir,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 27, 2020,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/.
173
Sheila Hicks, Oral history February 2004.

96
simultaneously.”
174
Hicks associates Josef with “color” and Anni with “structure,” notably
inverting the classical stereotypes surrounding the distinction between line and color established
during the Italian Renaissance as designo and colorito, respectively. In this schema, mastery or
preference for line over color was associated with a greater degree of rational intellectualism, as
Leonardo da Vinci exemplifies, whereas an exuberance or dependence upon color’s ability to
define and shape form in a composition (associated with artists like Titian), was understood as a
more sensual, intuitive pursuit, and thus more associated with a feminine or even exotic impulse
coded as implicitly and often explicitly Extra-Western. This association was modernized by the
Orientalist painting of the nineteenth century and then by the attentions of their modernist heirs,
so that Delacroix and Matisse’s interest in iconography or decorative motifs understood as
Oriental (in spite of any status they retain as “structures”) was logically aligned with their status
as champion colorists.
175

Paintings that Hicks made contemporaneous to her earliest fiber works show how this
constructed binary manifested materially. Works like Snow Garden, 1957 are constructed out of
swatches of bright, brushed color, and as such are completely free of the demarcating lines that
would most obviously concretize an adherence to “structure” [see figure 24]. In this, Snow
Garden is an anti-cubist painting, and develops the style diagnosed as typical of the “Abstract
Impressionism” discussed in the preceding chapter. In Snow Garden, Hicks, as Joan Mitchell did
too repeatedly in her paintings of the late 1950s (like Hemlock, 1956) uses white to edit and
frame the color laid down already. Unlike Mitchell, whose thin calligraphic brushwork of this
period often conjured a preponderance of palpable lines that cohered into a loose grid, Hicks’s

174
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
175
David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 24-49.

97
strokes combine to create tilted patches of color, losing the individual strokes and a clear linear
rhythm. That said, almost invisibly, as we read it as a blank rather than a presence, Hicks’s white
sections diagonally scaffold the painting, creating a binary structure of positive and negative
space missing in earlier compositions like Taxco, Iguala that present color edge to edge, stacked
upon itself like bricks. That said, taking the work’s title, Snow Garden, at face value, these white
spaces do not represent a blank but in fact areas actually covered (if not pigmented) even more
so, by fresh snow. Even so, as the above statement suggests, Hicks (via Anni) idealized an
approach that would not depend upon a binary (color vs. white; presence vs. absence), forcing
her into an either/or, or a process where one element (“structure”) would come before or after
another (“color”). With the weaving Anni introduced her to, Hicks embraced an opportunity to as
she put it, think color and structure “simultaneously.”
A cursory review of the many times Hicks has been interviewed or profiled since her
time at Yale reveals that Josef Albers is usually acknowledged before Anni. Often Anni never
comes up. To some degree this is explained by sexist bias in journalists, interviewers, and art
historians, or some not unrelated belief that Josef is better known, or stands for more in the short
hand of such publications than his wife would. That said, it is also a symptom of Hicks’s
recurring tendency to acknowledge her male teachers and influences more easily than
intersections with women. And yet, the medium Anni, not Josef, knew so intimately would
become Hicks’s life work. As the following passage describes, the stakes and Hicks’s ambition
for her work in fiber were monumental, and existential questions instilled by exposure to Anni
abounded:
We were sitting on a car seat in a clapboard house poking around with these cast
away knitting materials and trying to find out, how do threads hold together? How
do they become an object? How do they compete with every other medium to be
taken seriously? How do they come out of the basement and up into the

98
penthouse, and how would artists, art critics, and the whole art milieu deign to let
them through the door in a bona fide legitimate art exhibition? These were the
considerations at that time and I had a very scrappy attitude about the whole
thing, I thought it’s going to happen, my feeling is let’s go for it it’s going to
happen.
176

In an association that is humbling for them both, Hicks couples Anni with the salvaged
automobile seat the Alberses had repurposed as a couch in their living room.
177
A decade later,
Hicks would write the following to Anni after viewing her exhibition at MoMA, in part a
realization of the fantasy anticipated in the preceding recollection, where Albers, the master
weaver had been welcomed into the citadel of the “art milieu,” New York’s Museum of Modern
Art:
[It] brought me closer to you and your thought systems than ever before. It made
clear to me the path I have been carefully and tediously threading since the
encounters I had with you in New Haven in 1956 and 57. The concepts and clear
manner of structuring ideas you introduced to me have lead me through many
chaotic impasses while attempting to treat thread in a meaningful and poetic
way…Thank you again for opening up my road, and supplying me with a legible
map.
178

Hicks’s appreciation for Albers’s guidance is palpable, almost as visceral upon the face of the
postcard that bears this text as a weaving would be. Several metaphors are introduced, especially
key is the association of weaving with communication. Hicks describes Albers’s “thought
systems,” “concepts,” and “clear manner of structuring ideas.” Saying that the exhibition,
“brought me closer to you and your thought systems,” make the works themselves concretized

176
Hicks continued, recounting “It broke my heart when I was living in Paris to find out many years later
that Anni had given all of her looms away, she didn’t have that many but she had a few, she had given all
her looms away she had given all her materials away. She said she’d had it. Textiles, art weaving, will
never be taken seriously or come to the place where people really consider it art. It will always be relegated
to les art decoratifs, crafts, and she began making prints. I thought damn, double damn. I don’t really know
how to end this story. I’m in it ‘til the end.” Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and
shared with the author (2018), digital video.
177
“I still remember sitting when I would go to see her and we would sit on an old car seat taken out of car and that
was the couch…we were sitting on a car seat in a clapboard house” Sheila Hicks as recorded by JRK.
178
Postcard from Hicks to A. Albers, May 9, 1969. Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

99
“thought systems,” realizing knowledge as an object as no other form of communication could.
For Anni, and Hicks as heir to her thinking, there was no distinction between material thing and
conceptual idea, a realization of "what Biologists know,” that function shapes form as much as
form determines function. What Anni afforded, weaving, was also an open road and, “a legible
map,” to navigational analogies that resonate with Hicks’s pursuit of international travel,
likening weaving thread to an ambling road, its warp and weft analogous to the orthogonal grid
of latitude and longitude that networked the globe.
If weaving is simply “a method of forming a pliable plane of threads by interlacing
them rectangularly,” as Anni defined it in On Weaving, it is by definition a vehicle for
delivering the image of the grid before it carries any other.
179
As such weaving echoed the
icon of modern art while also excavating the grid as an intrinsically global motif, one that
recalled both pre-Incaic textiles and European maps—including those that facilitated
Oceanic navigation, particularly the successful passage of early modern European ships
across the Atlantic Ocean and ultimately to the coast of South America where those artifacts
and their heirs were “discovered.”
Unlike the painted grids of Piet Mondrian or later Frank Stella, Hicks’s woven grid
was not projected as an icon onto a substrate. Hicks and Albers’s grid is not a design applied
but a given, the palpable structure and logic of the woven surface from the start. Weaving
unites the dematerialized formal theme seen again and again in modern painting with the
ancient motif of the woven grid. George Kubler too saw the grid as one way of
understanding his theory of the “prime object,” writing that, “the daily crossword puzzle.
The manuscript draft by the puzzle-maker is a prime object (which no one conserves); all

179
Anni Albers, On Weaving (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017),): 1.

100
the solutions in subways and on the desks of people who ‘kill time’ compose the replica-
mass.”
180

This outing of the grid, as a sign of historical and global continuity rather than
rupture challenges Rosalind Krauss’s claim, that “the grid is an emblem of modernity by
being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century, while appearing,
nowhere at all, in the art of the last one.”
181
Such confidence of the grid’s invisibility in the
nineteenth century was possible chiefly because Krauss attended primarily to modern
European painting, an extremely tidy, relatively small data set by comparison to Kubler,
Hicks (or nineteenth century theorists like Gottfried Semper or Alois Riegl for that matter).
Not looking at the visual culture of the Americas (or Asia and Africa for that matter),
allowed Krauss to see the grid emerging solely via Cubism or, later, Minimalism’s rehearsal
of it. Hicks instead saw that the woven grid represented a site of technological and
conceptual continuity, a global rather than strictly European inheritance not modernly new,
but both ancient and present in the contemporary moment.
Bigger Than Any of the Guys
Following her undergraduate graduation, it was maybe inevitable that Hicks would push
her research beyond the tidy geography of New Haven, leaving the library and traveling to Latin
America as a Fulbright scholar. There, Hicks would witness archeological sites, but also their
coexistence, in situ, with modernist developments across the continent. Hicks won the Fulbright
with the help of Josef, and was assigned to teach his color theory course in Chile in lieu of him.
As spring turned to summer, she set off with Joaquin Rallo, a Yale architecture student who had
turned down a job offer from Louis Kahn (then teaching at Yale) to pursue opportunities in

180
Kubler, The Shape of Time, 42.
181
Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (1979), 50-64.

101
Venezuela, like those Josep Lluis Sert and Carlos Raul Villanueva already had underway. Hicks
was particularly captivated by the Villanueva’s Ciudad Universitaria in Caracas, the site of
multiple monumental Euro-American commissions by modernists like Alexander Calder, Jean
Arp, and Fernand Léger. Jesus Rafael Soto, an artist also engaged, like Hicks, in the articulation
of dynamic lines, set up a tour of the campus. Villanueva’s commissions ultimately totaled more
than one hundred works, demonstrating for Hicks how art could depend, both formally and
financially upon collaboration with an architectural context. As discussed by Romy Golan,
Villaneuva’s commissions worked to achieve a Corbusian ideal, a “synthesis,” where “art was
used to disarticulate the volumes of the buildings and destroy the surfaces, so as to produce a
transparent and airy architecture,” what Golan deems, “the anti-monumental approach.”
182

Calder’s works, suspended acoustic panels that appeared to float from the campus’s Aula Magna
auditorium ceiling made a particular impression upon the young Hicks, who recalled them years
later as a demonstration of Albers’s Bauhaus ideal of Bauen collaboration:
It was my first encounter with contemporary art within architecture as it was
being built…I couldn’t imagine contemporary art on that scale…I was quite
comfortable with the idea of being a person walking into a space that was
architected and that was including other voices of artists in that architecture. That
to me seemed to be the way to go. And of course when I got to Europe and saw it
happening for many centuries, it seemed they had figured it out. We were barely,
in the United States, figuring it out.
183

As she would in her later monumental commissions, Hicks idealized the idea of a collaborative
dialogue, where individual subjectivity is expressed through aesthetic form, and such forms
realize a play of voices. Whether in modernist Latin America or medieval Europe, Hicks cited
the United States for its comparative lack of successful aesthetic collaborations and architectural

182
Romy Golan, Muralnomad, The Paradox of Wall Painting in Europe 1927-1957, Yale University Press, 2009,
197.
183
Sheila Hicks, in conversation with Tyler Green, “No. 152: Sheila Hicks,” The Modern Art Notes Podcast,
November 30, 2014: https://manpodcast.com/portfolio/no-152-sheila-hicks/.

102
synthesis—an ideological byproduct of its old myth of the rugged American individual or more
recent valorization of the Abstract Expressionist painter as a liberated Cold War patriot of
solitary innovations.
Before the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jimenez collapsed in Venezuela, putting such
ambitious building projects on hold, Hicks was on her way south again. A small weaving from
1957, Rallo commemorates the then newly attenuated relationship, with Hicks writing of it, “a
spice brown, ink blue, and purple portrait of Rallo…the story begins straightforwardly but ends
in cracks and doubts. I weave from both ends toward the middle and try to narrate it.”
184
She
articulates weaving as a kind of writing, a narrative as she will continue to do. She also, for the
first time aligns it with the idea of portraiture, recording the kind of intimacy germane to a diary
or love letter. If with Taxco-Iquala Hicks demonstrated her art’s ability to apprehend landscape
and the natural world, with Rallo, she recorded the nature of her connection to another person
(especially urgent as it faded), aligning weaving with the paradigm of painterly (or photographic)
portraiture. Hicks suggests that the weaving can be read as a document of their relationship, its
form mimicking the psychological arc of their connection, a band of lavender at the top that
moving downward begins to split, “cracks,” into five relatively equal rectangular extensions, like
long posts, elongated fingers or toes knit together in a much darker purple sobered by a dusky
brown. In this way, it is also a small timeline, tracking change over time.
From Venezuela, Hicks traveled to Bogota, Colombia, then to Quito and Otavalo,
Ecuador, as tracked by the yellow crayon line she inscribed on the torn fragment of a map she
kept in her diary.
185
Her itinerary was advised by Junius Bird, Latin American archeologist at

184
Sheila Hicks, Weaving as Metaphor (New Haven: Yale University Press/Bard Graduate Center, 2006), 86.
185
Free Threads, 151.

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New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
186
Bird encouraged Hicks to move as a kind
of proxy for his own interests and via his own network of connections, including active sites of
excavation. As such, Hicks became what the anthropologist Christopher Pinney calls, “the ‘man
on the spot,’ ” who performed fieldwork—collecting photographs, artifacts, and observations—
first hand on behalf of a professional anthropologist (in this case, Bird) who remained in the
citadel of the museum as contextualized by the Western metropole.
187
As Hicks described it, “he
prodded me to go and find things and send him reports, and to collect things along the way. I
tried to observe. He gave me reasons for going to see the weaving, the Indians, the villages, the
architecture, and the archeology in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile. Basically he gave me a
more focused way of traveling.”
188
Not just focused, Bird gave her an anthropological way of
traveling, one that took her away from the postcolonial capitals and their investment in the
modern nation state and instead into rural and archeological geographies that often defied
twentieth century borders and preserved precolonial traditions.
She was waylaid for ten days in Lima by “the Asiatic flu,” maybe contracted from “a
pension” shared by “some archeologists and anthropologists.”
189
From there, she ventured to
Cuzco, Urubamba, and Machu Picchu, capturing photographs Kubler would subsequently use to
illustrate an article on the site in Yale’s architecture journal, Perspecta (where they appeared
without any explicit acknowledgement of Hicks).
190
Arriving at Machu Picchu, Hicks in fact
perpetuated Yale’s modern role in the site’s ‘discovery’ via the excavations of Hiram Bingham

186
Bird had also served in an advisory capacity on Hicks’s research previous to her South American travels.
187
Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).
188
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
189
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
190
George Kubler, "Machu Picchu," Perspecta 6 (1960): 49-55. Accessed April 24, 2020. doi:10.2307/1566891.

104
III, a Yale explorer. Bingham excavated thousands of artifacts, all of which were sent to Yale’s
Peabody Museum of Anthropology and his work was celebrated by National Geographic. Hicks
then continued south, to Pisac, Pucara, Juliaca, and Puno, crossing into Bolivia and then
doubling back into Chile where she would officially begin her Fulbright tenure. Tracing Hicks’s
route, it becomes clear that her trajectory followed ancient as much as twentieth century
geographies, roughly following the course of the Incan empire, as it had been represented for her
in catalogues and books, such as MoMA’s catalogue for Ancient Art of the Andes (1954), where
past and present became a visual palimpsest.
Alongside the small diaristic portrait weavings, like Rallo, Hicks would create others that
continued her investment in landscape, like Parque Forestal, 1957 and Zapallar, 1957. In their
appeal to landscape, they are a conceptual match to the gestural, Abstract Expressionist flurry of
cool indigoes, greens, and white to be found in much larger paintings of the same year, like Snow
Garden, 1957. Of these works, Hicks has said, “I was also doing very large impressive paintings,
bigger paintings than any of the guys’, how to get noticed. And the Fulbright commission
noticed too.”
191
Hicks notably credits her Fulbright success to these paintings, rather than any of
her contemporaneous weaving or research into ancient Latin America. She also casts them as
symbols of a gendered contest.
Part of what made them “impressive,” she implies, was their size, “bigger paintings than
any of the guys,” conjuring a kind of phallic contest around them where Hicks was the winner,
no matter her gender. If Hicks was to compete as a painter, as this passage suggests, she was
subject to the masculinist conventions, beginning simply with scale, established by the

191
Sheila Hicks as recorded by Jennifer Reynolds Kaye and shared with the author (2018), digital video.

105
monumental paintings of figures like Pollock, Newman, or Rothko—an arms race matched for
that matter too by women like Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler.
As Joan Kee and Emanuele Lugli argue, “scale hides in plain sight,” and, “has a way of
displacing the viewer.” Attention to scale has the capacity to unsettle conventional wisdom, and
reorient our apprehension of images and ideas, including those that feel especially familiar. Kee
and Lugli define scale, “as the relationship between the actual physical magnitude of a thing and
the way that magnitude is represented.”
192
“Scale,” as Kee and Lugli assert, “requires that we
think of how size enables a material and physical entity to function convincingly as an
artwork…scale therefore opens up onto an almost algorithmic process of recognizing not only
how things and people occupy a given space in relation to one another, but also how artworks
mediate the relations between things and people.” Qualities potentially taken for granted in
weavings like Parque Forestal or Zapallar, beginning with their proportions, are underscored as
constitutive to their (il)legibility as art, and the pressure they put on existing conventions of
scale. They are too small, for example, to be confused with a more functional weaving, like a
blanket or a garment. Mounted, framed and presented in the space of the museum, they mimic
the scale of a drawing or small painting. Building upon these questions of aesthetic category,
which might remain local to the logic of any one context, considered according to the conceptual
algorithm Kee and Lugli describe, Hicks’s small weavings mediate not only between “things”
like fiber and other aesthetic materials, but how people apprehend them, scaling aesthetic and
cultural hierarchies often similarly operating, “in plain sight.”
Condensed and easily transported across vast distances, Hicks’s small weavings conjure a
sense of somewhere else in miniature not unlike the international flotsam or messages in a bottle

192
Kee and Lugli 2016, 10.

106
that might wash up on a beach. As such, they are also metaphors of modern geography,
connecting here to there. In this, they help us recognize weaving’s capacity (especially when
presented at a portable scale) to channel the logic of a map (as in An Acre of Rainforest, 1989
[see figure 49]). In particular, they both share a commitment to the intersection of horizontal and
vertical lines—warp and weft as longitude and latitude. Suggesting a dada or surrealist legacy,
Hicks has remarked that, “beaches are the flea market of the sea.”
193
They are also a medium
connecting all the disparate geographies of her life.
In Scale and the Incas, Andrew James Hamilton explains that, “while scale may not be
commonly considered in this historically Eurocentric field, objects with conspicuous scales are
prominently encountered in more distant and ancient civilizations” and “of the cultural traditions
where scale seems to have played a prominent role in signification, the ancient Andean world
stands out as a locus.”
194
To introduce an interest in plays of scale and size particularly among
the Incas, Hamilton focuses on a series of spinning and weaving tools in the collection of
Harvard’s Peabody Museum—objects not unlike those collected by Hiram Bingham for Yale’s
Peabody. The reason for creating these tiny versions of otherwise functional objects (at one point
referred to by puzzled modern eyes as “toys”) remains largely mysterious, but represents a
tendency found across the archeological record in a variety of objects types and cultures. Now,
scholars like Hamilton collectively refer to such tiny replicas, from “minute” tombs from Moche
Dos Cabezas c. 500, to Huari greenstone figurines found at Pikillacta and dated between 550 and
700, to Inca figures dressed in bespoke textiles as “miniatures.”
195
This term echoes that which
Hicks has long used to describe her earliest and longest standing series and form-class in the

193
Hicks 2006, 180.
194
Andrew James Hamilton, Scale and the Incas (Princeton University Press, 2018), 5
195
Hamilton, Scale and the Incas, 6.

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Kublerian sense, “the minimes” or “miniatures” as they have often been referred to
interchangeably in English discourse on Hicks’s work.
The series earliest examples, such as Troubled Twill, 1956-7 arose as part of Hicks’s
tutelage with Anni Albers and final undergraduate year at Yale, but she continues to make them
to this day, estimating that she has made over a thousand in her lifetime.
196
Thus, the question of
scale the “minimes” attends not only to consideration of their individual size, but also the
contrast established by their monumentality as a series, one that grew both in quantity and
duration (for over 60 years). Able to function as an adjective or noun to describe something
minor, minimal, or small, Hicks’s choice of name potentially occasions a self-effacing gesture or
proto-minimalist sentiment. More salient, both the English “miniature” and French “minime”
derive from the Latin “miniare” or “to rubricate,” the activity of demarcating the various
paragraph signs, versals, capitals, and headings of medieval manuscripts.
197
The small scale of
such manuscripts encouraged the development and application of various derivations of the Latin
root to describe any small brightly colored image used to decorate such books as “miniatures,” a
connotation reinforced by the homophony and description of size embedded in the classical Latin
“minore,” or minor—another word entirely. Because the same red lead color was used for such
demarcations, it became known as “minium.” Subsequently, when the same pigment and scale
was witnessed by Western eyes in Asian painting, particularly Persian and South Asian
manuscript pages, the term “miniature” traveled and was applied to these culturally distinct
images.

196
Joan Simon, “Frames of Reference,” Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor, 44-47.
197
See "miniature, n. and adj.," OED Online, March 2020, Oxford University Press:
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/118826?rskey=q33nyB&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed March 09, 2020);
and also “Minime, adj. et subst.,” Le Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé:
http://stella.atilf.fr/Dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/advanced.exe?8;s=1353695805 (accessed March 9, 2020).

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Hicks is rarely without two necklaces. One is a length of brown cord with small coral-
colored beads crafted by her granddaughter. The other is a small, framed image, an Indian
“miniature,” that depicts the Hindu god Krishna attended by beautiful milkmaids, or Gopi. As
such, the legacy of the miniature as a world art pursuit is something she chooses to carry with her
every day. These scenes and images like them are typical of the various illustrated mythologies
and epics of the gods, such as the Bhagavata Purana (Ancient Stories of Lord Vishnu), the
Harivamsa (Legend of Hari (Krishna)), and the Gita Govinda (Song of God). Removed from the
manuscripts they were originally scaled to accompany, in order to circulate as more autonomous
art objects akin to the conventions of Western paintings and drawings, such “miniatures”
subsequently became a genre unto themselves, shifted by such intercultural translations,
exchanges of distinct conventions and expectations. As jewelry, the image Hicks wears around
her neck is even more miniature than its book page precedents, and in style evokes the
naturalism and spatial recession typical of the hilltop Rajput principality of Kangra, captured in
watercolors like Krishna Dallying with the Gopis, c. 1775.
198
Hicks’s adoption of such
terminology for these small, first works, whether “minime” in French, or the English
“miniature,” (and also German, as “miniatur”), marks her weavings as heirs to the complex
status of “miniature” as a world art historical term. From its application in a Latin American
context by scholars like Hamilton to its role in defining art from medieval Europe, early modern
Persia, and South Asia, Hicks’s “miniatures” inherit an uneven history of cross-cultural
exchanges, colonial revelations, and misunderstandings. Beyond this, her intimate commitment
to the “miniature” necklace extends the alignment from her work to include her own identity and

198
Vidya Dehejia, Indian Art (Phaidon, 2012), 336.

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sense of self, aligning herself with the category of the miniature, from the Latin American
examples Hamilton describes to the very different “miniatures” of India.
The inequalities and misunderstandings of such linguistic universals as they travel are
embedded in every utterance of “miniature.” As scholar of South Asian art Debra Diamond
explains of such small-scale Indian paintings, “the term miniature doesn't really mean small, it
comes from a word that means red lead, but it's come to mean something really small and I think
when people hear the word miniature, they think of something lesser but then you look at these
paintings, they’re portals into an entire world. They're huge and sort of endlessly
fascinating.”
199
As Diamond explains, even when deployed by the admiring, “miniature”
concretizes and perpetuates an implicit “lesser” status. As such, it marks the inequal power
relationship between the West and the rest of the world. Indian art critic B.N. Goswamy echoes
Diamond’s point while also finding other ironies of Western logic at play, stating:
The word we very often use in English for Indian painting is miniature [but] there
is no Indian equivalent in any language for that word. Painting is painting. The
general tendency would be to imagine that a great or a large work of art makes a
big impression—maybe right, may not be so right. A diamond makes an
impression, a tiny little etude by Chopin makes an impression. These paintings are
capable of making a very terse, dense impression upon the human mind, which is
quite extraordinary.”
200

True to Goswamy’s descriptions, Hicks’s miniatures, “make a big impression,” not despite their
size but in part because of their diamond-like condensations of gesture and activity.
In On Weaving, Anni Albers described how even as, “tangential subjects [would] come
into view” in the book’s contemplations, “The thoughts, however, can, I believe, be traced back
to the event of a thread.” This diamond-like phrase, “the event of a thread” lends the act of

199
Deborah Diamond, in Civilizations, 5, “Renaissances,” directed by Ashley Gething, aired 2018, on PBS,
https://video-alexanderstreet-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/watch/renaissances.
200
B.N. Goswamy, in Civilizations, 4, “Encounters,” directed by Ian Leese, aired 2018, on PBS, https://video-
alexanderstreet-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/watch/encounters.

110
weaving and the finished product it renders (“weaving” as both gerund and more arrested noun)
a performative status. Weavings are animated as “events,” where material itself, “thread,”
becomes an actor. If for Harold Rosenberg, Abstract Expressionism (and Jackson Pollock in
particular) inaugurated, “an arena in which to act” upon the painterly canvas, as theorized by
Albers and Hicks as her heir, weaving likewise occasioned its own kind of boxing ring.
This idea is dramatized in the jewel-like focus of Hicks’s miniatures, and their minute
stitches, always more finite than the scale of brushwork Abstract Expressionism generally
deployed. In works like Parque Forestal, ca. 1957, the eye feels the work of nimble fingers as it
traces the interlacing colors and attempts to reconstruct the actions each structure might require.
It is a record of decision-making that the viewer retraces in real time, rewinding the tape,
unraveling the thread with the eye. When Hicks’s conceit shifts from woven to wrapped warps, a
more unusual technique (notably diagramed in d’Harcourt’s Textiles), an element and spirit of
spontaneity, undeniably active and apparently unpredictable is introduced and contrasts with the
more traditionally woven portions. Part of the big “impression” that miniatures like Parque
Forestal make is the reminder of a human hand and consciousness at work, one that is liberated
to make idiosyncratic choices, the reminder of a human hand and consciousness at work
millimeter by millimeter. They show a mind and hand liberated to make idiosyncratic choices
and make up its mind for itself as it goes. “The sonnet” writes Phillis Levin in her introduction
to The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001), “is a portrait of the mind in action…a mini-guide to
the progress of an emotion.”
201
Sonnet-esque in both their impactful brevity, Hicks’s miniatures
suggest both a mind and body in action, thinking embodied and materialized.

201
Phillis Levin, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, London: Penguin, 2001, xxxvii.

111
Thanks in part to their rich, condensed details and portable format, Diamond contends,
that “miniatures” of the South Asia tradition radiate, “a sort of cosmopolitan awareness of…the
whole world,” as exemplified by works such as Bichitr’s Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to
Kings, 1615-1618 [See Figure 44]. In this work, the Mughal ruler Jahangir is shown consulting
first with a religious leader, the Sufi Shaikh, demonstrating that he prioritizes spiritual urgencies
over more mortal concerns. Beneath the Shaikh, a hierarchy of figures descends, from the
Ottoman Sultan, King James I of England, to finally a self-portrait of Bichtir himself, who wears
a yellow robe or jama that identifies his religious difference, a Hindu working in the service of a
Muslim ruler. In addition to the British monarch, robed angels at the base of Jahangir’s throne, a
naked putti floating above and human-vegetal arabesque patterns that background the scene
evidence a variety of western visual sources, from Italian renaissance painting to Dutch
portraiture of English rulers to French and Italian architectural ornament and decorative arts. As
Diamond summarizes, “In the same way that we see different kinds of people from different
communities, we see imagery that's brought together from all over the world.”
202

“Life today is very bewildering,” wrote Anni Albers in 1938. “We have no picture of it
which is all-inclusive…We have to make a choice between concepts of great diversity. And as a
common ground is wanting, we are baffled by them…we are overgrown with information…we
must come down to earth from the clouds where we live in vagueness, and experience the most
real thing there is: material.”
203
Engagement with material, or “unformed or unshaped matter,”
via art and craft, Albers suggested, helps us make sense of not only the bewildering scale of the
interconnected world, but also the modern proliferation of “information.” Grounding first the

202
Deborah Diamond, in Civilizations, 5, “Renaissances,” directed by Ashley Gething, aired 2018, on PBS.
203
Anni Albers, “Work with Material,” Black Mountain College Bulletin 1, no. 5 (1938).

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artist and then viewers in something small and concrete, Albers’s words and Hicks’s weavings
propose a way to telescope between the local and the world to create an “all-inclusive” “picture.”
Similarly, in addition to the series titular echo of the “miniature” as a conceptual
category, Hicks’s miniatures, from early works like Parque Forestal to later continuations of the
series express her own twentieth-century worldly understanding, condensing distinct cultural and
geographic touchstones. As abstractions, this works less iconographically, and more at the level
of formal and material choice. As small fiber objects, they were and are ideal for crossing vast
international distances, light, easy to carry, and resilient in the face of any blow or drop. They do
not warp, dry, puncture, stretch, or flake like paintings on canvas might, nor do they shatter like
plaster, glass, or ceramic. They do not dent or tarnish like metal, they do not lose pigment as a
drawing might, and would survive a bath much more heartily than anything grounded by paper
or bound by glue. They do not even need to be wrapped to be sent around the world, in fact they
can become packing material to protect more fragile things.
With some exceptions, Hicks’s minimes are finished on every edge, according to the
tradition of the four-selvaged cloth. This technique can be found in several cultures but was most
famously practiced by the ancient Andeans Hicks so admired. As conservator and textile expert
Elena Phipps described, investment in this highly skilled, precise approach meant that, “each
textile was woven to be what it was intended, whether a daily garment, royal mantle, or ritual
cloth,” and, “reflects a cultural value in the integrity of cloth, not only in its design and function
but in the way in which it was made.”
204
In this way, four-selvage textiles achieve a kind of
autonomy and reflect an obdurate integrity, never fraying or colonized to serve any purpose but
that for which they were conceived. Taken as documents of a spiritual outlook, they reflect a

204
Elena Phipps, The Peruvian Four-Selvaged Cloth (Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2013),
https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/fowler-at-fifty-peruvian-four-selvaged-cloth/.

113
search for a world predicated on an ultimate unity, where principles of structural continuity and
reconciliation take on a holy status.
According to Hicks’s description, the hues of “heliotrope, iris, mars violet, terra rosa,
and ultramarine…and lavender warp” in Parque Forestal, evoke her view of “flowering bushes
and trees” in the real Parque Forestal, a park in Santiago that adjoined her apartment there. The
wrapped warps that appear in Parque borrow from the ancient artifacts photographed in
d’Harcourt’s Textiles of Ancient Peru, but beyond this are also to be found in a variety of cultural
traditions. D’Harcourt himself draws a connection to techniques to be found in ikat, North
American Mohawk, and Oceanic textile cultures.
As Hicks continued to create her miniatures, their material shifts index her own evolving
cosmopolitanism. When she began to work in India, Kozhikode, 1966 incorporated the name of
its origin and also a wooden insert crafted by a Dravidian carpenter, “who kept six hundred
handlooms in good repair.”
205
Contemporary miniatures, including Kozhikode, 1966 would also
shift in palette and material, to bright red, fluorescent pink, violet, and cerulean in cotton and
silk, reflecting the scraps and raw fibers Hicks collected from local craftspeople and markets in
India, as evidenced likewise by Mogador, made in Bangalore ca. 1966. Whereas, one might take
the unraveling character of Dégringolade, 1971, made in Tangiers, Morocco, as an abstraction of
the political unrest that had shaped the country’s history in recent years, particularly the coup
d’état and assassination attempted against King Hassan II in 1971, followed by another a year
later.
Returning part time to the United States in the late 1980s, Hicks collected “Connecticut
handspun sheep wool…dyed by local plants,” for An Acre of Rain Forest, 1989 a material

205
Hicks, Weaving as Metaphor, 136.

114
history and approach reflective of its origin in Umpawaug, Connecticut [see fig. 49]. Returning
from Japan, Hicks would craft several miniatures out of unprecedented stainless-steel fibers,
including one called Moudang [sic], 2004, named for a Korean shaman, traditionally female, in
keeping with Indigenous tradition. And like Bichtir’s inclusion of himself in his portrait of
Jahangir’s cosmopolitan power, as these examples show, Hicks’s miniatures echoed not only the
people and places she witnessed, but her own unique mediation of them. As such, they uniquely
meld traditions of portraiture (as established in Rallo,1957) with landscape (as in Parque
Forestal) with Hicks’s consistent announcement of her own expressive agency, a kind of self-
portraiture.
Strung on her tiny painting stretcher hand loom outfitted with nails while under
construction or after, when contemplated in a lap, hand, or on a wall, the miniatures interface,
first between artist and world, then between spectator and artist, and gallery and site. In this way,
in scale and function they mimic planar technologies of communication, from the letter to the
iPad, all media that aid us in scaling the vastness of the Earth. The “miniatures” occupied a
freighted linguistic category to index and affiliate themselves (and Hicks with them) with a
plurality of traditions with which Hicks sought fealty.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality” has been embraced by feminist scholars
and others across the humanities and social sciences (as well as in the public sphere at large) as
an analytical term for encompassing and embracing the codependent relationship between
vectors of social stratification including race, class, gender, and sexuality.
206
Intersectionality is
also a term that evokes the basic requirement that defines weaving, namely the intersection of

206
Brittney Cooper, “Intersectionality,” The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, Lisa Disch and Mary
Hawkesworth (edit.) (Oxford University Press, 2016); Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality
(Wiley, 2016, revised 2020).

115
one and another thread, usually in the perpendicular intersection of warp and weft. Hicks’s small
weavings have consistently provided a material, and intersectional intellectual space, for
processing the diversity of the world. Weaving provides an especially rich metaphor for
contemplating potential intersections of various cultural differences because its basic motif
encourages us on the one hand to consider continuity and sameness, or similarity, in the
continuation of a particularly colored or textured thread beside others, some of which it mirrors
and matches as their extension, and then conversely their conversation with others with which
they differ from entirely in direction (horizontal versus vertical), but then possibly also as well in
color, texture, tension and other evocative ways. Crucially, the difference between a collection of
threads, and weaving, is intersection, an intersection composed of elements (even if they are the
same thread continuing) that meet at diametrically opposed orientations, suggesting the
productive reconciliation of difference as constitutive to its being.
Aligning the Japanese horticultural art of bonsai (usually small) with that of European
tapestry (usually large), miniatures like Bonsai Tapestry, ca. 1986 re-inscribe the question of
scale, and its capacity to reconcile distinct media and cultural traditions. They also suggest the
capacity of these miniatures to circumscribe the much larger proportions of Hicks’s more
monumental works such as Palm Tree, 1984-85. As Nina Stritzler-Levine has discussed, the
miniatures can be understood as sketches or meditations in dialogue with Hicks’s monumental
and mass-manufactured commissions. Thinking more conceptually about the theory of scale
works like Bonsai Tapestry propose, I think of the poet Dean Young, who advises, “Do not
confuse size with scale: / the cathedral may be very small, / the eyelash monumental,” in “Whale
Watch.”
207
Aligning a language of cross-cultural exchange (Bonsai + tapestry) with such

207
Dean Young, Bender: New and Selected Poems, Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2012.

116
diamond-like condensation of expressive activity, such weavings organize our attention upon
their ability to construct a transnational, intracultural conduit, scaling across an imaginative
space whose size far exceeds the physical proportions of the weaving at hand.
Meditating on this, the punning evocation of a sandy beach via later miniatures like
Écailles makes sense, as the beach has often been a theater for thinking through the relationship
between the very small and the very big, a place “To see a World in a Grain of Sand,” as coined
by William Blake [see figure 42]. In “A Grain of Sand,” nineteenth century abolitionist and
suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper remedies, “how little seems the span / Measured round
the life of man,” by likening its small scale to an indestructible grain of sand. In Elizabeth
Bishop’s “Sandpiper,” the bird, is “a student of Blake,” and studies “the millions of grains,” “(no
detail too small).” “The world is a mist,” writes Bishop, “And then the world is minute and vast
and clear,” narrating the mental pivot between molecular and monumental perceptions,
proposing their power when pondered simultaneously. Again, Young, calls sand, “both the
problem and the solution for the beach,” maybe in part because it is both miniscule and endless,
mirroring our own scalar relationship to the vastness of the ocean, the Earth, or the universe.
A Logical Jump
The question of scale as a marker of difference and the hierarchy of media is notable here
too, especially when one encounters weavings like Rallo or Zapallar firsthand. While they are
impactful, they are never large, not bigger than a hand or a head—and thus, according to this
logic, no great competition at least for the game paintings like Snow Garden aimed to play—they
would never be “bigger than any of the guys’,” largely because they never tried to be. Hicks
recalled her painterly influences years later:
When I was in the south of Chile, and going through seascape, landscape
areas on small ships where there were all kinds of reeds and water plants,

117
Monet became very important to me. And all the paintings I did at that
period were very very related to my observations of Monet….if I move it
into contemporary at that time, Joan Mitchell was painting. And I have
specific memories too of enthusiasm for her way of handling paint but
then painting and pulling and splashing and applying colors one on top of
another, and next to one another, it just seemed like a logical jump to do it
with threads.

Maybe ironically, Chile encouraged Hicks to recognize and return to Monet and
Mitchell as precedents, and by extension the possibility of Abstract
Impressionism. Reconciling her own relationship to past precedent, Mitchell
would memorably claim, “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with
me and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I
could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves with
me.”
208
Part of Hicks’s “logical jump” was recognizing the greater universality of
thread over paint. In part, this meant recognizing and appreciating its hemispheric
importance and vitality, elevated to a great status of esteem by ancient South
Americas but also its resilient mobility as a living medium in the present.
209

Weaving, especially as the miniatures embodied, was more easily mobile than oil
on canvas and more grounded in ancient American precedent. Sensing this, Hicks
designed her miniatures so that their landscapes, rendered in miniature, literally
could “carry with” her as she scaled the Americas.
Virginia Woolf would also animate a play of scale, in defining the historic
disenfranchisement of women, stating, “Women have served all these centuries as
looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure

208
Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women (New York: Little, Brown, 2018), TK.
209
Lois Martin, “Nasca: Woven Cosmos and Cross-looped Time,” Textile,
4:3 (2006), 312-339; William J. Conklin, “Structure as Meaning in Andean Textiles,” Chungara: Revista de
Antropología Chilena, Jan./Jun. 1997, Vol. 29, No. 1: 109-131.

118
of man at twice its natural size,” wrote Woolf in A Room of Own’s Own. “That is
why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of
women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge.”
210
More
recently, in appraising her own work’s plays of scale, the sculptor Sarah Sze (who
too began as a painter), invoked the aesthetics of Emily Dickinson:
the master of that, where in one sentence you shoot from a pebble to a
boulder and within such a minute shift…Vermeer is a great example,
where you go from a milk bottle to a map to a window, and you shoot up
into that space…how information can speed that quickly and back is
something we experience constantly and the volume on that has been
turned up more and more…the way we travel through time and space has
sped up exponentially in our own lifetimes we know that and the speed of
it speeding up seems to be exponential as well.

Crossing and thinking across vast amounts of time and space, Hicks’s miniatures
work small but think big, proposing a telescopic aesthetic that Sze’s suggestion of
Vermeer’s map encourages us to recognize as a uniquely global sensibility.
211

Hicks’s miniatures, like Dickinson’s poems, demonstrate how potentially
physically small work can mobilize the potential of scale to address a global
terrain much larger than its own dimensions.
Hicks continued to make paintings alongside the emergence of her earliest weavings and
exhibited both simultaneously in Chile (and upon her return to the United States, and Yale) to the
general public as she seldom would anywhere after this period. While the Museo Nacional de
Historia Natural, one of the oldest natural history museums in South America, displayed Hicks’s
weavings in Tejidos, the Palacio de Bellas Artes hosted Pintura de S.A.W. Hicks – Fotografías
de Sergio Larrain (both 1958). Each medium received supportive recognition from two of

210
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harcourt, 1929/2015), 38.
211
Svetlana Albers, “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art,” The Art of Describing, Dutch Art in the Seventeenth
Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 119-168.

119
Chile’s three major national museums, a major achievement for a young woman less than a year
out of school. That said, the contextual difference that shaped each exhibition is paramount and
reflects a separate but unequal condition projected onto intimate objects but reflective of
stratifications of people too. I see Hicks’s painting and weaving, as they coexist at this time, as
representative of a material consciousness, split and reflective of an experience of alterity like
that diagnosed by Woolf, and dramatized formally as a Dickinsonian play of extreme scaling.
Taken at face value, their separation into distinct institutions was likely driven in part by
dispassionate distinctions of media, weaving over here, painting and photography elsewhere. But
these separations were not simply formal decisions, they reinforced hierarchies that elevated and
differentiated the culture of European settler colonists from that of Indigenous peoples.
Exhibiting Hicks’s woven miniatures at a natural history museum encouraged an understanding
of them, despite their twentieth century genesis, as most akin to ancient Indigenous crafts and
other artifactual objects to be found there, objects of “nature” rather than European history. In
the art museum, Hicks’s paintings conversely were positioned as heirs to a European artistic
tradition and a modernist conversation largely dominated by white men.
As the exhibition’s title indicated, Hicks’s abstract paintings were exhibited with the
photographs of Sergio Larrain, a pairing that reflected their intimacy both aesthetically and
personally. Far away from Rallo (left behind in Venezuela), Hicks had grown close to Larrain,
the son of the dean for whom she worked. The young photographer would ultimately become
one of the more prominent contributors to the Magnum photo agency, assisted by his mentor
Henri Cartier-Bresson, before returning to Chile and living a life of comparatively reclusive
solitude. The idea of medium-specificity, “Paintings by,” “Photographs by,” and the differences
it defines, were stressed in the presentation of the exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The

120
social hierarchies encoded in medium distinctly positioned both exhibitions. For example, note
the use of initials for Hicks but not Larrain, likely an attempt to obscure her gender. Painter
Grace Hartigan had signed her early work with and presented it in gallery exhibitions under the
name, “George Hartigan,” a nod to George Sand and George Eliot that she claimed had nothing
to do with gender discrimination.
212
To be exhibited in the company of European artists and their
aesthetic heirs, Hicks not only needed to produce paintings, she also needed to pass as a man.
Choices of medium as well as the repression of any sign of gender that deviated from the
assumed male norm encouraged artistic validation.
That said, Hicks’s works pursued an intermediality that questioned such clear-cut
distinctions. In a photograph of Hicks and Larrain at the opening of their show, they converse
across a painting by her hand [see figure 46]. Its composition is made up of repetitive horizontal
dashes, suggestive of the exchange of dialogue and emotion we can neither hear, nor feel. The
hashes mash at the upper left atop similar vertical hatches that assemble into a vertical column.
Such hatches resemble fish swarming in a school as well as the vertical and horizontal
intersections of warp and weft evoked in her simultaneous miniatures, the Tejidos exhibited
separately at the natural history museum.
Hicks’s paintings were intended to pair symbiotically with Larrain’s photographs when
exhibited, printed “seventy inches high” to mimic the scale of Hicks’s paintings. His images
captured their travels away from the capital, “rocks, seaweed, and algae…wooden houses built
on stilts in the water…shells and debris washed up making incredible designs” as Hicks’s
paintings attempted to as well via abstract painting.
213
Meanwhile, the dialogue would not stop at

212
Linda DeBerry, “Grace Hartigan,” Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art,
https://crystalbridges.org/blog/womens-history-month-art-grace-hartigan/ [accessed May 13, 2020].
213
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.

121
the museum’s walls, traveling together, Larrain and Hicks shared film and clothing, and
returning to the city developed their respective photographs in the same darkroom. Weavings
like, Chonchi, Chiloe, brown and off-white, approximate the palette of Larrain’s black-and-white
photographs, or the muddy expanse punctuated with pooling water of the unpaved street pictured
in particular in images like “Hicks in Chonchi, Chiloé, Chile,” 1958 [see figures 37-38].
Chonchi, Chiloe, features an arch toward its top, like a doorway cut into a façade. It carves out a
simple architectural reference that recalls the stilted platform Hicks captured poised beside the
water, but also the familiar, simple American Western-style saloon façades to be found lining the
main street in Larrain’s photographs of the rustic town [see figure 53]. As she did in her painting,
Hicks took interest in the play of linear bands, capturing long poles supporting houses or arrayed
in the soft mud of a street.
214
Employed by both Larrain and Hicks, the camera occasioned an act
of serial standardization, able to process the variety of visual content presented by the world
around them into the organized, repetitive format of the negative and its aspect ratio. Hicks in
particular would utilize a Rolleiflex, a camera whose format allowed her to shoot with the device
away from her face, looking down at it as it looked out at the world. Hicks’s camera mimicked
the posture and scale of her miniatures in progress on the handloom and the weavings
approximated the dimensions of a snapshot when finished, suggesting that there was always
something documentary, photographic, about her mobile woven landscapes.
John Curley has argued that a “photographic unconscious” undergirded “1950s American
and European notions of abstract painting,” so that even paintings without “a direct photographic
referent,” (like Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm) were afforded with figurative resonance by

214
Free Threads, 168

122
“the postwar explosion of mass media photography.”
215
“Abstract painting and photography,”
writes Curley, “behave as mediums in a more literal sense of the word: intervening substrates that
allow each to speak through the other.”
216
Internal to her own pursuits, there was clearly a
correspondence between media within Hicks’s practice, between painting, weaving, and
photography. More than this, Hicks and Larrain’s photographs encourage us to understand that
her weavings and paintings, despite their comparative abstraction, were similarly tethered to
external referents and evocative of the wider figural world. In fact, their abstraction allowed for a
different kind of correspondence with external references, the weavings especially echoed visual
experiences but also tactile and sensory memories. Hicks’s intermediality extended to newly
inflect more frequently abstract media like weaving to channel resonances well beyond itself.
Very Provincial
Returning to Yale the following fall, Hicks continued to experiment with such formal
plays and conversations between media, as a shot of her studio captured in the fall of 1958
demonstrates. On the easel, paper bands of white and yellow mimic the formal logic of her
paintings and her weavings in another medium entirely: collage. Two looser landscapes
background the scene, along with an ancient textile fragment, framed above her desk at right, and
a large-scale photograph (maybe Larrain’s) of fish, mouths agape, awaiting sale at market [see
figure 53].
217

Prioritizing prudence over preference, Hicks returned to Yale to obtain her graduate
degree, an MFA completed and awarded after only one more academic year in New Haven. The
MFA was a strategic calculation to enhance Hicks’s credentials especially as a teacher (a role

215
John Curley, A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War (Yale
University Press, 2013), 22.
216
Curley, A Conspiracy of Images, 23.
217
Free Threads, 37

123
reinforced by the gendered stereotype that informed teaching as a profession at large) and insure
some earning potential in a market otherwise tepid for work by women. “She had a romance
going on with a Magnum photographer, a Chilean guy, and she would read his letters to me,”
reported Barbara Chase-Riboud, confirming that Hicks remained tethered, at a distance to
Larrain even once she returned to New Haven.
218

Chase-Riboud arrived at Yale to study architecture and quickly became a close friend for
Hicks. Informed by their respective travels, both understood themselves to be much more
cosmopolitan, open-minded, and worldly than their surroundings in late 1950s Connecticut.
Desperate to imagine an escape, Riboud recalled how, “we both decided, we swore on the heads
of whoever that we were going to marry Magnum photographers, both of us. And I did and she
didn’t! I mean she was the one who decided these were the most glamorous men in the world and
she was going to marry one. And I thought, what a good idea!” As Riboud remarks, though
Larrain would go on to work for Magnum, Hicks’s half of the pact would never be realized.
Instead, Barbara Chase would ultimately marry the Magnum photographer Marc Riboud, a man
who did indeed travel extensively around the world, documenting it all through the lens of his
agency camera. By the time of their marriage, he had already spent a year in India, captured in
images like Benares, India, 1956, and would become one of the first Western photographers to
capture communist China.
219

While Hicks may not have gone ahead with the plan, the idea of the Magnum pact
conveys how conjoined her sense of her own life, to the degree not only of romance but
marriage, was to questions of artistic media and the lifestyles they differentially encouraged. It

218
Barbara Chase-Riboud in conversation with the author, October 2017.
219
Richard B. Woodward, “Marc Riboud, Photojournalist Who Found Grace in the Turbulent, Dies at 93,” The New
York Times, Aug. 31, 2016; and Benares, India, at https://www.artic.edu/artworks/22714/benares-india.

124
also suggests a willingness to wed her work in one media, whether painting or weaving or even
photography to the allure of another, extending the promise of transmedial practice described
above according to the logic of romantic coupling and marriage.
Hicks’s sense of herself as an outsider, as well as a burgeoning cosmopolitanism was
well matched and echoed by Chase-Riboud, not only one of the handful of women at Yale, but
also Black, a fact she admits drew stares of confusion and fascination toward her as she
navigated campus, particularly when she entered buildings like the library that were otherwise
off limits to the general public. Hicks and Chase-Riboud bonded over their shared experiences
abroad, but also in light of their shared sense of themselves as outside Yale’s norm. Chase-
Riboud remembers Yale as, “very provincial,” inverting the logic that might be projected upon
somewhere else further away from the American northeast. “New Haven is a terrible town,”
Chase-Riboud remarked to me, stating:
I entered with no expectations, I didn’t know what to expect. I had spent a year at
the American academy in Rome. I had already been to Egypt, I had already been
to Greece, I had already been to Turkey, so I was open to a much wider range. On
top of that, I was the first black woman in the school of Design and Architecture
to begin with, so already it made me a kind of illegal alien.

The alliance between Riboud and Hicks reflects Hicks’s own now further confirmed sense of
herself as an outsider. That said, as she moved into weaving, Hicks’s status as an outsider would
increasingly become as much a chosen as assigned identity. New Haven may have become a
kind of province for Hicks, limiting, but maybe also generative in its isolation, allowing her to
concretize her experiments not only between media, but also her troubling of cultural and
historical distinctions. In another picture from the following spring of 1959 (again taken by her
friend and studio mate, Ernest Boyer), we see how all the distinct classes of imagery, media, and

125
history condensed, spotting Hicks beside six works from her graduate thesis exhibition at Yale
[see figure 54].
Somewhat affectless, she sits in the immediate foreground, occupying the lower right-
hand corner of the frame. She looks unconcerned not only about the picture but also the
important occasion of the show itself. Rather than gazing up and out at the camera, her gaze
points downward into her lap, at her hands, which have blurred, suggesting activity, some doing
or undoing—maybe another miniature underway. Maybe Hicks’s thoughts were already
elsewhere, eager to move beyond Yale, a place that in the wake of South America had become a
source of boredom and frustration.
Notably, the MFA show featured both Hicks’s weavings and paintings, defying the logic
of the museums that had divided her practice in Chile. In Boyer’s photograph, we are able to
identify several works, including Muñeca, 1957, notable for its titular and visual suggestion of a
feminine silhouette, including the flair of a skirt, short like those worn by dolls. While Muñeca is
mounted and framed like a drawing the four works to its left are suspended between wooden
dowels, indexes of their creation on a back-strap loom, a technique Hicks’s adopted from the
artifacts she studied under Kubler, and read about in d’Harcourt’s Textiles, as well as the living
technologies she witnessed still in use throughout contemporary Latin America. Understood as a
series, these Fajas in title and form resemble functional belts created throughout the Andean
region. One of their most powerful echoes are belts that continue to be produced in the
Huamachuco region of northern Peru. Accessible to Hicks as a living craft practice in the
twentieth century, the belts are also understood as “the only documented unbroken Inca weaving
tradition,” meaningfully tethered at least to the moment of colonial contact when they were
chronicled by a Mercedarian Friar, Martín de Murúa in 1590 but likely too further back, to that

126
time and art world “without writing” as well.
220
Encouraged to travel widely through the Andean
region, including Peru, by Kubler and the archeologist Junius Bird, Hicks would have witnessed
such belts not only as finished objects, artifacts from the past as well as the present, but also in
process. As such, they bested Kubler’s “arrested happening,” by presenting happening itself,
ongoing in the present.
Archeologists who have studied such Andean belts in detail, such as Gioconda Arabel
Fernandez Lopez, propose this transcendent understanding, calling them Inca survivors—a
provocative description that endows material culture with an anthropomorphic agency that
harkens to postcolonial themes of resilience and resistance.
221
As Lopez describes, such belts
became a way to discretely visualize local and Indigenous identities and insure their survival,
first in the face of Incan imperial efforts to standardize local cultures under their domain and then
subsequent Spanish colonizers who both encouraged a cultural homogeneity, what Lopez calls,
“una identidad cultural artificialmente uniforme,” that also (maybe counterintuitively) enforced
new modes of dress that marked subjects as Indian rather than Spanish. As such, the belts were
and remain a material condensation of how Indigenous practices were preserved despite efforts
to render them invisible or immaterial.
The belts also demarcate gendered differences, including the matrimonial and attendant
sexual status of the wearer. Though the belts present a variety of patterns, from the
representational to geometrically abstract, in her study of the belts, Lopez focuses on two distinct
patterns that continue to be produced in the community of San Ignacio de Loyola, las fajas “sara”

220
Lynn A. Meisch, "Messages from the Past: An Unbroken Inca Weaving Tradition in Northern Peru," Textile
Society of America Symposium Proceedings (2006), 345.
221
Arabel Fernández López, “El anaku, la lliklla y las fajas sara y pata: supervivenvias Inca en la comunidad de
San Ignacio de Loyola, Sinsicap – Otuzco,” La Trama y La Urdimbre: Textiles traditionales del Peru (Lima:
Universidad Ricardo Palma: ICPNA, 2007).

127
and “pata,” worn by married women and unwed girls respectively [see figure 55]. The repeated
rhombus pattern, made up of four rhyming triangles, that define the sara pattern is echoed by a
similar silhouette repeated in Hicks’s Fajas, often a neutral field of black and white that frames
an oblong swelling of color, widest at the weaving’s midsection and tapering to two points on
either end. The colored centers are created by the same wrapped warps discussed earlier in
regards to Parque Forestal and learnt from d’Harcourt’s Textiles. Each wrapped warp, bending
all in their own way, resembles a larvae or other small undulate or worm. Repeatedly, Hicks
opens up a floating diamond or rhombus shaped field, like a seed pod or gash, at the core of her
belts by assembling these vertical dashes.
As Lopez describes, the words sara and pata indicate an association with corn or other
crops central to life both in the ancient and contemporary Andes. Recognizing the ceremonial
status of the crops, and the belts, coupled with their role in marking Andean women, she also
recalls the centrality of corn to Incan dynastic myths, where corn was understood as “the seed of
the cave,” supposedly having emerged from the same crevice as the imperial rulers before
becoming a staple in the lives of all those they conquered. Thus, corn, and its symbolic
representation in such daily attire, reified the Incan right to rule—a righteousness that extended
to mark the wives and daughters of Incan emperors similarly. As such, I am inclined to read
Hicks’s belts as heirs to this craft tradition and the mythology it perpetuated. Especially
anticipating the iconography of more self-proclaimed feminist art of the 1970s, but also
considering the morphological and conceptual continuities between the sara diamond/rhombus
and the mythical “cave” of the first Incan Kings and Queens Lopez identified, Hicks’s Fajas
conjure a suggestively vaginal presence. In this, they anticipate later riffs on genital forms in the
fiber work of artists as distinct as Mrinalini Mukherjee and Josep Grau-Garriga.

128
As Boyer captured in his image with Hicks in the foreground, the belts realize Kubler’s
idealized series, a historic practice made urgent and aligned with activity ongoing in the present,
so much so as to be logically presented simultaneously with abstract painting. The belts, like the
miniatures with which they remain affiliated, also explored how apparently abstract form might
consecrate and combine previously remote subject positions and histories as well as the
inanimate material cultural traditions associated with them. Hicks’s Fajas were heirs to South
American weaving as well as modernist painting, mixing discourses of Indigenous American
craft and European painting. They presented a gendered material history on a campus otherwise
largely centered on white, male, European intellectual and historical traditions.
After Yale, Hicks would send weavings into the world as her primary artistic product,
choosing the medium more likely to be associated with alterity of one form or another rather than
painting’s aura of the modernist mainstream. Not made of oil or canvas, tempera or wood,
weavings like the Fajas, Muñeca, Zapallar, Rallo, and Parque Forestal put pressure on medium
specific definitions of painting. Meanwhile, her paintings, designed to compete with those
created in a dominantly male milieu, made it clear that Hicks was a far cry from a feminine
stereotype, like that concretized by the docile, infantile specter of Muñeca’s skirted silhouette (a
freighted icon reminiscent of the one that still demarcates many a women’s restroom). This
began in 1957 as Hicks “experimented with string, twine, and various yarns” in what she notably
still called her “painting stall” in Yale’s Street Hall.
222

During her time at Yale, Hicks also demonstrated an extremely independent and intrepid
fortitude, a globalist ambition and lifestyle, traveling further before the age of 25 than many
people do in their entire lives. This was especially remarkable then but would still impress today.

222
Simon, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, 92.

129
From the classrooms of Yale to the tip of Patagonia, Hicks’s intermedial practice rejected a
medium-specific definition of painting and modernism more generally, proposing an expansion
of art’s materiality beyond Eurocentric precedent, anticipating contemporary art’s embrace of a
greater diversity of media, makers, and geographies. Hicks’s first weavings exhibited alongside
her paintings—as they were at the moment of her graduation—evidence a hybridity and
permeability between media but also peoples, a conceptual provocation that Hicks literalized
when she began to weave her miniature works on a device fashioned from four canvas stretcher
bars inspired by a lecture on Latin American art.
223
They explored how a play of media can
concretize an intersection of subjects and sites, giving form to a radical alterity and more worldly
definition of art.

223
Simon, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, 94.

130
Chapter 3 — “Some exotic girl”:
Letters from Mexico and The Value of Difference from a Distance, 1959-1964
In August 2020, Architectural Digest featured a cohort of young designers from Mexico,
England, the Netherlands, the United States, and France, “a new crop of young talents…gaining
international attention,” whose work, “didn’t quite mesh with the Eurocentric standards of
industrial design, rather it created a new language rooted in the handmade traditions of”
Mexico.
224
The designers posed in their Mexico City studios and showrooms, embodiments of “a
steady stream of foreigners who praise the city’s slower pace and affordability.” They stood
among their often highly tactile, colorful products, evocative of the specific textures and palette
of modern Mexican life, from purple heirloom corn and its husks, caramel-colored leather,
brown and goldenrod ceramic tiles, reed woven baskets, thick rope, handblown glass, loofahs,
cochineal-dyed sisal, color-blocked concrete, even public bus upholstery. Proposing, “the endless
possibility of making in Mexico,” French furniture designer Fabien Cappello played into the
article’s overall mythology of ubiquitous making, claiming, “everywhere I looked, someone was
making something.”
225

This utopia of making is explicitly predicated on the unique skills of Mexican
craftspeople. “I like to transform humble materials into something luxurious” said Fernando
Laposse, who “collaborated with a collective of female weavers and other artisans.” Sisters
Annette and Phoebe Stevens “collaborated with traditional silversmiths from the Taxco region.”
“I wanted to see what else I could explore in terms of craft,” weaver Emma Gavaldon van
Leeuwen Boomkamp states, as the feature describes her introduction “to the weaving traditions

224
Hannah Martin, “How Mexico City’s Design Scene Is Separating Itself From the Pack,” Architectural Digest,
August 7, 2020.
225
Hannah Martin, “How Mexico City’s Design Scene Is Separating Itself From the Pack,” Architectural Digest,
August 7, 2020.

131
of Oaxaca” and her work “with artisans in the area to produce her own graphic wool rugs.”
Mexico is posited as a haven of “production possibilities” particularly in historic craft media like
“textiles, ceramics, and glass…stone carving and metalworking.”
Repeatedly, the article accepts the designers’ self-appointed roles as globalist go-
betweens; they mobilize Indigenous materials, skills, traditions, and knowledge for a global
design audience. Studio Tezontle takes its name from “the indigenous volcanic rock used for
construction since the Aztec era,” and combines, “pre-Columbian aesthetics with contemporary
material culture.” Stressing “heirloom varieties,” “Indigenous farmers,” “land rights,”
“biodiversity” and “heritage,” the article conveyed the value of such associations in 2020,
especially as a materialization of a more ethical, progressive outlook on the contemporary world.
Sensitive to these intersections of art and labor, global ambition and local (often Indigenous)
skills and knowledge, the article quoted curator and art fair director Cecilia León de la Barra,
who claimed “‘It’s about collaboration,’ says León de la Barra…[who] acknowledges the
complex and sometimes-colonialist tone these partnerships have taken in the past, saying that
today, ‘It’s essential that designers collaborate with artisans rather than conquering or imposing.
It must be an exchange.’”
226

Acknowledging the modernist history of such pursuits, the young designers of this
century are compared to forebears of almost a century prior, including Diego Rivera, Luis
Barragán, Clara Porset, and Mathias Goeritz.
227
I was struck by one omission in particular—that
of Goeritz and Barragán’s friend and colleague Sheila Hicks.

226
The repetition of “collaboration” to describe these intersections here and above is notable. Interrogating what
might fall under the broad discursive umbrella of “collaboration” throughout this chapter, I also return to
“collaboration” as a recurring watchword again in Chapter 5.
227
Curatorial attention has also recently revived an appreciation for the role of “foreigners” in modernist Mexican
design in particular, see Zoe Ryan edit., In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists In Mexico at Midcentury
(Yale University Press, 2019); and Gabriela Rangel and Jorge Rivas Pérez, Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil,
Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940-1978 (Americas Society, 2016).

132
Dedicated to abstraction, Goeritz, Barragán and Hicks represented a break with the
dominant party in Mexican art. In their distinctly figurative work, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego
Rivera, and Frida Kahlo had investigated the illustration and celebration of mexicanidad, a
national identity informed by Mexico’s rich Indigenous past and living present. Though
generally uninterested in pursuing the figurative work of such forebears, Barragán and Goeritz
still took note of local conditions and mobilized these resonances in their work. As poet Octavio
Paz remarked of Barragán in a short essay entitled “The Uses of Tradition,” Barragán exalted,
“neither the palace nor the skyscraper. His architecture is rooted in the Mexican village with its
streets, limited by towering walls, that in turn lead to plazas and fountains… The art of Barragán
is an example of how to employ our popular tradition with intelligence.”
228

Barragán and Goeritz’s most significant collaborative project, the Torres de Satelite,
exemplifies how this materialized “at the level of form.” As Jennifer Josten describes:
When viewed from a distance, they appear to be regular geometric forms, hard-
edge products of the industrial and automotive age; viewed from a car speeding
by, they flatten into thin walls that flicker past like a multicolored screen. Yet at
close range, the towers reveal their artisanal and premodern character in their
wavering edges, visible pour lines, and the paint drips that run down their sides. It
is in these contradictions that they negotiate, at the level of form, the unique
challenges of the midcentury Mexican moment of which they are emblematic.
229

Josten’s description of the Torres is one entry point for comprehending the value of Hicks’s
weavings of the early 1960s. Hers were not exceptionally sophisticated objects, at least not in
terms of technical achievement or futuristic experimentation—and yet they quickly attracted the
attention of authorities of design and major museums in the United States. Why?

228
Octavio Paz, "The Uses of Tradition," Artes de Mexico 23, New Series. (spring 1994): 92.
229
Jennifer Josten, “Color as Local and International Value in Mathias Goeritz’s Architectural and Urban
Sculpture,” Desafío a la estabilidad: Procesos artísticos en México, Rita Eder, edit. (Mexico City: Instituto de
Investigaciones Estéticas/Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, 2014), 297-299.

133
Like the Torres (and the designers celebrated by Architectural Design in this century)
Hicks’s weavings evoked both an “artisanal and premodern character” and an international
modernist vocabulary of abstraction. Like the Torres, Hicks’s weavings offer something graphic
and abstractly modernist from afar, but then dramatize their handmade as opposed to industrial
origin when scrutinized up close. Hicks’s edges too waver, their irregularity palpable. This is as
true of the minimalist, and monochromatic Amarillo, as well as the more activated Tres Lunas, c.
1960-61 (both works she made in collaboration with her small-scale workshop on looms
otherwise designed to produce common Mexican garments like the rebozo or serape), to the
comparative riot of smaller works like Solferino Tacubayo, continuations of the miniatures series
introduced in the proceeding chapter [see figures 18 and 13].
This chapter spans Sheila Hicks’s time in Mexico, from 1959 to 1964, and the works she
made there—recovering and scrutinizing the twentieth-century history of the same intersections
of Indigenous skill and global aesthetic ambition that publications like Architectural Digest still
celebrate today. During this period, despite living and working in rural Mexico, Hicks would
defy the conventional logic of artistic center and periphery and secure the consecration of
influential institutions like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
230
Her participation in
the group exhibition Woven Forms at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (MCC), a solo
exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), both in 1963, and a 1960 survey of recent
acquisitions to the department of Architecture and Design at Museum of Modern Art during
these years would consecrate her work (and fiber art as a multi-artistic investment) as worthy of
museum attention. These distinct discursive contexts (a museum of contemporary craft, a

230
On the role of center/periphery in Anthropology, see Arjun Appadurai, “Theory in Anthropology: Center and
Periphery,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28, No. 2 (Apr. 1986), 356-361; in art: Partha Mitter,
“Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” The Art Bulletin, 90:4 (2008), 531-
548.

134
department of architecture and design within a modernist museum, and an encyclopedic,
universal art museum) evidence how Hicks’s objects moved productively between distinct
contexts from the earliest moments of her career.
A version of the latter claim—that Hicks’s works move uniquely across otherwise
functionally and discursively distinct contexts including those of art, craft, design, and decorative
arts—while undoubtedly true, has been articulated enough to tempt cliché.
231
I examine these
early and concrete institutional case studies (at MoMA, the MCC, and AIC) not to belabor such
claims, but rather to excavate what greater social hierarchies their categorical imperatives reified.
I query what impact such distinctions had (and have still today), and what differences (beyond
those that govern objects) they tracked. I am interested in how museum categories and discourses
catalogued and stratified people as much as things, and how recovering this transitional moment,
for both Hicks amid a greater cultural field of the early 1960s helps us see how museological
distinctions—often still operative today and often regarded as either strictly formal or
bureaucratically neutral—shaped a long history of diversification within the modern museum. I
argue that this dynamic of categorical confusion and plural inclusion which still frames Hicks’s
status today does more than animate questions of art versus craft. I argue that where and how
Hicks’s early objects were framed by museums in the United States demonstrates the value of
their international origin and the Mexican artisans involved in their making.
Buttressed by abstraction’s status as a message whose code was uncertain, this mobility
and diversity of contexts mirrors Hicks’s own transnational fluidity during these years, when she
moved between the United States, Mexico, and Europe to establish her international career.

231
A particularly recent example: “she has removed the seams between art, architecture and design…In Hicks’
work, textile art is sculpture, painting, architecture and an independent discipline in its own right,” Harriet Lloyd-
Smith, “Textile artists: the pioneers of a new material world,” Wallpaper*, April 3, 2021,
https://www.wallpaper.com/art/contemporary-textile-artists.

135
Meanwhile beyond the art world, she established important connections at Knoll International
and initiated early crucial commissions like those for the CBS Building and the Ford Foundation.
Claimed for these divergent contexts of reception, Hicks and her objects reified and benefited
from the alterity and uncertainty their Mexican craft origins ordained for audiences further north.
Analyzing the associated objects, exhibitions, publications, and press coverage
surrounding these early inclusions as part of a greater pictorial discourse of weavers at work
across the Global South, I argue that Hicks’s objects and their presentation in the United States
materialized questions of cultural difference and international relation urgent in the Cold War
era, unassumingly ushered in by a young white woman from suburban Illinois. Manifesting these
questions via weaving and often picturing Hicks’s employees in Mexico at work alongside her, I
argue that these exhibitions presented Mexico as a potential space of international accord
achieved via handmaking, a foil to an increasingly capitalist, consumerist United States typified
by objects of machine and mass-manufacture.
Hicks and her objects traced a transnational network, connecting her site of production in
Mexico to modernist consecration and American capital, from the art museum to the design
showroom, mirroring emergent logics of transnational trade between the so-called first and third
world. As I will explore below, Hicks’s time in Mexico and early career was not hampered, but
helped, by the “provincialism problem” and its affective intersection with specificities of
medium, process, and production explored across this chapter.
232
Hicks’s transnational objects
materialize how in moving between national and cultural distinctions, a new kind of
“international style” that successfully blended signs of the local with global conditions

232
Terry Smith, “The Provincialism Problem,” Artforum, September 1974.

136
manifested—in this case as a meaningful reconciliation of European modernism and distinctly
Mexican dialogues, from the ancient to the modern.
233

Other Objects
Jennifer Roberts has theorized how artworks of the United States’ first century
materialized the experience of communication at a distance, visualizing how, in her words,
“distance is constitutive.”
234
Artworks materialized often otherwise immaterial experiences of
communication, or the attendant vastness of geographic and temporal separations one might
attempt to communicate across. Unlike Roberts’s American case studies (which are all
predicated either on a continental United States or Anglophone Atlantic crossing), Hicks’s
objects were conditioned by their movement between Mexico and the United States, between
Spanish and English, framed by languages and cultures both ancient and modern.
Hicks’s works are all predicated upon and framed by distance, and this distance,
preserved not denied, produces their significance. Unlike Roberts’s case studies, the distance
measured both a geographic distance and cultural difference; this is distance inflected
meaningfully by difference (recalling the theorizations of Jacques Derrida). This chapter

233
Coined by curators Henry Russell Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson as part of the title for their 1932 exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, the moniker, ‘the international style,’
designated the language of linear, ornament-free buildings (most famously associated with the design style of the
German Bauhaus) as an ‘international’ vocabulary of form flexible enough to serve a variety of geographic contexts.
Various critics and architectural historians have proposed alternatives to its emphasis on one, the formalism of style
(assumedly ignoring or effacing content or more programmatic, functional imperatives) and two a potentially false,
flat, or undifferentiated internationalism, where form takes hold without regard for local difference or potential
resistance. For one, Kenneth Frampton proposed the phrase, “critical regionalism,” suggesting a more intellectually
informed dialogue between a shared international language and local needs or material conditions. Kenneth
Frampton, “Toward a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” The Anti-aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture (The New Press, 1983). More recently, art historian David Joselit has returned to the
notion of an “international style,” as a historical framework for understanding not modern but contemporary art. As
he describes it, “an international style encompasses the adoption and adaptation of an existing idiom by a culturally
and geographically diverse, even unlimited, array of producers. Put slightly differently, an international style
accommodates a wide variety of utterances within an existing language.” David Joselit, “On Aggregators,” October
146 (2013), 4.
234
Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (University of California
Press, 2014), 6.

137
considers translation in both the linguistic and geographic sense by underscoring how Hicks’s
objects profited from mobility between distinct cultural contexts.
235
How do they concretize what
Roberts calls, “the phatic dimension,” the uncertainty, delay, and difference, between the site of
their making in Mexico and the site of their exhibition in Chicago and New York City? How are
the dimensions of these anxieties greater or otherwise qualitatively distinct from those of other
historic or contemporary objects somehow less remote?
Sarah Parrish has underscored how “issues of (mis)communication are central” to
Hicks’s work, manifest in a recurring, “overriding metaphor of writing and translation…that of
textile-as-text.”
236
Hicks offered this interpretive lens to others via her titles, including Blue
Letter, 1959, Escribiendo con Textura, 1960, and White Letter, 1962-1963, all made during her
time in Mexico. As Parrish has discussed, this metaphoric understanding built on a long history
of likening fiber to language, beginning with the shared latin root (textere) of textiles and text.
In theorizing the folding or folded work of the neo-concretists of Brazil, Irene Small has
reached for the newspaper as a phenomenological comparison for the formal conceit of folding
that recurs throughout their work. Comparing the neoconcrete art object to the newspaper allows
Small to materialize Ferreira Gullar’s claim that neoconcretism established a “new type of
communication” and to demonstrate how “the newspaper and the Neoconcrete work approach
communication and a host of attendant terms—information, fact, message, knowledge—through
radically different means.”
237
This new form of art, and its communications, was, Small claims,
“plied from the very caesuras by which a newspaper’s communication takes shape.”

235
Translation has recently been invoked to understand the history of design and exchange particularly between
Mexico and California for the exhibition, Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915-1985:
Wendy Kaplan edit., Design in California and Mexico, 1915-1985: Found in Translation (LACMA/Prestel, 2017).
236
Sarah Parrish, “Anthropologies of Fiber: Claire Zeisler, Ed Rossbach, Sheila Hicks” (dissertation, Boston
University, 2017), 168-170.
237
Irene V. Small, Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 21.

138
Hicks’s titles establish a similar analogy. Blue and White Letter propose both a
conceptual and formal correspondence between such small-scale weaving and the rectangles of
paper to which we affix words (made up of letters of another sort) and send between disparate
sites in order to communicate [see figure 18]. Hicks’s affiliation with the letter, a manifestation
of written, materialized language, rather than the telephone, arguably a vehicle for
communication’s dematerialization, or the similarly flattened plane of the television (a medium
she, uniquely, had known in color since childhood, as hers was one of the first families she knew
to acquire a color set) is notable beside other such media for its by then potentially antiquated
status. While letters were by the late 1950s an old convention besides the telephone, for Hicks it
was still an essential condition of life in Mexico, and her ability to connect that life to points
elsewhere, like New York City in order to establish her reputation and career.
Whereas the telephone is direct and immediate, the letter is predicated on a sense of
distance and delay. What is said on the telephone is heard immediately, whereas the
communication of a letter might take days or weeks to arrive (if at all) to its intended audience.
Indeed, the telephone was distrusted. As Hicks has recalled, “they were writing letters. People
didn’t telephone much between Mexico and the United States.”
238
In its delay, but also its
confessional intimacy, the letter, like an art object, serves as a proxy, and presents an object in
lieu of the subject that authored it, always to some degree representing them, though always in a
romantically partial way. In fact, Hicks’s first appointment at MoMA hung on a letter, as she
recalls, “there must have been a letter announcing some exotic girl arriving from Mexico with
her potholders or something.”
239

238
Sheila Hicks, Oral History, February 2004.
239
Sheila Hicks, Oral History, February 2004.

139
Only two years out of school, she had secured an audience in 1961 with curator in the
department of Architecture and Design Greta Daniel and Alfred Barr, the storied Director of the
Museum of Modern Art, by then more than ten years into his demoted but still significant role as
Director of Collections. Blue Letter was acquired by MoMA at that meeting in 1960 for $85
(roughly $700 in this century), and was followed by the white Wall Hanging, 1961 in 1961. Then
came Greta (no. 55), 1961 (an abstract portrait like those discussed in the preceding chapters),
named and donated in 1962 to commemorate the death of Greta Daniel at the age of 53.
240
Daniel
was Hicks’s first, though certainly not her last, ally at MoMA, an institution, both because of
these early enthusiastic acquisitions to its canonizing collection and temporary exhibitions like
Recent Acquisitions and later Wall Hangings, 1969 that ultimately played a defining role in
consecrating Hicks as part of a larger field of modernist practice. Due to its medium-specific
logic, MoMA also effectively segregated Hick’s work, by settling it too fixedly into its
department of Architecture and Design, rather than allowing it to be understood more freely,
maybe expanded to include the context of the department of Painting and Sculpture, but better
yet beyond these strictures as well. White Letter, 1962, joined Blue Letter, 1959 [Fig. 20] and the
other MoMA works in 1964 (as a gift of Knoll Associates).
241

Just as Hicks’s presence was ushered into MoMA by proxy through a written, paper letter
that preceded her physical arrival, so too, and possibly more distinctly, the woven Letters
allowed her to be present in more than one place simultaneously. Hicks has sent hundreds if not
thousands of letters during her lifetime. Anyone who takes the time to review an archive where

240
“Daniel, Greta (1909–1962),” “Modern Women / A Partial History,” accessed August 5, 2017,
https://www.moma.org/explore/publications/modern_women/history#lexicon10. Her colleague and director of the
department, Arthur Drexler, recalled that Daniel, “worked like a dog for the wages of a porter,” and that, “after her
death we had pandemonium”.
241
Letter, Christine Rae to Sheila Hicks, Knoll New York archives.

140
letters by Hicks are retained cannot help but note her exceptional charm and presence as a
correspondent, captured even by one quick letter. Hers are a lesson in epistolary charm, full of
warm wit and surprising details. One feels as though they are in the presence of a real intimacy
and living consciousness.
242
Encouraged by these parallels, I see an explicit metaphoric
connection between Hicks’s literal presence and the formal device of the Letters and other
similar works of the 1960s. Describing the adornment of modernist spaces Alina Payne has
posited, “a development in thinking about detached, mobile, virtually inconspicuous objects
aimed at extending human gestures and movements, not at illustrating them.”
243
Considered as
such, the Letters condense both a materialization of thought and gesture made one, recording the
script of both mind and body and dissolving distinctions between the two.
Blue Letter, typical of many of Hicks’s works, bears no signature, a break with both
epistolary and aesthetic precedent. Hicks has since underscored the lack of a literal signature or
name appended to her finished works as typical of all that followed, intended and purposeful. “I
don’t sign anything I make,” she has stated. “I don’t write my name on my work. I make it and
then it must live on its own. That’s what I’m striving for: something that can be contemplated,
meditated – that can become part of our existence – peaceful coexistence: something that
somehow envelopes you in good oxygen.”
244

Hicks describes her unsigned works like living and breathing things, capable of
producing “good oxygen” like trees, and achieving “peaceful coexistence” like a good neighbor
or a diplomatic state. For an artist coming of age and circulating internationally as the Cold War

242
I have had the unique pleasure of confirming and sharing this sense of Hicks with Lynne Cooke. I am deeply
grateful to have discussed this particular facet of our shared research and experience with her.
243
Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (Yale University Press, 2012),
21.
244
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 March 18. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

141
set in, this diplomatic analogy echoes urgent discourses of geopolitical negotiation, accords of
peace designed to avoid world war or nuclear destruction. In another refusal of proper names, by
the time MoMA acquired it, Blue Letter didn’t yet exist, at least not in name. When first
exhibited in 1960, in Recent Acquisitions: Architecture and Design Collection, Blue Letter was
called Tapestry and was the only textile in the show, giving Hicks a kind of ownership of the
medium and craft tradition. Later, echoing this idea it was called Blue Weaving, and then finally
Blue Letter. These shifts condense “the ambiguities that exist in the way curators classify”
Hicks’s work generally and MoMA’s particular uncertainty about how to describe, think about,
and ultimately classify, this object—and any somehow like it.
245

Stritzler-Levine stops short of recognizing that although this is certainly true of Hicks, it
is also evidence, I argue, of her work’s instigation of the kind of confusion that shapes our
interpretation of the rest of the world too, from the art museum to collections of anthropology,
natural history, or botany, all similarly obsessed with classification and divisional organizations.
Depending on the institution, Hicks’s work has been collected by textile departments,
departments of design, decorative arts, craft, American, and contemporary art—all variably
conceived as both distinct and at times commensurable categories. At MoMA, Hicks has
remained, no matter what she makes (from the ambiguity of Blue Letter to the monumentality of
Supple Column/Pillar of Inquiry, 2014—presented as the introductory work for Surrounds: 11
Installations, 2019, a survey of contemporary installation art) within Architecture and Design.
Language and the institutions that model and attempt to standardize its use vis-à-vis objects like
Blue Letter provide case studies for understanding how categories fail to divide the diversity of
the material world as cleanly and neutrally as they appear to.

245
Nina Stritzler-Levine, “A Design Identity,” in Weaving as Metaphor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006),
346-9

142
Puzzling over this dynamic, I return again and again to the phrase “problem picture,” a
term historically tied to a genre of late Victorian painting that presented viewers with a figurative
scene that was intentionally ambiguous, evocative of more than one potential narrative so that
audiences might puzzle over it as a problem to be solved. I am attracted to the phrase as a
descriptor for Hicks’s objects, like Blue Letter, especially as they enter the museum. They too are
“problem pictures,” I argue, in that they force those who receive them, whether museum curators
or viewers, to decide what to make of them, (“tapestry,” “weaving,” “letter”?), ultimately
remaining obdurately mute and inconclusive, encouraging many narratives, and allowing for
many classifications and interpretations to be simultaneously possible. Of this confusion of
attaching language to the material world, W. J. T. Mitchell has noted:
objects are the way things appear to a subject—that is, with a name, an identity, a
gestalt or stereotypical template...Things, on the other hand,...[signal] the moment
when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the
mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny and feels
the need for what Foucault calls 'a metaphysics of the object, or, more exactly, a
metaphysics of that never objectifiable depth from which objects rise up toward
our superficial knowledge.’
246

Here, Mitchell ingeniously condenses the major intellectual history of French post-structural
thought (Lacan’s sardine can, et. al.) and underscores how its theories although encoded by
language often depend upon visual rather than verbal analogies—likely because perception, and
its autonomy from the logos of language, is at the heart of the problem. Language is an imperfect
map of the physical, material, emotional world, and often (as described by Jean Baudrillard), it is
a “map that precedes the territory.”
247
Materializing Mitchell’s distinction, Blue Letter is not a
settled object but a “thing,” the object become “Other” as he describes. It is both connected to

246
W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2013), 156.
247
Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford;
Stanford University Press, 1988), 166.

143
what we know, made of the same stuff as wash cloths or scarves and yet it is beyond a familiar,
“stereotypical template,” slipping provocatively between legible and illegible, underscoring, “our
superficial knowledge” indeed.
Unlike Le Corbusier’s Armchair, Alvar Aalto’s Sofa Bed, or Charles Eames’s Lounge
Chair and Ottoman, all exhibited alongside Tapestry (aka Blue Letter) in Recent Acquisitions,
the word “Tapestry” used as a title, Stritzler-Levine contends, conveys less certainty about its
function than its exhibited peers. Tapestry “does not indicate a function but a construction
technique,” she remarks.
248
Alluding to the usage of “tapestry” (versus “plain” weave) to indicate
a distinct weaving technique, Stritzler-Levine’s distinction does not cohere with the definition
offered by the Oxford English Dictionary, which evokes a spectator’s rather than a technician’s
perspective when it defines a tapestry as, “a textile fabric decorated with designs of ornament or
pictorial subjects, painted, embroidered, or woven in colours, used for wall hangings, curtains,
covers for seats, to hang from windows or balconies on festive occasions.”
249
Blue Letter is
notably also not a tapestry weave in the nomenclature of technique to which Stritzler-Levine
alludes (defined by tomes like Raoul d’Harcourt’s Textiles of Ancient Peru and Their
Techniques, a foundational text for Hicks and other modernist weavers like her mentor Anni
Albers). Unlike true tapestry, in Blue Letter many of the warp threads remain visible to our eye
rather than completely obscured by the wefts.
A tapestry, like many things, is defined, as the dictionary entry suggests by use and
function, by hanging from a wall or other surface, but also by the nature or content carried by its
surface. Historically defined by being filled with “ornament or pictorial subjects,” if Blue Letter
hangs, as it did in its first showing at MoMA, it is performing tapestry’s use-value and function.

248
Nina Stritzler-Levine, “A Design Identity,” Sheila Hicks: Weaving As Metaphor, 346.
249
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “tapestry.”

144
But what about the condition of decoration or ornament, so-called “pictorial subjects” described
by the dictionary entry? Blue Letter looks nothing like what we likely imagine when we hear the
word “tapestry,” captured more iconically in something like the medieval The Unicorn in
Captivity, 1495-1505, also exhibited in contemporary postwar New York City.
250
In solidarity
with modernist preference for abstraction Blue Letter, or Tapestry was certainly not pictorial, nor
ornamental in the traditional sense. It was also too small, and failed to measure up to the scale of
such historic tapestries, often commissioned to cover and insulate whole stone castle walls.
This discrepancy did not go unnoticed in 1960, in fact, it was registered by Barr. “Alfred
Barr said, ‘Can you make this larger?’,” Hicks recalled many years later of her first meeting at
MoMA.
251
Maybe mindful of Barr’s fallen star, Hicks’s recollection of this scene ironically casts
Barr in a cameo role, as a man obsessed with size, the mythic voice of a museum that had, by the
time Hicks recounted this story in 2004, dramatically expanded itself to prop up the gargantuan
tonnage of contemporary art (fellow Yale graduate, Richard Serra, in particular).
252
For a
spectator like Barr or maybe many a New Yorker circa 1960, scaling Blue Letter up would not
only encourage it to be recognized as tapestry, but, more likely would liken it, especially if it
remained free of figurative imagery, to the increasingly minimalist developments in
contemporary abstract painting. As Kirsten Swenson has discussed, the late 1950s and early
1960s were, “a moment when the relevance and meaning of modernist painting was in doubt.”
253

Predicated on her time at Yale, Hicks’s thinking about painting (like Hesse’s in Swenson’s

250
This work is in the collection of the Cloisters Museum of the Metropolitan Museum, in Washington Heights.
251
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
252
“The late curator Kirk Varnedoe specified, before MoMA’s renovation, that the floors in the contemporary
galleries had to be built to support Serra’s art. He’s actually engineered into the building.” In Karen Rosenberg,
“Richard’s Arc,” New York Magazine (May 24, 2007): http://nymag.com/arts/art/profiles/32110/.
253
See “Chapter 1: The Problem of Painting, 1960-64,” in Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol Lewitt, and 1960s
New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 29-59.

145
study) was suspended between the apparently conflicting influences of Josef Albers, a man of
careful planning and strict abstract geometries, and Rico Lebrun, a figurative expressionist who
encouraged emotion and improvisation. Even as they entered MoMA’s conceptual intersection of
Architecture and Design, Hicks’s works simultaneously aspired to and were described in the
language of art. As discussed in the preceding chapters, Hick’s weavings were made on painting
stretchers subverted into service as looms, they were colored to match the mellow tones of
“Vuillard and Bonnard,” and filled with enough gestural incident for Hicks to suggest that it was
“almost like drawing with yarn.”
254

Scaled up, Blue Letter’s exploration of cross-hatching raised to a level of soft-spoken
activity at its core and its subtle coloristic shift between relatively similar hues explores a
territory similar to something like Philip Guston’s Zone, 1953-54. A more streamlined cruciform
gestalt surfaced in Ad Reinhardt’s Blue, 1952, in a palette remarkably akin to that employed for
Blue Letter. And Blue Letter’s grid (an a priori of weaving that here effectively becomes its
pictorial content in lieu of another image), as well as its hue, echo the blue grids of Agnes
Martin, such as Untitled, 1960, or Stars, 1963. Indeed, Hicks’s weavings get closest to modernist
painting, as exemplified by Blue Letter, when they offer a monochrome and make weaving’s grid
especially obvious.
Referring to herself and her work in the meeting with Barr and Daniel as, “some exotic
girl arriving from Mexico with her potholders,”
255
Hicks exoticized, mislabeled, and comically
belittled herself and her own work, underscoring the questions of category previously raised as
well as the hierarchies, from gendered and geographic, that her Letters and other works of this
period surreptitiously operated within—and, in my reading, productively antagonized. Such a

254
Sheila Hicks, Oral History, February 2004.
255
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks.

146
glib moniker betrays how Hicks, and fiber, were embroiled in a challenge to perceptions, the
stakes of which were and remain as grand as the recognition of some “thing” (in Mitchell’s
sense) as art, and some “exotic girl” as an artist.
Wool Letters and Hieroglyphs
Two series, the Letters and related Hieroglyphs, were sustained and primary for Hicks in
the early 1960s.
256 257
Both conceptually and formally similar, works in both series are
monochromatic, and consist of uninterrupted bands of warp and weft gathered to create raised
blocks of rectangular patches that dwarf the constructive weave that surrounds them, turning the
constructive logic of weaving into a pictorial conceit with the balanced syncopation of a Piet
Mondrian.
When Hicks describes Red Hieroglyph below, another linguistically minded work made
in Mexico, the mention of “wool letters” and “wool writing” makes clear how intertwined this
thematic inquiry was with the specific geographic, historical, mythological, and emotional
context Mexico afforded:
When I turned to look at it—I looked into it and all of a sudden the blocks or gaps
fell away; I thought of Mexico, of wool, of the first wool writing I tried to do, of
Popo [the volcano, Popocatépetl], the snow on top, the valleys between Taxco and
Iguala, the Amante [sacred pre-Hispanic paper] and Casahuate trees, Mathias,
gold leaf and Barragán and solid wood cubes. Then I remembered all the wool
letters I had tried to structure and read and the hieroglyphs as they appeared to me
in chiseled facades
258

Hicks describes the weaving as a kind of mnemonic device. Looking at it, she translates its
abstract, colored surface into a rich series of memories, not only of the architect Luis Barragán

256
Elissa Auther, “Classification and Its Consequences: The Case of ‘Fiber Art,’” American Art American Art 16,
no. 3 (2002): 2.
257
Though these works emerged first and were meaningfully inspired by Mexico, they would persist in Hieroglyph,
1968 and become monumental motifs for architectural commissions like Grand Hieroglyph, 1967, commissioned
for the George Eastman house.
258
Commentary by Hicks, prompted by seeing Red Hieroglyph in the home of Mildred Constantine, as quoted in
Fifty Years, p. 166.

147
and Mathias Goeritz, her two most significant aesthetic connections in Mexico, but also
volcanoes of mythic importance, rural cities like Taxco and Iguala, and ancient materials like
wood, gold, and Amante paper. Like a message in Braille, the haptic quality of the weaving’s
surface echoes the varied textures evoked by such allusions, the cold tenderness of snow, the
pragmatic warmth of a wooden cube, the luxurious fragility of gold leaf, the dry, mysterious
surface of antique pages.
“Hieroglyphs” would have appeared to Hicks in “chiseled facades” across Latin America
but would become newly foregrounded by the anticipation and construction of the Museo
Nacional de Antropología in early 1960s Mexico, completed in 1964. Such “chiseled facades”
and “hieroglyphs” also appeared at fixed sites like Monte Alban and Copan as they had for
hundreds of years. They were fascinating and mysterious to Hicks as they had been to
subsequent civilizations for centuries, from Indigenous peoples who came after to colonial and
enlightenment explorers, as captured by images like Plate 10, Archway, Casa del Gobernador,
Uxmal, from Frederick Catherwood’s Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas
and Yucatan, 1844. Like several of the images in Catherwood’s volume, the ancient site exists
embedded in unruly nature and by implication forgotten by the modern world. That said,
Catherwood’s image also establishes the ruins of Uxmal as a dramatic backdrop for the
continuation of daily life for contemporary people, who seem to have no reverence for the site’s
original function or significance.
This was not necessarily the case, or accurate reporting (maybe of course) on
Catherwood’s part. As Enrique Florescano reports, the recovery of Indigenous artifacts, in
particular their prominent re-presentation in public space, could disrupt colonial order, and defy
desires (like Catherwood’s) to see them as purely aesthetic objects whose significance was

148
arrested in the past. Following the accidental discovery of a monumental stonework depiction of
the Aztec deity Coatlicue in 1790 (found beneath the main plaza in Mexico City thanks to
incidental construction), viceroyal authorities ended its subsequent exhibition in the central plaza
of the Universidad de México, going so far as to redeposit it in the ground, in order to put an end
to the many who had begun to worship it in keeping with tradition passed down by their
ancestors.
259
A period eye much closer to Hicks’s own in several senses and directed again upon
such fixed facades of ancient Mexico is captured in the photocollages of Josef Albers, such as
Untitled (Mitla, Mexico), 1956, where the site is editorially cropped and captured at discordant
angles until, as a series of images assembled in a grid, it feels like a jigsaw puzzle of
architectural (or for that matter textile) fragments.
Such archeological sites (and sights) would become newly urgent and visible in the
postwar period and especially during Hicks’s time in Mexico owing in part to their new touristic
accessibility and imaged mobility (as captured in Albers’s photocollages), exemplified by the
organization and opening of the Museo Nacional de Antropología as a new destination for locals
and international travelers alike in Mexico City in 1964 (looking ahead to the Olympics in 1968).
Built to house a monumental collection of pre-Columbian objects, like the iconic Aztec sun (or
calendar) stone and the aforementioned statue of Coatlicue, the museum was one of several built
by President Adolfo López Mateos in a definitively modernist, monumental style, typical of a
building boom underway across Latin America that notably invested in iconic museological
structures that endorsed local derivations of the abstract, International Style as fit for expressing

259
Enrique Florescano, “The Creation of the Museo Nacional De Antropología,” in Elizabeth Hill Boone
(edit.), Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past: a Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks
Research Library and Collection, 2011), Page TK.

149
nationalist, modernist sentiments.
260
As older postcolonial museums like the Museo Nacional
had before, the Museo Nacional de Antropología (or MNA) organized and branded the great
plurality of Indigenous cultures (like the Maya, the Aztec, or the Olmecs) encompassed by
Mexico’s comparatively recent geopolitical boundaries into one nationalized heritage. That said,
the MNA, along with the other new museums erected nearby, broke with the legacy of earlier
Mexican museums, formally with its new modernist building, and also conceptually. Whereas
the Museo Nacional had been critiqued for its inchoate antiquarian jumble, as captured in prints
like Mexican Antiquities, 1869,
261
the MNA presented many of the same objects as totemic
glories of formal complexity, celebrated and framed by monumental architectural spaces as
autonomous aesthetic objects in their own right. Also, instead of claiming to materialize
evidence of one singular linear history (from the ancient prehistoric and precolonial, to the
history of the colonial, postcolonial, and subsequent present) communicated via prehistoric
stonework, ancient art, and colonial paintings mixed-up together in one building, the disciplinary
separation of the country’s collections into separate museums, including the MNA, allowed these
ancient and pre-colonial objects to meet the present without the interruption of colonial history.
As such, they could be greeted as more contemporary than they had been before, more adjacent
to and productive of twentieth century modernity, rather than rendered remote by centuries of
colonial history and repression.
This final idea was communicated especially by the building’s architecture, undeniably
modernist, but also inspired by the monumentality of Mayan precedents. The MNA, evocative of

260
Michele Greet, “Art Museums of Latin America: Structuring Representation,” (lecture, Getty Museum, May 12,
2017), https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1434&v=Yc-CsaayHGk&feature=emb_logo, accessed May
21, 2020.
261
General Research Division, The New York Public Library. "Antigüedades mexicanas, que existen en el Museo
Nacional de México, 1857 = Antiquités mexicaines, qui existent au Musée National de México, 1857 = Mexican
antiquities, which exist in the National Museum of México, 1857" New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Accessed May 21, 2020. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-16b0-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

150
a cultural imagination typical of 1960s Mexico, posited ancient precedent in an active dialogue
with Mexican modernism of the early 1960s, including Hicks and her peers, Barragán and
Goeritz among others. The MNA translated the “chiseled facades” Hicks’s so admired spatially
if not always linguistically. They were removed from the past tenses of their otherwise fixed
(literally in light of their weight) sites and brought from frequently rural, and comparatively
inaccessible, circumstances of their archeological recovery into the symbolic heart of the
developing city and national capital. The city itself was a purpose-built locus of the so-called
“Mexican miracle,” a period of sustained economic growth and political stability.
262
The MNA
represented the modernity of ancient Mexico’s “hieroglyphs” and “chiseled facades” made
newly accessible and, especially as touristic and press photography turned toward them,
circulated their image as paradoxically mobile and modern.
Echoing the shift occasioned by institutions like the MNA, Hicks not only turned to
ancient Mexican artifacts and puzzled over them in producing her own work in Mexico, but her
objects were also subject to similar translations of context and category as they left Mexico. In
the United States, work by Hicks would move between commercial art galleries and design
showrooms, as well as modern, contemporary, and encyclopedic art museums like MoMA, the
Art Institute of Chicago, and new experimental institutions devoted explicitly to the provocative
intersection of craft media and the new historical category of the “contemporary” embodied by
New York’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts.
263

262
Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution: Contemporary Mexican
History, 1910–1989 (University of Texas Press, 2010).
263
“Museum History,” Museum of Arts and Design, accessed April 10, 2021,
https://madmuseum.org/about/museum-history; Richard Meyer, “Midcentury Contemporary (1948),” When Was
Contemporary Art? (Yale University Press, 2013), 191-258.

151
Hicks’s titles and descriptions of weavings of the early 1960s, invoking letters and
hieroglyphs, posited communication via materialized rather than spoken language, possibly
rendered in an alphabet distinct from that informing contemporary English or Spanish. In my
reading, Hicks inherited this idea from the Indigenous archeological archive framed by
institutions like the MNA that heightened the investment from afar she had already gleaned from
Anni Albers, fascinated as she was too with various linguistic systems developed in Mexico and
further south across Latin America.
Whereas Hicks’s diction, “letters,” suggests a more contemporary metaphor, one
evocative of English or any language making use of a lettered alphabet, “hieroglyphs” points to a
more ancient linguistic model. Greek for ancient writing, the word hieroglyph was originally
coined to describe the first pictorial script ever developed, by the ancient Egyptians. In an
American context, it could be associated with many writing systems, including the glyphs of the
Ojibwe, Muisca, and Mi’kmaq peoples, and most immediate to Hicks in Mexico, the precedents
of the Olmec, Zapotec, or Aztecs—but the most logical touchstone and point of comparison was
likely the Maya.
By the early 1960s, Mayan glyphs were both the most well known popularly and most
energetically deciphered form of ancient American language, an active puzzle and primary
investment of modern philologists worldwide.
264
Of the Indigenous American writing systems,
Mayan language in particular has received the most significant and sustained attention from
linguists and Mesoamericanists, which intensified particularly in the postwar years. Mayan
glyphs, still often characterized as the only complete writing system developed in Mesoamerica,

264
Evidence of Olmec writing emerged on only one known artifact (the Cascajal block) found in the 1990s, which
since has been proposed as a likely inspiration for the distinct, elaborate script developed subsequently by the Maya.
See, Andrew Robinson, Writing and Script: A Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009), 34.

152
were largely still illegible to modern readers working to decipher them during Hicks’s time in
Mexico. Revising the claims of a nineteenth century “alphabet” defined by Bishop Diego de
Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, by 1952 linguist Yuri Knorozov had correctly
identified that Mayan pictorial glyphs, often palpably figurative and representational could be
read as both morphemes (complete words), indicative of the real world objects they depicted, but
also alternatively as a series of syllabic sounds that together indicate a morpheme (or irreducible
word/concept).
265
In this, Mayan glyphs can be said to work representationally and more
abstractly (or, in the language of structural linguistics, semiotically) in tandem.
266
This dual
potential would have been of logical interest to a young artist schooled in abstraction like Hicks.
In 1960, Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff published the landmark, “Historical Implications of a
Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras Guatemala,” in American Antiquity, establishing the legibility
of Mayan archaeological sites as inscribed histories.
Despite the achievements of Proskouriakoff and Knorozov (ultimately deemed prescient
by later scholars), their claims were not immediately accepted and were contested by several
other scholars of Mesoamerica. Even decades later, once their arguments had been accorded a
general consensus, attempts to identify a standard process to decipher, to read Mayan texts
continued well into the 1980s. Even still today, several of the known texts remain beyond
complete legibility. As such, translation of the very artifacts celebrated by the MNA or other
such institutions was far from settled during Hicks’s time in Mexico. Endorsing them, the nation
endorsed objects whose messages were both encoded and uncertain, striking contemporary eyes
not unlike Hicks’s abstractions, where another encoded message was presented.

265
Robinson, 59.
266
Peter T. Daniels, The World’s Writing Systems (Oxford University Press, 1996), 2.

153
“Let us suppose,” wrote Kubler in The Shape of Time, “that the idea of art can be
expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in
addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world.” While expanding art to include
tools is already provocative, including “writing” pushed Kubler’s definition of art into something
much more esoteric, but Hicks’s “hieroglyphs,” “chiseled facades,” and even more modern
“letters,” grounded Kubler’s meaning in the logic of longstanding facets of material culture,
rendering his language tangible. Systems of writing and language become material things, even
achieving an architectural monumentality, when carved into stone, whether in the infamous
Rosetta Stone, or inscribed tantalizingly atop equally titanic humanoid figures as in the reliefs of
ancient Assyria. Mayan stelae and carved reliefs are again especially compelling in this regard
for materializing language with stony permanence, as demonstrated by works such as Relief with
Stone Ruler, from the early 770’s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or Front Face of a Stela,
AD 200-1000 in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Like the Assyrian examples,
their surfaces provocatively mix writing (already, in Mayan hands, a pictorial script) with
figurative imagery, often of human rulers or deities, as commensurable compositional elements.
In their own way, these stelae trouble the modernist binary constructed between abstraction and
representation.
Serious students of the ancient Americas that they both were, Sheila Hicks and Anni
Albers would have understood the Mayan occupation of a unique position in comparative
linguistics and the history of writing in the Americas. If, as described by Peter T. Daniels,
writing is defined as a graphic representation of speech, the Maya are often credited as one of the
three cultures where writing developed independently (the others being Mesopotamia and

154
China).
267
They are unique among pre-colonial American cultures for investing so extensively in
what we now understand as writing, available still now for contemporary eyes to ponder in a
myriad of objects. Taking Hicks’s preceding time and investment in Andean weaving and
cultures as a comparison, the Inca and their predecessors produced no system of alphabetic
writing, nor was any comparable tradition to be found south of central America.
268
Indeed,
simply Hicks’s decision to settle permanently in Mexico as a nonnative Spanish speaker, raised
the question of language in a modern context as well, beginning with the translation of speech or
thought into writing or art. But the Mayan precedent in particular would foreground writing’s
unique history there, newly relevant in a Mexican as opposed to an Andean context.
Mayan writing is unique, especially when compared to modern English or other
alphabetic languages, for combining both logograms, or signs that pictorially represent whole
words or concepts (so that a jaguar head signifies “jaguar”), and syllabograms, or signs evocative
of individual syllables combined to form specific words (“ka” + “ka” + “u” = “cacao”).
269
Mayan
language both defies and echoes the logic of alphabetic languages like English or Spanish.
Unlike them, in its recourse to figurative representations and complex formal conceits as
opposed to more simplified letter forms, it presents a model of language more sympathetic to an
artistic or art historical eye. In its comparative example, it also reminds the contemporary eye
how alphabetic writing and the spoken sounds they chart are also forms of conceptual, graphic,
and sonic abstraction, translations of the world as seen or experienced physically and psychically
into a potentially more obscure code. Especially for abstract artists like Anni Albers and Hicks

267
Peter T. Daniels, The World’s Writing Systems (Oxford University Press, 1996), 2.
268
This point has been made by many, but I am especially indebted to Joanne Pillsbury, whose account can be found
in, “Reading Art without Writing: Interpreting Chimú Architectural Sculpture” Dialogues in Art History, from
Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century (National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, Date TK),
73.
269
Evidence of contemporary fascination with the unique Maya, this explanation is adapted from Lauren Collins,
“London Postcard: Graphical,” The New Yorker, August 3 & 12, 2019, p. 19.

155
(but even those working in a more figurative vein too), the gray area courted by the unique blend
of picture and symbol inherit in Maya writing anticipates still unresolved twentieth-century
crises of meaning, legibility, and representation occasioned by modern and eventually purely
abstract art. Invoking language as they did, Sheila Hicks and Anni Albers theorized their own
abstractions not as inaugurations of a complete free-play of meaning.
270
Instead, echoing a
structuralist understanding of language and culture championed by scholars like Proskouriakoff,
they theorized international abstraction as participant in an ordered semiotic field within which
they established and elaborated a communicative dialogue. Like the pre-colonial reliefs
presented by museums in both Mexico and the United States, Hicks’s abstractions were accepted
despite the uncertainty and perhaps ambiguous status of their messages.
271

Craft Capitalism
Moving to Mexico straight from New Haven upon her graduation from Yale, Hicks
returned in part to escape the United States, particularly the inhospitable atmosphere, “the
roughness of [its] cities,” and the petty in-fighting over artistic styles and pedagogy that she had
witnessed in her final year at Yale (between her teachers Josef Albers, who modeled abstraction
and self-discipline, and the more expressive and surrealist encouragements of new humanist
figurative painter Rico Lebrun).
272
Hicks was “determined not to teach and not to get caught in

270
Virginia Gardner Troy, Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles, 36-37; 74; 119-121; 148-156.
271
An extension of this argument attends to the circulation of Mexican antiquities, particularly the iconic Olmec
heads, throughout various US contexts, including exhibitions and corporate lobbies and plazas throughout the 1960s.
See, Luis Casteñeda, “Doubling Time,” Grey Room 51, http://www.greyroom.org/issues/51/14/doubling-time/.; Jeff
Giles, “When Corporate Lobbies Started to Look Like Museum Galleries,” The New York Times, July 19, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/when-corporate-lobbies-started-to-look-like-museum-galleries.html.
272
“I thought I could learn from practical experience, in an unfamiliar rural culture away from the theories of the
schools and the roughness of cities,” Diamonstein-Spielvogel, Handmade in America: Conversations With Fourteen
Craftmasters (Abrams, 1983), 97.

156
academic conflicts; I became determined to make art and to live in an atmosphere in which art
can be produced – to get out of the school systems.”
273

She realized this ideal by 1960 as the wife of Henri Tati Schlubach, an apiculturist and
ranch owner in rural Taxco El Viejo, Mexico, roughly three hours from Mexico City. Life in
Taxco was a way to be away from city life, to be rural but also to live and learn about life in a
pragmatic way, through doing and experience in the tradition of philosopher John Dewey. Hicks
opposed this to a method that separated theory from practice, an approach she associated with
academia, and probably the New York art world too, informed by the late 1950s by the
deterministic discourse of flatness or action, or other theories of painting’s logical trajectory
espoused by writers like Clement Greenberg or Harold Rosenberg. Mexico represented an
alternative to the proffer of New York City, and a career, hopefully, beyond teaching, the usual
path for MFA graduates, and especially women.
“Everyone’s manual in Mexico, in the countryside,” she has stated, “and since we were
improvising and inventing, no one felt intimidated – we were all learning as we went along.”
274

For Hicks, rural Mexico was a place where craft experimentation was natural, a place where
“everyone’s manual.” In fact, in characterizing Mexico, especially Taxco, as a haven of manual
(and thus handicraft) labor, Hicks followed in the footsteps of several Americans that had
preceded her there. As scholars such as A. Joan Saab and Rick A. López have established, by the
time of Hicks’s arrival, Taxco was already well-established as an outgrowth of a distinctly
Mexican modernist community that in turn attracted an emergent network of global modernists
largely thanks to the craft entrepreneurship of the silverwork designer William Spratling

273
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
274
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.

157
beginning in the 1930s.
275
Along with several influential others (including Luis Barragán),
Spratling was in fact recruited to Taxco, Guerrero as part of a historical preservation scheme
enacted following the passage of a law designed by Manuel Gamio and sociologist Lucio
Mendieta y Núñez. Known as the “Amigos de Taxco,” the group administered a preservationist
building code, to “monitor all architectural alternations or restoration, and call for burial of all
telephone and electrical lines,” and eliminate, “vending booths, kiosks, and anything that
‘violated the aesthetic.’”
276
Empowered to halt the arrival of urbanizing as well as touristic
infrastructures (especially however they might materialize visually), the Amigos worked to
preserve Taxco as they found it, as an ideal picturesque.
Having become Spain’s primary source for silver following Cortez’s defeat of the Aztecs
in 1521, Taxco’s silver mine had fallen largely dormant by the early twentieth century. Arriving
in Taxco, with funds garnered from brokering a Rivera mural for Dwight Morrow, US
Ambassador to Mexico, Spratling opened a workshop that revived silver work in Taxco by
employing locals in the production of jewelry and decorative objects.
277
Wares carrying
Spratling’s name were produced by local Mexican laborers trained by a master craftsman
brought in expressly for this task. Well known for his designs, sold throughout the United States
at major department stores like Bonwit Teller, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue,
Spratling’s success as a craft entrepreneur in Mexico would have also been available to Hicks by
way of his memoir, Little Mexico, 1932. Seduced by Spratling’s flattering descriptions of the
town in Little Mexico, tourists flocked to Taxco to witness the workshop and buy its products.

275
A. Joan Saab, "Modernist Networks: Taxco, 1931," Modernism/modernity 18, no. 2 (2011): 289-307.
276
Rick A. López, “Foreign-Mexican Collaboration 1920-1940,” Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the
State After Revolution (Duke University Press, 2010), 109.
277
Susan Danly, Casa Mañana: The Morrow Collection of Mexican Popular Arts (Mead Art Museum, Amherst
College/University of New Mexico Press, 2002).

158
Spratling befriended titans including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the illustrator Miguel
Covarrubias (whose Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, 1946 and The Eagle, the
Jaguar, and the Serpent—Indian Art of the Americas, 1957 would become standards on Hicks’s
bookshelf
278
), and brought visitors like the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and the muralist
David Alfaro Siqueiros to the small town, all driving along a brand new highway built explicitly
to encourage easy travel for international tourists beyond Mexico City. By the 1950s, Spratling’s
role as a broker and beneficiary of Mexican cultural heritage had expanded to include work as a
dealer in antiquities, including several sold to Nelson Rockefeller to be exhibited in his Museum
of Primitive Art in New York City, across the street from MoMA, and later accessioned into the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Spratling’s marketing and craft manufacturing scheme capitalized upon period sentiments
at the intersection of craft and tourism espoused by best-selling books like Made in Mexico by
the US novelist Susan Smith, who declared, “in Mexico art isn’t something that is kept in
museums and spoken of only by critics. It is part of everyday life…Mexicans make beautiful
things as a matter of course. They don’t know how to make anything ugly.”
279
These
publications were proceeded by the advocacy of Katherine Anne Porter, who stewarded the first
United States exhibition of traveling Mexican “popular” (also known as folk) art in 1922 and
Frances Toor, who published the serial magazine Mexican Folkways from 1925 to 1937.
280
Other
period publications indicative of American enthusiasm for its southern neighbor and the
imagination through which a counterpoint between the two was set included Anita Brenner’s

278
Sheila Hicks, Oral History, February 2004.
279
Susan Smith, Made in Mexico, New York: Knopf, 1930, Introduction; as quoted in A. Joan Saab, “Modernist
Networks: Taxco 1931.”
280
Rick A. López, “Foreign-Mexican Collaboration 1920-1940,” Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the
State After Revolution (Duke University Press, 2010), 95-106.

159
Idols Behind Altars, 1929 and Stuart Chase’s Mexico: A Study of Two Americas, 1931.
281
Writers
like Smith valued Mexico (in contrast to the United States) as an aesthetic, modernist utopia
where beauty was automatic, a land where art and life were one. Informed as much by pre-
conquest designs as Bauhaus silhouettes, Spratling’s silver and the workshop model that he
crafted closely anticipated the logic of Hicks’s own workshops established roughly thirty years
later, where Josef Albers’s Bauhaus color and material theories would inform weavings made
with the assistance of local Mexican weavers.
As flattering as Spratling and Smith’s descriptions of Mexico may have intended to be,
they also imagine an impossibly perfect place, suggesting a psychological wish held by many
midcentury American makers and consumers to escape. Mexico was constructed as a place apart
from the disappointments of the United States and its mass-produced, excessively capitalist,
consumer culture, especially as materialized by the comparatively dour or excessively
standardized character of its contemporary art and design—a backdrop that would only mount by
Hicks’s arrival circa 1960. As Mary Panzer contends, an interdisciplinary field of “historians of
American art, literature, and culture, anthropologists, archaeologists, artists, writers, and popular
intellectuals all sought to identify and nurture a distinctive modern New World—civilization
independent of both an exhausted Europe and a philistine commercial tradition at home.”
282

Compared to the United States, midcentury Mexico was a haven for Leftists still yearning for the
Bohemian union of progressive art and politics. Though still operating according to its own
postcolonial hierarchies, for artists like Elizabeth Catlett and Isamu Noguchi, Mexico was found
to be notably less racist and biased against artists of color. At least as the subject of projection,

281
Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mullins, Mexico Modern: Art, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange (Museum of the
City of New York and Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin/Hirmer Verlag, 2017).
282
Mary Panzer, “The American Love Affair with Mexico, 1920-1970,” Archives of American Art Journal 49, No.
¾ (Fall 2010), 15.

160
Mexico reconciled otherwise apparently diametrically opposed investments. Most relevant for
Hicks, it configured advanced modern art as naturally aligned with Indigenous tradition.
283
As
intellectuals like Stuart Chase proposed, it uniquely preserved “native handicrafts,” in concert
with “the frescoes of Rivera and Orozco…and above all the way of life in the free
villages…functioning much as it did in the middle ages.”
284
Mexico offered a land apparently in
defiance of linear time, embracing the good parts of modernity and avoiding the less desirable
symptoms of its progress.
Anticipating Hicks’s investment in weaving and fiber, other Americans like Elizabeth
Anderson (wife of writer Sherwood) moved into Spratling’s house and began teaching the local
women how to embroider, supposedly according to their “native fashion.”
285
In 1939, San
Francisco transplant Margot Van Voorhies established Los Castillo Taller with her husband, and
marketed her successful silver and enamel jewelry under the inventively sing-song moniker of
“Margot de Taxco.” These arrangements were repeatedly shaped by neo-colonial hierarchies,
with Spratling and Anderson occupying the problematic role of the white, well-connected
entrepreneur, ironically imagined here as an outsider who imparts “native,” insider skills to
empower locals otherwise cast as either unskilled or underemployed. These hierarchies, and the
dissolution of collective labor into the authorship of a single name that they often entailed, would
characterize Hicks’s work as well. These are aesthetic, but also clearly capitalist configurations.
On the one hand, a valuable market (where otherwise previously none existed) and the means of
production to satisfy it are fostered by figures like Spratling, Anderson, and Hicks. At the same
time, their products depend upon otherwise anonymous (though compensated) labor. These

283
Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips, Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Duke University
Press, 2018).
284
Stuart Chase, as quoted in Panzer, “The American Love Affair with Mexico, 1920-1970.”
285
Saab, 295.

161
moments of craft capitalism are potentially more just according to the logic of economic
capitalism than aesthetic authorship, as only a fraction of the makers involved (privileged, white,
and internationally mobile employers) are ultimately credited as the authors of these collective
workshop productions.
Mexico’s reputation as a haven for American artists seeking escape from commodity
culture would continue into the postwar period, including attracting leaders like the Alberses
who in turn encouraged their students to venture south. They, like Spratling and Anderson before
them, would revel in what they “discovered” in Mexico, potentially identifying a technique that
would define the entirety of their subsequent career, as was the case for Ruth Asawa. While
visiting the Alberses in Guerrero, Mexico, Asawa observed basket weavers who inspired her
own iconic works in wire.
286
Below ads for the Hans Hofmann school in ArtNews, students were
offered bilingual education at the Guadalajara Summer School (sponsored by Stanford) and,
maybe no surprise, at the Taxco School of Art, which promised, “year round study in quaint
surroundings and delightful climate.”
287
Clearly, by the time Hicks set up shop in 1960, not only
Mexico, but Taxco in particular was well-known throughout the art world, not only for its craft
commodities but also for skillful marketing of the place itself.
Weaving Mestizo Identities
“We made our own electricity on the ranch, so the diesel engine would be cut at 10:00
every night,” Hicks has recalled, suggesting a homesteader’s life that may in part recall her
Nebraskan origins but sounds even more dramatically off the proverbial grid. Moving not only to
Mexico, itself a developing nation, but particularly to the rural ranch allowed Hicks’s to affect a

286
Fran Bigman, “Wired,” January 15, 2021, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/everything-she-touched-marilyn-
chase-review-fran-bigman/.
287
Louis Finkelstein, “New look: Abstract-Impressionism,” ArtNews, March 1956, 67.

162
provincial persona while still cultivating connections back in the cities like New York and
Chicago. Like many others who have retreated to the country, Hicks found she “had time to do
things that you don’t have time for in the city.”
288
If the United States was hopelessly urban and
modern, Mexico offered, at least in Hicks’s imagination, a more primary and original cultural
experience, a way to “[dig] back into indigenous cultures…I thought I could learn from practical
experience, in an unfamiliar rural culture away from the theories of the schools and the
roughness of cities. That notion still persists.”
289
Hicks identified Taxco as home to, “the
indigenous population,” suggesting that by living there rather than in the city, she too was closer
to an Indigenous lifestyle.
As discussed in the introduction, Hicks could claim partial Native American ancestry,
and thus a mixed racial identity. And yet, in Mexico she was far afield from the usual territory of
her Cherokee ancestors, as well as the German, Dutch, and English settlers or immigrants from
which she also descended. As a distinctly configured colonial culture administered by the
Spanish Empire, Mexico had long been home to a distinct understanding of race, especially
mixed identities like Hicks’s. Mixed figures, real and mythic, also became central to narratives
reiterated in the emergence of modern Mexico, a national construction distinct from the colonial
identity of New Spain. As Joshua Lund contends, postcolonial Mexican, “intellectuals,
statesmen, and poets rallied around the figure of the mestizo—understood as an individual of
mixed-heritage, usually assumed to be of European and Indigenous American ancestry—as the
symbolic protagonist of a new project of state formation.”
290
During the cultural efflorescence in

288
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
289
Diamonstein-Spielvogel, Handmade in America, 97.
290
Joshua Lund, The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), ix.

163
the arts in the 1920s in the wake of the Mexican revolution artists embraced mestizo figures as
allegorical icons of the new national sensibility.
A particular embodiment of this valorization was the image of La Malinche, a
multilingual Aztec woman, enslaved and then conscripted into service as an interpreter and guide
for Hernán Cortés. While La Malinche has at times been understood as a traitor, in other
moments, as in the wake of the revolution, she was recalled as the mother of modern Mexico (an
allegory that draws upon her real motherhood of Martín Cortés) to serve a country seeking to
celebrate its history of ethnic mixing and modern racial diversity. Painters like Alfredo Ramos
Martínez mobilized both the historically real and culturally mythic into images like La Malinche
(Young Girl of Yalala, Oaxaca), 1940 a temporal and cultural palimpsest condensed into one
face. Ramos Martinez’s image casts a modern Oaxacan woman as the early modern La
Malinche, and, in a monumental, stylized guise evocative of an Olmec head, (some of the earliest
artworks of Mexico) overlaid all at once—as if all three are historically and geographically
commensurate. As such images allegorize, the mestizo condensed a compromise of politics,
identities, and histories, neither purely an heir to the societies of preconquest Mexico, nor the
more recently ousted European colonial powers. Mixed as she was, Hicks entered a modern,
mestizo Mexico.
Beside the celebration of the mestizo, enthusiasm for “indigenismo,” a political trend that
denounced the abuse of Indigenous populations and often expressed this belief through
appreciative depiction of these populations in art, had informed modern art and culture in
Mexico for decades, informing the work and subject matter of major figures like Diego Rivera
and Frida Kahlo.
291
As Mexico solidified its modern, post-revolutionary and postcolonial

291
Greet, Michelle, “Indigenism,” in Grove Art Online.

164
identity, urban intellectuals, politicians, and artists (themselves often of mixed descent)
celebrated Indigenous identity as a uniquely Mexican, anti-colonial touchstone.
292
The embrace
of Indigenism led to the Mexican government’s adoption of it as a nationalist platform and
rhetoric.
293
Political powers beyond Mexico also encouraged hemispheric solidarity and
collaboration during the Cold War made manifest in international exhibitions and exchanges of
art.
294
Discouraged by this official embrace, by the early 1960s Indigenism had not only become
historic but had also shifted from a progressive position articulated by the muralist avant-garde to
a potentially compromised cause co-opted to serve a nationalist agenda.
295

In two photographs from 1960, we see Hicks working with a back-strap loom [see Fig. 1
and 2]. Both pictures appeared as part of her exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1963,
and one was reproduced in the Chicago Tribune magazine that year. They have since been
reproduced in many of the catalogues for Hicks’s subsequent exhibitions and mass media
coverage of her, becoming as familiar and essential to an understanding of her work as the
weavings these images accompany. To cite an especially recent example, the same photograph of
Hicks seated, weaving, that appeared more than fifty years earlier in the Tribune, accompanied a

292
Tace Hedrick, Mestizo Modernism: Race, Nation, and Identity in Latin American Culture, 1900-1940 (Rutgers
University Press, 2003).
293
Lopez, Crafting Mexico, 125; David A. Brading, "Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo in Mexico," Bulletin of
Latin American Research 7, no. 1 (1988): 75-89; Claudio Lomnitz, “Bordering on Anthropology: Dialectics of a National
Tradition in Mexico,” Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making, Benoit de L’Estoile, Federico
Neiburg, and Lydia Sigaud, edit. (Durham, Duke University Press, 2005), 167-196.
294
Luis M. Castañeda, “Archaeologies of Power: Assembling the Museo Nacional de Antropología,” Spectacular
Mexico: Design, Propaganda, and the 1968 Olympics (University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Nancy Lutkehaus,
“Rene d'Harnoncourt, 20th Century Cultural Broker: Bridging Art and Anthropology Through the Display of
Indigenous Art," in Regarding the Unknown: Encounters of Art History and Anthropology from 1870 to 1970, Peter
Probst and Joseph Imorde, eds. (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, In Press).
295
“By indigenismo, I am referring to the ways in which non-Indians have sought to represent indigenous peoples in
political processes as well as in literature, visual arts and the social sciences in Mexico. As numerous critics have
made clear, indigenismo is not indigenous expression but rather, expression in the name of indigenous communities
and individuals. In the most general terms, indigenismo inhibits or detracts from indigenous self-representation in
both a political sense as well as an aesthetic or symbolic sense,” in Analisa Taylor, “The Ends of Indigenismo in
Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 14:1 (2005), 75-86; Néstor García Canclini (Lidia Lozano,
trans.), Transforming Mexico: Popular Culture in Mexico (University of Texas Press, 1993).

165
Wall Street Journal Magazine feature on her in August 2019.
296

In both, Hicks works beside others engaged in similar handiwork. In one, a woman sits
beside her, possibly spinning fiber into thread or engaged in some other hand work small enough
to fit in her lap. They both sit humbly on the dirt ground, Hicks apparently perched on a stone
with her legs tidily crossed. She wears a casual shirt dress, a modern look distinct from her
companion’s more embellished blouse. Apparently taken from a standing position, the
photograph shows the linear patterning of Hicks’s weaving crisply, its interlacing mimicked by
the leather strands that weave together to make the sandals she wears. Recalling Smith’s
evocations in Made in Mexico, the picture does not show Hicks alone, at work in a precious,
especially consecrated studio for art. Rather she is captured by the camera as part of a
community of craftspeople, working, the photograph argues, much akin to the woman at her
right. Here, Hicks’s weaving is not necessarily recognizable as a special aesthetic object, not any
more than the work of the woman beside her or even the aesthetic achievement of the fabric that
makes up her dress, the craft that braids her sandals, or the finesse that wrapped her hair up into a
neat bun.
297

The weaving Hicks attends to is just one example in the photograph of how one might
turn disordered, raw material, into an orchestration of matter—just as the sandals, the hair, the
dress, even the informal mass of the dirt and earth that surrounds them are too. The composition
even offers a basket of unwoven string as if to make this theme of material processing clearer
still. If we did not know better, we might imagine that Hicks and her partner are weaving
clothing for the three children in the background, the youngest held back by an elder as if to keep

296
Alice Cavanaugh, “Inside Textile Artist Sheila Hicks’s Paris Studio,” Wall Street Journal Magazine, Aug. 15,
2019.
297
Hicks has drawn the comparison of ‘coiffure’ toward other works herself, I pick up the reference to women’s hair
styles in the following chapter.

166
him from disturbing both the women’s labor and the making of the picture. Their weaving exists
as part of a real world, and in that a rural space apparently far away from the urban, differently
modern world. Appearing as they did in a newspaper magazine, and as black-and-white images
in her associated show at the Art Institute of Chicago, these photographs testified to this origin
story for viewers otherwise unable to witness it in person. Though Hicks would find her way to
Mexico City, New York City, Chicago, and Paris during her time in Mexico, the photograph
wants us to see and imagine Hicks located here, in Taxco among these working-class people, to
authenticate as it were the work that circulated elsewhere with this specific intersection of
processes and identities.
A second picture shows Hicks before a man dressed all in white, with a hat to match that
evokes his rural rather than metropolitan identity. [see Fig. 2] He works at a loom much like
Hicks’s, larger now and anchored visibly to a tree, as we are led to assume Hicks’s larger loom is
too. They stand now, using their bodies to adjust the tension of the warp threads. Connecting the
working humans to these stately trees, the weaving becomes a conduit, a technological interface
that connects their bodies to the natural world. The back-strap technique dramatizes weaving’s
incorporation of the human body into its becoming, making it into a kind of performance for the
camera. We see Hicks connected, literally strapped into her work by another textile band that
runs behind her lower back, a level of visceral and material connection that painting, for
example, with a brush and canvas could not match.
Both Hicks and the man at her side mimic the posture and occupation described by
ancient sculptures like Weaver with a Back-Strap Loom and Birds, A.D. 600-900 [Fig. 3], a
Mayan ceramic sculpture of a woman similarly at work. The tall, elaborate hairstyle and
pronounced jewelry that adorn the body of the ceramic weaver not only prefigure Hicks’s own

167
modern elegance, but also posit weaving textiles as an occupation of high status and glamour for
the ancient Maya. The back strap loom was also employed by the Aztecs, as illustrated in the
Codex Mendoza.
298
Balanced against these Indigenous depictions, Hicks and her companion, at
least at the level of process and posture, inherit and adapt the legacy of native weavers like the
Maya and Aztec, performing the task anew for twentieth-century spectators.
299

In photographs like Learning to Knot with Rufino Reyes, Mitla, Oaxaca, México, 1961
(by Faith Stern) we see, as the title suggests, Hicks working with Reyes at center. [See Figure 4]
Reyes was one of several local craftsmen from which Hicks learned. Again, they are surrounded
by others at work, children carding fiber in preparation for spinning at left and an adult man and
woman at right interlacing a multitude of yarn into woven planes weighted down by rocks. They
are backgrounded by a structure of reeds or thin twigs with raw tree trunks creating a wall with
mud filling its gaps toward the roofline, likely part of the exterior of a traditional Mayan hut. The
whole scene presents Hicks as meaningfully embedded in a sophisticated, alternatively modern
scene predicated on the continuation of Indigenous craft and building traditions distinct from
colonial or European precedents.
300

The photographs also echo period images to be found in mainstream publications like
Life and National Geographic, which taken together trace a genre of weaving portraits. As early
as 1919, photo editorials like “Weavers of the World” established the act of spinning and
weaving we see Hicks performing as a global, universal act to be found all over the world in

298
“Codex Mendoza (1592),” The Public Domain Review, https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/codex-
mendoza-1542, accessed April 10, 2021.
299
While acknowledging the continuities at play, Elizabeth M. Brumfiel has also argued for the importance of
acknowledging the differences defined by distinctions of culture and history. See Brumfiel, "Cloth, Gender,
Continuity, and Change: Fabricating Unity in Anthropology." American Anthropologist 108, no. 4 (12, 2006): 862-
877.
300
The façade especially anticipates the architectural themes I will focus upon in greater detail in the following
chapter.

168
various local permutations, from Norway to Egypt, Korea, the South Pacific, and “Sunny
Mexico” too. In Norway, people retain “medieval” style of dress. In Portugal, “the spindal and
distaff are still employed,” (emphasis mine) according to “primitive method.”
This watch-word of modernist aesthetics also describes “a primitive loom” captured in
Weaving the Multi-hued Navajo Blanket: Southwest United States. In several images, some
version of back-strap technology physically connects weaver to weaving as it did for Hicks. The
closest formal echoes of technology and posture are offered by “A Weaver of Santa Cruz, La
Perouse Islands, South Pacific Ocean” (picturing a man “of cannibalistic forbears”) and,
“Outdoor Weaving in Sunny Mexico,” [See Fig. 5 and 6] where we are told that, “Like
everything else in Mexico, textiles range in quality from the crudest to the best. In the North the
peons weave coarse net work [sic] and lace of twine, but in the South they produce beautiful
fabrics of intricate designs and wonderful texture.”
301
The diction of National Geographic posits
weaving and fiber work’s universality but also a paradoxical fascination with its persistence,
“still,” “primitive,” despite the apparent modernity of the twentieth century.
302

The advent of color photography and the use of a smaller Leica camera adopted by the
National Geographic photographer allowed the camera to communicate the vibrantly saturated
hues of more midcentury weaving and the harmonizing clothing of its weavers. Later
photographs circulated closer to Hicks’s emergence, such as Luis Marden’s A Chichicastenango
Weaver…, 1947 (taken in Guatemala) [See Fig. 8] reiterate the full body motif of the earlier
images, capturing the full human form of the weaver and most of her work, suspended tautly
between her torso and a point of suspension beyond the upper left corner of the photographic

301
“Weavers of the World,” National Geographic Magazine, August 1919, I-VIII.
302
This is a recurring and common trope of modernism across its long arc and multiple manifestations, where
various antimodern positions emerge in tandem with modernity and its definition. See T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place
of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

169
crop.
303
Shot from above, the richly colored photograph takes a dramatic angle that fills the
frame, and surveys the work from above, giving the viewer a clear view of the design’s pattern
and its echo in the weaver’s own garment. As Hicks’s incorporation of the backstrap loom posits
in her photographs, such continuities argue for weaving and weaver—artist and aesthetic
object—as synthetically connected and formally in tandem.
Closer to Hicks’s intersection with weaving, as part of a multipart series on “The Epic of
Man,” Life magazine presented “Neolithic Folk Today” in 1956, an article with a paradoxical
headline and stunning photo series, all dedicated to Berber “tribesmen” living in a “lost valley”
of the Atlas Mountains beside the Sahara, “an oasis of Neolithic culture which has persisted,
virtually untouched by time and change for more than 5,000 years.” Contradicting (at the very
least) the mid twentieth-century date of its own publication, the article posits the Berber nomads
as evidence of a Neolithic people that have escaped time and history, developmentally arrested
and “untouched.” In its first few sentences, it defines them according to evidence of agrarian
skill, and, more importantly, craft: “Like their prototypes of ancient Mesopotamia they are
‘herders of sheep’ and ‘tillers of the soil.’ They spin, they weave, they make pottery.”
304
The
photos show us a woman “Spinning Wool by ancient Neolithic methods” and the dramatic
composition of “Weaving a Burnoose…at a loom, an invention of ancient Neolithic times” [See
Fig. 7]. In this composition, the camera looks from one side of the skeletal warp threads toward
two weaving women, its flash apparently the only source of illumination in an otherwise cave-
dark space. Despite their clear contemporaneity with the twentieth century reader and
photographer, these people, and the craft work they do, is framed as a living performance of the

303
Luis Marden, “Guatemala Revisted,” National Geographic, October 1947, p. 534.
304
“Neolithic Folk Today,” Life, April 16, 1956.

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deep prehistoric past, alive, ongoing alongside modern time and technology.
305
As such, staged
in images such as this, weaving becomes an interface between cultures, distant times, and
technologies indicative of our ability to represent such historical and cultural distinctions too,
between the flat planes organized distinctly by the film camera and the woven surface.
Though men are pictured weaving at times, in the editorials mentioned, photographs tend
to picture women, re-inscribing Euro-American definitions of weaving, or the mechanized
sewing and mending more usual for the everyday middle-class home in the United States by the
twentieth century, as women’s work. Here, National Geographic’s reporting on the Berber’s
gendered division of labor, reinforces the stereotypes shaping the lives of its potential readers in
the suburbs or Illinois or Delaware: “Berber women are never idle. Their lives of toil begin at the
age of 8 or 9, as soon as they are strong enough to carry brush. Although the French have tried to
curb child labor, neither the children nor their mothers complain; and the men, who are endowed
with liberal quantities of that Neolithic asset, leisure, automatically oppose all change.”
306

In A Chakma’s Featherweight Loom Travels with Her, 1955 [See Fig. 9] we travel to
East Bengal (then newly defined as East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) and witness weaving’s
attractive mobility especially in its back strap format. “Only a few pounds,” it may, “be
lashed…even to trees when the operator is in the jungle.”
307
A watchful companion seated
behind the woven plane (again diagonally traversing the photograph’s composition) calmly eyes
the intersection between skilled hands and woven plane, guiding the magazine viewer’s own
gaze and curiosity. As one viewer becomes three in Ignoring passers-by, 1961, [See Fig. 10]

305
Photographs that similarly juxtaposed the picture plane of the camera with that of the strung loom had also
emerged from the German Bauhaus, as in Hajo Rose, Michiko Yamawaki weaving, 1932 or T. Lux Feininger,
Weaving class at the loom, 1928. Thanks to Amy Ogata for suggesting the latter as a point of comparison.
306
Neolithic Folk Today,” Life, April 16, 1956.
307
Franc Shor and Jean Shor, “East Pakistan Drives Back the Jungle: A Land of Elephant Roundups, Bengal Tigers,
and a Bamboo Economy Takes Big Strides Toward Becoming a Modern Nation,” National Geographic, May 1955,
p. 406.

171
these photographs position weaving as a spectator sport, captivating to immediately local and
far-removed global audience alike.
308

The work of explanation, accounting for process, producer, and origin, that these
photographs do evidences the didactic tack of an anthropologically minded photographer, the
anticipation of a context like National Geographic, or display in an anthropological museum
rather than an art museum—interested as much if not more so in the cultural context, the living
humans, that generate or crafted the object in question as the object itself.
309
In this, the images
of Hicks at work harken back to the institutional frame of her first professional (non-academic)
exhibition, Sheila Hicks, Tejidos, 1958 a show, as the title suggests, exclusively of weaving
curated by Greta Mosney, an anthropologist and director of the National Museum of Natural
History in Santiago, Chile.
310

Accompanying Hicks’s weaving as they did, in newspapers, catalogues, and displayed in
the space of the gallery as they were in Textiles by Sheila Hicks (an English reiteration of
roughly the same title employed in Chile), November 1963-January 1964, at the Art Institute of
Chicago, the photographs betray a belief that the weaving itself was in some way was not enough
on its own, not able to locate or explain itself one way or another without the evidentiary
testimonial of photography. Credited either to Hicks, Faith Stern-Levine, Marc Riboud, or H.
Bruning,
311
in the instance of the Chicago exhibition these images were organized and
administered by Hicks, offered by her to the press and the museum, and described as, “medium
size photo murals of the workshop and the pre-incaic [sic] techniques employed.”
312
As such,

308
Frank and Helen Schreider, “Indonesia, the Young and Troubled Island Nation.” National Geographic, May
1961, p. 614.
309
Pinney, Photography and Anthropology.
310
I address this exhibition further in Chapter 2.
311
Exhibition checklist, Textiles by Sheila Hicks, (Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Textiles collection files).
312
Letter from Sheila Hicks to Miss V. Shiedenmantel and Mr. Allan Wardwell, Art Institute of Chicago, September
28, 1963, Art Institute of Chicago collection records.

172
they promised to document site, process, and pre-Incan technique alive in the twentieth century,
more than 500 years after the fall of Cuzco to Francisco Pizarro in 1533. When exhibited, the
photos’ medium size made them roughly the same size as many of the actual woven and fiber
works exhibited, thus occupying an equal amount of rhetorical and visual weight in the
exhibition overall. Installed, they were hung without mount, both framed and unframed, attached
directly to the wall. As recorded in photographs, the documentary photographs also joined the
fiber objects in the museum’s vitrines, as well as escaped them, hung more autonomously and
freely on surrounding walls.
313
As captured in photographs of the Chicago exhibition [Fig. 11],
we see Hicks’s sculptures, like Tenancingo, 1960 encased behind glass according to the same
period grammars that contained anthropological and natural science specimens. Before
Tenancingo are two rectangular weavings laid out flat, arranged parallel to several spindles and
similar tools (referred to as “utensils” in the retained checklist) that again attest by proxy to the
implements, mechanics and process enlisted to create such works.
If this presentation seems obvious or natural, consider how defiant of usual modernist art
display conceits it would have been to present contemporary paintings or especially sculptures
behind glass, accompanied by photographs of the artist who made them at work, with the paint
tubes, brushes, chisels, saws, glue, or welding torches variably used to create them placed at their
feet. Presented as such, even as they entered museums like the Art Institute of Chicago, Hicks’s
objects suggested the grammar and recourse to origin and process—stories more usual
(especially at this moment) for museums of anthropology rather than institutions of art.
To a degree, this presentation underscored the confused role such fiber works played
even in the context of an art museum. Indeed, according to internal curatorial documents,

313
Art Institute of Chicago, Textiles department archives.

173
Hicks’s exhibition was part of an intended series dedicated to foregrounding contemporary craft,
led by a curator of Decorative Arts, who was also, tellingly, a curator of “primitive art.”
314

“Craft” offered a kind of accord especially between the different value systems at play in a
twentieth century encyclopedic museum. Craft was more modern, humane, and populist than the
collections of British and French luxury antiques more appropriately associated with the phrase
“Decorative Arts,” predicated on old world, Ancien Régime, European logics of Arts décoratifs.
In Hicks’s “experimental workshop,” craft was also a bridge between the futuristic thrust of
modernist culture (including the potentially dematerialized design discussed in my first chapter),
and the handmade, object-based collections typical of any collecting museum. In an
encyclopedic museum context, the exhibition also suggested the possible reconciliation of
otherwise separate collecting areas, from the union of Decorative and Fine Arts (such as
painting), to the blurring of Western and Extra-Western cultural archives. Hicks’s work
particularly, and the connection it forged between Indigenous and colonial American cultures
created a bridge between modern and “primitive” art, beginning the work of dissolving this
problematic, reductive category and underscoring the modernity of Indigenous cultural forces
alive in the 1960s Americas.
The anthropological and performative discursive frame would also accompany
contemporary fiber art’s emergence as a shared investment, as exemplified by Woven Forms at
the Museum of Contemporary Craft, New York also in 1963. Describing the influence of, “the
textile tradition of ancient Peru, which has been the subject of intensive study in recent years” on

314
“Re: Craftsmen’s exhibitions…As you requested, I will prepare a list of craftsmen with whom we have had
contacts about future exhibitions…we should continue the series of individual shows until such time as we can make
a positive announcement of a general biennial crafts show.” Mention of Hicks’s offer of an exhibition is mentioned
at the conclusion of this memo, from Vivian Schiedemantel, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts to John Maxon,
VP for Collection and Exhibitions, April 10, 1963; Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Textiles archives. Allen
Wardwell, curator of decorative arts and primitive art is mentioned by Nina Stritzler Levine, “A Design Identity,”
Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor, 359.

174
the artists exhibited (Alice Adams, Lenore Tawney, Dorian Zachai, Claire Zeisler, and Hicks),
the group’s collective investment in Indigenous weaving techniques and their history was
foregrounded in the exhibition’s small catalogue.
315
The publication was illustrated with as many
pictures of artists as artworks, as it made a point to feature portraits of all five artists, in several
instances (as with Hicks) pictured at work or otherwise generally contextualized by their studios
and often framed by some element of their artworks beside, before, or behind them. In this way,
the catalogue demonstrates an interest in process as much as product, and in particular in the
specific human subjects enacting the process in question. Drawing from the melodramatic and
theatrical staging techniques popular and contemporaneously deployed in anthropology
museums, particularly in the lighting of monumental stone reliefs and other carved forms (such
as at the American Museum of Natural History), at least half of the exhibition’s galleries were
generally cloaked in darkness punctuated by spotlights trained directly upon the sculptures to
throw their textures into high relief.
316
Elsewhere, can lights placed upon the floor created
otherwise improbable and equally dramatic upward shadows, emulating the drama and
directionality of light from a fire. Exclusively comprised of women, the exhibition also launched
the emergent discourse of fiber art as a movement primarily identified with women artists,
implicitly gendering the new discourse’s objects as female.
Describing the most famous works of French painter Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur
l’herbe, 1962-3 and Olympia, 1963, French philosopher Michel Foucault memorably called them
the first “museum” paintings, “the first paintings in European art that were less a response to the
achievement of Giorgione, Raphael, and Velázquez than an acknowledgement…of the new and

315
Paul J. Smith, Woven Forms (Museum of Contemporary Crafts, 1963).
316
Museum of Contemporary Crafts/American Craft Museum Archives, American Craft Council Library,
Minneapolis, MN.

175
substantial relationship of painting to itself, as a manifestation of the existence of museums and
the particular reality and interdependence that paintings acquire in museums.”
317
A hundred
years after Manet, Hicks’s works show how this self-consciousness had extended well beyond
the Eurocentric, medium specific tradition detected by Foucault.
“They erect their art within the archive,” writes Foucault of Manet and Flaubert. Hicks
erected her art not for the established art museum and its descendants as imagined by Foucault,
those that privilege a history of European painting above all else. Instead of paintings that
anticipate and draw upon the company of other paintings as Foucault imagined, Hicks’s
weavings operate in excess of this comparatively limited, Eurocentric episteme, anticipating a
much greater field of museological discourse and collections. Her work exceeds the company of
Western painting to converse with the often inferiorly positioned decorative arts or handicraft
collections potentially contained in the same American or European art museum Foucault
describes. It also meaningfully connected these collections, already confused and disrupted by
new logics of industrial, craft, and modernist manufacture, with collections of Indigenous and
extra-Western art and material cultures, often either separated or sidelined within Western art
museums or presented completely elsewhere, in museums of anthropology, natural history, or
ethnography, according to alternative disciplinary scripts. Witnessing Hicks’s objects, the same
objects, simultaneously welcomed into three distinct museums underscores the real permeability
that existed between the apparently objective differences claimed by both the totalizing (from the
“Craft” and “Contemporary” of the Museum of Contemporary Craft to the “Modern” of MoMA
and the “Art” of both it and the Art Institute of Chicago) and departmental or sub-categories
(from “Painting and Sculpture” and “Architecture and Design” at MoMA to “Decorative Arts”

317
Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard
and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 92-3.

176
and “Primitive Art” at the Art Institute of Chicago). Revisiting these historical episodes, we see
that what museum discourse and interpretation defined as incommensurable and categorically
distinct was in fact commensurable, a spectacle of difference in fact repressed the possibility of
cultural continuity.
By documenting and testifying to the singularity of one artist’s procedure, Hicks’s
photographs of the workshop anticipate the performative images that would circulate to promote
the idea of sculpture as action about ten years later, like Richard Serra throwing lead, Castelli
Warehouse, New York, 1969, which too have an anthropological, documentary curiosity to them
[See Fig. 12]. To theorize performances conceived but not performed by a credited artist, Claire
Bishop has coined the phrase “delegated performance.”
318
We see how elaborate Hicks’s
performances for the camera would become in images like Hicks in the Weaving Workshop,
Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico, 1961 [Fig. 16]. She stands left of the photograph’s center and at the
heart of the intense activity it documents. She is elaborately surrounded by at least three
monumental looms that appear to fill the room, barely leaving room for her and four other
artisans, two men and two women. While the two women wear European-style dresses with high
visible waistlines atop loosely pleated skirts, Hicks wears a huipil, a garment named for the
Nahuatl word for blouse and common from at least Spanish contact onward, especially among
Zapotec women in Southern Mexico. Like her choice of craft media sited in rural Mexico,
Hicks’s choice of garment styles her as aligned with the traditional, local, and Indigenous as
opposed to more modern or mass-manufactured styles—an alignment she may have drawn in
part from the example of prior Mexican modernists like Frida Kahlo.
319

318
Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October 140, (2012), 91 (91-112).
319
Rebecca Block and Lynda Hoffman-Jeep, “Fashioning National Identity: Frida Kahlo in ‘Gringolandia,’
Woman’s Art Journal 19, No. 2 (Autumn 1998-Winter 1999), 8-12.

177
Thinking of these images as documentation of a kind of performance distinctly indexed
by the woven objects and companion photographs, the artisans of Hicks’s first workshop accord
with Bishop’s logic of “delegated performance.” As Bishop’s definition reckons, this reading
also acknowledges them as part of a capitalist hierarchy, an executive/employee relationship. As
Bishop describes, delegated performance shifts the “valorized live presence and immediacy [of]
the artist’s own body,” to “the collective body of a social group.” Crucial for Hicks and those she
employed here and later, Bishop underscores as a rule that (unlike theater or cinema) artists hire
delegated performers, “to perform their own socioeconomic category, be this on the basis of
gender, class, ethnicity, age, disability, or (more rarely profession).”
320
Bishop’s framework
allows for an appraisal of Hicks and her collaborators as a complex intersection of identities, one
that preserves their respective differences rather than obscures them into a universally equal and
translatable exchange of labor value. It also encourages us to see how Hicks’s collaborators were
valuable and significant not only for the work they did but also for who they were, visualized via
photography, alluded to in textual descriptions, and abstracted into the alterity of craft and
handmaking affected by the finished weavings and fiber works that they produced for
exhibitions. The laborers in Hicks’s “experimental workshop” not only made valuable objects,
special because of their alterity as craft; they also made those same objects valuable because of
the identities they inhabited and the camera witnessed.
Activists in One Way or Another
In some images the scale of production appears “modest,” as Hicks would say and these
earliest weavings struggled to find a market in a typical New York gallery context.
321
That said,

320
Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October 140, (2012), 91.
321
“I wanted to show my weavings in a New York gallery. Well, that was a wake-up experience. I showed them to
Bertha Schaefer. She bought one made of short lengths of irregularly spun knotted wool [Rufino, 1961, 16 x 16

178
in photographs such as Hicks in the Weaving Workshop..., we see Hicks at the center of a more
elaborate investment of technology and human labor, a scaling up that encourages one to focus
more intently on otherwise unaddressed questions. How should we describe the relationship
between Hicks and her largely unnamed “collaborators”? Are they artists in their own right, or
employees, or maybe both? Even if they received a wage in keeping with a market standard, as
Hicks made use of their labor, their names went unknown, preserving her singular status as the
conceptual figurehead of their work product—a convention that either looks back to Renaissance
precedent or anticipates the kind of studio assistance typical of more contemporary art. Hicks has
either never publicly disclosed, or otherwise deflected and discouraged inquiries into the literal
logistics that helped her work come into being, both in this moment and later when things
became much more grand. Of this time in the early 1960s, she has speculated, “maybe it grew
from three to six or seven,” an estimation that prompted her interviewer, Monique Lévi-Strauss,
to remark, “That’s quite a lot.”
322
All things being relative, questions of scale are by definition
relational, predicated on physical (and conceptual) differences. Later on in the decade, Hicks
would work as a consultant and designer in collaboration with the largest handweaving factory in
the world, the Commonwealth Trust of Kerala, India—a scale that certainly puts anything in
perspective.
In 2019, in a public conversation at the Bass Museum in Miami, mega-collector Mira
Rubell pushed for more. She compared Hicks to peers like El Anatsui, (whose monumental metal
works have often been compared to tapestries), “whose practice deals with other people

inches], but that was it. ‘Thank you, it’s charming.’ I showed them to John Lefevre at his gallery…I had a hard time
getting them back and I decided I don’t think I’m going to be able to market my work through a gallery as a painter
or sculptor does. It was too modest in every way.” In Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-
March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
322
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.

179
essentially making his work, he engages the economics of a whole town and is very conscious of
the kind of support his work brings…Are you engaged in those economics?,” Rubell asked. “Are
you engaged with the actual working people that make the work and how that affords them a
living?” In response, Hicks, true to past precedent, avoided specific dollar and cents details,
stating:
SH: I answer my own phone in my studio…and every week I have
calls to help, engage in some kind of process or work that has
social implications—is that what you’re asking me?

MR: I was actually dealing with the economics—

SH: The economics are that people are trying to make their living
and working and making an honest living by using manual labor.
I’m often approached to try and engage with all these people who
have fantastic plans or schemes or foundations or funds…I never
was a tourist. That’s what caused me to go to South America,
India, Morocco, each time was on a job, a mission, on a challenge,
and it all had to do with economics. It had to do with people who
wanted to work and they wanted to work creatively and
productively, and they thought I was naïve enough to put my finger
in the dike.
323

Likening the potential power of developing economies predicated on manual craft labor
to the water imperfectly retained by Dutch flood walls, Hicks softly rejected Rubell’s implication
that El Anatsui has created a historically novel situation. She cast the question of “economics”
and “social implications” as a kind of assumed condition in her line of work, running so
completely through her work (but also any practice where real human labor is engaged) as to
become a banal feature. Engaging that labor, she implies, insured that she was never “a tourist.”
Rather, she suggests that she functioned like many artists across time charged with the industry
of a studio, but also like anyone tasked with a managerial “job,” any other person making use of

323
“Curator Culture: Sheila Hicks, Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee Live,” The Bass, April 14, 2019,
https://thebass.org/forms/curator-culture-live-2/.

180
collective human industry in any field.
A few minutes later, having ostensibly moved on to answering another question, Hicks
returned obliquely to her point, contrasting her historic sensibility to a more recent trend for
didactic provocation and activist art broadly conceived:
A lot of work today is confrontational, thought-provoking, needs to
be, causes us to stir our minds and activate us, used as a vehicle for
activism. I’m so engaged in giving energy and life reinforcing
messages but in my studio I take all the time apprentices who are
all activists in one way or another, from Brazil, Korea, Japan, and
we all have lunch together and they all refuse to eat what the others
are eating. Strange. Each one wants to eat their thing. Do you have
this problem?

Refusing to answer Rubell directly and meandering toward this anecdote as if it were a semi-
accidental, and yet still incidentally instructive parable, Hicks left the impression that in her
mind, to speak too intricately about wages and conditions would distract, and lead to an art too
confrontational and largely irrelevant to her purpose—evocative of an isolated, short-sighted
solipsism rather than a shared, universal experience.
This opposition, between art that offers an individualized, “activist” agenda rather than a
shared, universal message of “energy and life” may be a logical fallacy but it was real for Hicks
from the beginning and echoes a longstanding modernist party line. To a degree it echoes the
persistent modernist stigmatization of the market and its frank acknowledgment. It also posits a
similar taboo for activism, or activation, echoing a classical modernist antimony between the
freedom of the individual and prompts for collective action, from the revolutionary to the state-
sanctioned. Hicks’s utopian language recalls something like Henri Matisse’s well-known remark
that, “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or
depressing subject-matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as
well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something

181
like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”
324
Relatedly, in critiquing
the novels of her immediate literary predecessors, Virginia Woolf would write:
Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they leave one
with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In order to
complete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more
desperately, to write a cheque. That done, the restlessness is laid, the book
finished; it can be put upon the shelf, and need never be read again. But with the
work of other novelists it is different. Tristram Shandy or Pride and Prejudice is
complete in itself; it is self-contained; it leaves one with no desire to do anything,
except indeed to read the book again, and to understand it better. The difference
perhaps is that both Sterne and Jane Austen were interested in things in
themselves; in character in itself; in the book in itself. Therefore everything was
inside the book, nothing outside.
325

And yet, Woolf would go on to write fiercely political, activist works (though likely preserving
still a distinction between these and her novels), betraying the potential limitations of such an
idealistic, formalist, and self-contained idea of art. Assessing her career largely in hindsight
Hicks proposes herself as cast according to such a modernist, disinterestedly aesthetic and
emotive mode.
326
Instead of an activist, invested in a world beyond the work of art, she suggests
she is committed, like Woolf, to a “self-contained” art and “things in themselves.”
327
While this
may have been and remain how she sees herself and her work, from the 1960s through to the
present, it is limits our ability to gauge the greater complexity at play in work. In this instance,
she styles herself with a certain amount of autonomy free from the obligations of activism, but
also must recognize all the ways in which her work in particular, from its collaborative nature to

324
Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter,” 1908, as quoted in Hilton Kramer, “Art,” The New York Times, March 10,
1974.
325
Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” 1924,
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/MrBennettAndMrsBrown.pdf, 9-10, accesed June 1, 2020.
326
Jerome Stolnitz, "On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20, no. 2
(1961): 131-43; Arnold Berleant, “What is Aesthetic Engagement?” Contemporary Aesthetics 11 (2013); C Thi Nguyen,
“Autonomy and Aesthetic Engagement,” Mind 129, No. 516 (October 2020), 1127-1156.

327
Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” 1924.

182
her long-standing involvement in big budget commissions, engages socio-political realities of a
world beyond its own strictly aesthetic logics or material dimensions.
As the comparison to El Anatsui suggests, or many of Hicks’s appearances in the last ten
years echo similarly, from the Whitney Biennial in 2014 to the Venice Biennale in 2017, her
work has been recovered and given new meaning because of its global ambitions and the
attendant histories and diverse identities it has complicatedly engaged beyond its strictly formal
effects. It has also been buoyed by an art world increasingly motivated to celebrate a greater
diversity of both media and peoples, especially women and people of color, and previously
sidelined craft media like fiber. These are historic shifts that have undoubtedly shaped her career.
Maybe then it is less that she is naïve or unaware of the activist potential of her work, but has
found a way to activate without appearing to do it quite as others have. Namely, Hicks has never
worked figuratively or narratively, two usual activist modes.
In the lunchtime allegory above, it is the difference between nationalized self-interests
(Brazil, Korea, Japan) and a more global, communal table that matters to Hicks.
328
Thinking of
the weavings and photographs mentioned earlier as symbiotically related, they visually configure
the opposing poles Hicks imagines. On the one hand the “energy and life” of abstract, and at
times functional weaving involved in the activity of everyday life and derived from quotidian
labor, and on the other the “activist” potential of photography and its specific, figured identities.
Unlike weavings and abstraction, documentary photographs tend toward specificity as opposed
to universality. The stakes of such binaries, between activist art, and its opposite, likely inform

328
Hicks has similarly framed this meeting of nationalities and ethnicities as configured by her studio as intentional
and pedagogically generative in a subsequent profile: “The young artists that make up her studio come from all over
the world. ‘Korean, Greek, Breton…It’s important that everyone is from a different nationality or culture,’ [Hicks]
says. ‘That way we learn from each other every day.’” In Caroline Roux, “Sheila Hicks: Weaving the World into
Her Work,” The Financial Times, May 22, 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/f24e80e0-3c5f-4dff-9615-
91f1f52448cd.

183
Hicks’s foreclosure on sharing any greater details about her collaborations and the employees
that drive them, leaving us with only photographs as evidence of the “economics” and scale of
her collaborations.
In images of Hicks at work in Mexico, she appears both participatory and distinct.
Throughout, her identity both aligns and defines itself as distinct from the largely anonymous
persons that work alongside her. Even if they had not circulated beyond the moment of their
capture in media coverage, exhibitions, and catalogues of her work as they have, images like
these posit her objects anthropologically, as something like a contemporary artifact. Echoing the
performative images that helped explain the novelty of Jackson Pollock and would later
distinguish the emergence of postminimalism as defined by Richard Serra’s gestural sculpture,
they take a stance distinct from the disembodied presentation of a more conventional,
autonomously modernist art object. As visual proof, the photographs verified and encouraged a
desire, in American centers like Chicago and New York, to cherish Hicks’s weavings (as we still
do now) for their handmade look, a comforting counterpoint in a late capitalist American context
increasingly characterized by a reduction in jobs focused on manual labor and a life supposedly
eased by mass-manufactured commodities rather than objects crafted by their user at home. Not
only this, they show how difference was valuable as a commodity captured and made visible—
and also how weaving and other craft materials as abstract media translated that alterity into its
own existing status as an alter to art.
The photographed workers charged Hicks’s objects with the allure of difference, the
distinctions of identity, Indigeneity, and the idealized authenticity assumed to accompany these

184
vectors.
329
The weavings and photographs (one abstractly and the other figuratively) depict an
escape from city life, an exotic fantasy imagined voyeuristically for her audiences in the urban
West. The photographs both reinforce and confirm craft’s alterity. With this photographic proof,
Hicks’s weavings became indexes of a craft performance ongoing elsewhere, proof of an another
place and an alternative way of life.

329
“Authenticity is a racist concept which functions to keep us enclosed in ‘our world’ (in our place) for the comfort
of a dominant society,” declared artist Jimmie Durham, as quoted by Jessica L. Horton, Art for a Divided Earth: The
American Indian Movement Generation (Duke University Press, 2017).

185
Chapter 4 — “Homeless Orphans”: Sculpture Dislocated, 1964-1989
In a 1968 letter to Museum of Modern Art curator Mildred Constantine, Sheila Hicks
mentions what she calls “my Volkswagon [sic] Evolving tapestry idea. It is for your show, done
in the brown linen thread you chose.”
330
One of a flurry of letters traded between the two, the
note anticipates the opening of Wall Hangings, 1969, curated by Constantine and Jack Lenor
Larsen at the Museum of Modern Art [see figure 60].
331
The show is often recalled as a high
watermark in the history of fiber art’s institutional consecration.
332
Constantine (1913-2008)
worked at MoMA from 1943 to 1971 in the Department of Architecture and Design, and began
to devote the majority of her professional attention to fiber after meeting Hicks in 1962, having
been introduced by mutual friends in Mexico.
333
As part of her subsequent work as a consultant
and independent curator, Constantine would devote significant energy to Hicks and her work. In
publications such as Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (1972) Constantine secured Hicks’s status as
a leader of the new investments in fiber as art that it traced, and continued to promote exhibitions
and artists similarly devoted to fiber, stewarding Hicks’s work in the years that followed into
important collections.
334
Acknowledging that no great gallerist or other similar figure would
champion Hicks’s work and career until well into the twenty-first century, Constantine’s role in
Hicks’s career beginning in the late 1960s was decisive and peerless.

330
Sheila Hicks, Letter to Mildred Constantine (Dec. 5, 1968), The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records
[882.9], The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
331
“Mildred Constantine Papers, 1945-2008, Biographical Note,” Archives of American Art, accessed April 11,
2021, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/mildred-constantine-papers-15687/biographical-note.
332
Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (University of Minnesota
Press, 2009).
333
Jenni Sorkin, “Way Beyond Craft: Thinking through the Work of Mildred Constantine,” Textile: The Journal of
Cloth and Culture, 1:1, 2003, 32.
334
Publicly disclosed deposits include Ephemera Bundle, 1975 and Drawn with the Wind, 1988 in the collection of
the Cleveland Museum of Art since 1992 and 2009 respectively, and Red Square, c. 1967 in the collection of the
Mint Museum since 2011. The latter two works were gifted by Constantine’s daughters in memory of their mother.

186
This letter describes The Evolving Tapestry, 1967-68 [see figures 59 and 61] and among other
novelties, the letter makes clear that Hicks was making work explicitly for exhibition, partially
guided by Constantine’s editorial selection of colored thread—a procedure that other curators
active at that exact moment, such as those stewarding Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,
James K. Monte and Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of American Art, or Harald
Szeemann and his Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern
(which both debuted in that same year) would stress as central to their show’s novelty.
335
While
shows like Anti-Illusion and Attitudes have been remembered as defining moments in the
emergence of postminimalism, process, and conceptual art, Wall Hangings and the other
achievements of fiber art as a collective aesthetic movement have been comparatively sidelined,
into a separate history to which Hicks was central.
336
This chapter returns to fiber’s history in
order to mobilize its value as a revelatory lens, showing its shared trajectories with
postminimalism and process art as well as subsequent developments such as Pattern and
Decoration, performance, and installation art, developing a shared generational project.
In the letter to Constantine, Hicks set two short underlines under the “vol,” in
“Evolving,” emphasizing the importance of this syllable for the concept that would ultimately
become The Evolving Tapestry, 1969 at MoMA. Beneath this mention, apart from the body of
the text, Hicks writes “title / ‘Volkswagon in Place Concorde.’” What made the car company
appropriate to describe Hick’s new sculptural prototype? Her underlining of “vol” may offer a
clue. “Vol” draws from the latin volare and forms the etymological base in several romance
languages for verbs and other words indicative of flight, evidencing both the physical fact and
theme of gravity and its defiance that runs through Hicks’s works of this period (like The

335
James Monte, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969), 5.
336
Bruce Altshuler, Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History: 1962-2002 (Phaidon, 2013).

187
Evolving Tapestry, 1967-1968 and The Principal Wife, 1968) to which this chapter turns its
attention.
The underline demonstrates how the work’s ultimate title, Evolving, preserves these three
letters from Volkswagen. A few lines later, Hicks states, “I can set it up the way we decide
together is best. There are infinite possibilities. Tapestry by the kilo! / Make it yourself and /
change it later! / Fill the emotional space and need of the / participating viewer (architect etc.). /
It’s been a real revelation to me to break through / with this idea working / frantically to get
ready for / your show and the Holland / one.”
337
“The Holland one” would become Perspectief in
textiel, 1969 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, another important moment in the validation
of fiber by a major modern art museum, again underway at exactly that moment.
Reading Hicks exclaim, “tapestry by the kilo!” one finds the second meaning of “vol,” as
volume. “Fill the emotional space and need of the participating viewer,” indicates that The
Evolving Tapestry filled not only a physical void but also a psychological one. Working
simultaneously as both critic and curator of fiber art’s institutional successes textile designer and
entrepreneur, Jack Lenor Larsen sensed these dynamics in his review of the Stedelijk show,
stating, “The fact is they are solid, heavy in the room, space filling, demanding, consuming.
They are not wallflowers. This is a different kind of declaration from Magdalena Abakanowicz’s
pieces which fill space and conquer it. Sheila Hicks’s do not fill up but engage.”
338
His words for
Hicks, “to engage,” are diplomatic and collaborative (pointing toward the diction of both

337
Sheila Hicks, letter to Mildred Constantine (Dec. 5, 1968), The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records
[882.9], The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
338
Jack Lenor Larsen, "The New Weaving," Craft Horizons, Mar. 1, 1969, 50; Julie Lasky, “Jack Lenor Larsen,
Innovative Textile Designer, Dies at 93,” The New York Times, Dec. 23, 2020,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/arts/jack-lenor-larsen-dead.html

188
performance art and more audience-conscious museum practices to come).
339
Recalling the
interactive prompt of sculptures such as Lygia Clark’s Bichos, 1960, he states how the
installation of these works was such that “people would be compelled to handle them, be
involved and surrounded by them.” Larsen’s diction, “involved,” conjures another sense of vol,
one of engaging and getting involved, participating in the work. “The floor sitting pieces have an
innocent ingenious quality. Children will want to pet them,” Larsen declares, rendering them into
friendly animals. Here we see Hicks, her curators, and her critics turning toward interactive and
performance art at least at the level of description—on trend with the wider art world of the late
1960s.
More than anything though, the idea of the Volkswagen furnishes its own powerful
symbol, and associates The Evolving Tapestry with the automobile factory, a kind of primal site
of industrial productivity in the United States and Europe. In pursuit of an affordable, “people’s
car,” the National Socialist Kraft durch Freude (KdF) or “Strength Through Joy” produced a
KdF-wagen in the late 1930s, which later became the Volkswagen. In the postwar period, the
Volkswagen became a symbol of economic regeneration in West Germany.
340
Facilitated by
assembly line efficiency, the Volkswagen represented a particularly European history, but one
related to the drive similarly concretized by Henry Ford in the United States. Echoing this idea,
Hicks references a “conveyor belt” when describing similar mounds like Banisteriopsis, 1965-
66. The reference to a conveyor belt reads the stacked forms as a series of turning rollers that
advance the belt, a celebration of the iconography of industrial productivity rendered abstractly

339
Jeanie Forte, "Women's Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism," Theatre Journal 40, no. 2 (1988): 217-35;
Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (Dartmouth College Press, 2012); Griselda Pollock
and Joyce Zemans edit., Museums After Modernism: Strategies of Engagement (Wiley, 2008).
340
Steven Tolliday, "Enterprise and State in the West German Wirtschaftswunder: Volkswagen and the Automobile
Industry, 1939-1962," The Business History Review (1995): 273-350.

189
rather than figuratively (as it had been in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry, 1932 murals, which so
impressed Hicks as a child).
341
The factory, from those animated by conveyor belts to textile
mills, is a theater of evolution, its commodities constantly “evolving” or changing as they come
into being from raw material or component parts to assembled, finished product, commodities
ready for global circulation.
The “evolving” reality of late capitalist manufacturing was not fantasy for Hicks but part
and parcel of her daily life. After leaving Mexico in 1964 for her new life in Paris, Hicks
commuted from Paris to Wuppertal, Germany monthly (through 1970), to help develop new
designs and production methods in collaboration with skilled factory technicians at Arterior, a
new subsidiary of Vorwerk. In 1966, she would begin to travel to India to consult on fabric
manufacturing for the world’s largest hand-weaving factory, operated by Parry Murray & Co.
and the Commonwealth Trust Ltd., a large Anglo-Indian company embedded in the postcolonial
development of Kozhikode, India. Alongside more than one thousand employees, Hicks
consulted upon the development of fabric designs and collections through 1980, including the
Kerala (sold to Crate and Barrel among others) and Monsoon Collections, designs titled to point
to their origin in India and which remained in production until the factory shuttered its doors, to
workers’ dismay and protests in 2012.
342

Huaquen, 1967, was presented as Hicks’s second entry to the Lausanne tapestry Biennial
(also in 1969) and took its name from a region in rural Chile, along the coast about two hours
north of Santiago (by car) [see Figure 66]. With the Catalan artist Juame Xifra and Parisian Jean
Paul Beranger, Hicks established Taller Hacienda Huaquén there in 1968, a workshop to employ

341
Sheila Hicks, Oral History, February 2004.
342
Nina Stritzler-Levine, "A Design Identity," in Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor (New Haven: Bard Graduate
Center, New York by Yale University Press, 2013), 371.

190
workers during a drought that greatly reduced the country’s sheep herds.
343
They founded an
artist’s cooperative that produced “wool and linen carpets, wall hangings, textiles and wooden
furniture,”
344
that continued to operate into the twenty-first century. In 1970, she collaborated
with heritage crafts people in Rabat, Morocco to design over thirty rugs subsequently available
for reproduction utilizing local and historic modes of production. In 1972, she established Taller
Los Bravos with Luis Barragán in Mexico, a site for the creation of their several collaborative
projects and heir to the workshop she had established there prior to her departure in 1964.
Hicks would eventually propose exhibiting the work of these workshops to curators like
Wil Bertheaux at the Stedelijk, literalizing the potential Huaquen and other more sculptural
works had to reference their ties to her involvement in collaborative craft and industrial
workshops in Chile, India, Morocco, Germany, Mexico, and elsewhere at this moment.
345
The
idea, ahead of its time in its anticipation of late twentieth and early twenty-first century
developments aligned with social practice was, maybe not surprisingly, rejected by her curatorial
collaborator.
346

While Banisteriopsis and Huaquen are demonstrably hand-crafted objects of the artist’s
studio, they also point outward from the studio to its historical context, a post-Fordist,
postcolonial moment characterized by advanced, sophisticated manufacturing, and more
particularly the re-location and development of such industry in contexts beyond the Euro-

343
Whitney Chadwick, “Ancient Lines and Modernist Cubes,” Sheila Hicks 50 Years (New Haven: Yale University
Press and Addison Gallery of American Art, 2010), 191. On Xifra, Beranger and Hicks, see Claudia Arbulú
Soto, Los Catalanes de París: un Análisis Estético (Dykinson, S.L., 2016), 136.
344
Sheila Hicks et al., Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor (New Haven; London: Published for the Bard Graduate
Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York by Yale University Press, 2013), 386.
345
Sheila Hicks, letter to W. Bertheux (Aug. 21, 1969), Stedelijk Archives [SC60056N8], Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam.
346
Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 51-79. See, for example, Liam
Gillick’s reconciliations of modernist abstraction with participatory formats, or Olafur Eliasson’s Venice Biennale
workshop discussed in the introduction.

191
American West. These specific itineraries chart a postcolonial interweaving, where transnational
business relationships knitted Europe and the United States to the Global South.
347

A similar milieu and origin story frames the sculptural language developed by Yale peers
like Eva Hesse and Richard Serra (often credited as canonical postminimal sculptors).
348
Hesse
would commit to sculpture while working in another textile factory in 1964.
349
Although unlike
Hicks’s factories, Hesse’s was a de-commissioned one, a shadow site of manufacturing’s
departure from the industrial town of Kettwig, Germany.
350
Serra would likewise reference his
formative time working in factories, intermittently between the age of 15 and 29.
351
Late
modernist sculpture drew significance from the primal scene of the modern factory, its
relationship to alienated labor and especially the small scale industries of the hand it aimed to
eclipse. If, as Larsen and Hicks suggested, these sculptures filled a psychological void for
engaged viewers in the West, then it may well have been the desire to engage, at least at the level
of fantasy, with the work of the factory and advanced manufacturing, one that had been
increasingly alienated by the global sophistication of consumer capitalism. If they pointed to
sites of manufacturing, then they made the sophistication of advanced capitalism close at hand,
rather than far-away, in another country, offshore and out of sight. In their intense appeal to
visualizing texture and technique, material manipulations a skilled hand occasioned, these works
offer the eye a haptic scene in the midst of a lifestyle increasingly disengaged from manual
labor.
352
As Hicks’s own multisite career attests, these works connected the work of the studio

347
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton (Vintage, 2015), 379-443.
348
Foster et. al., Art Since 1900 (Thames and Hudson, 2016).
349
Briony Fer, “Eva Hesse and Color,” October 119 (2007), 23.
350
Kirsten Swenson, Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol Lewitt, and 1960s New York (New York and London:
Yale University Press, 2015), 62.
351
Richard Serra, in Richard Serra, Interviews, Etc., 1970-1980 (The Hudson River Museum, 1980), 62.
352
Bryant-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, 19-25.

192
and that of the factory, charting an increasingly international itinerary both psychologically and
materially real.
Across the Global South
In this chapter, I analyze Hicks’s sculptures and argue for their significance on several
fronts, beginning with their capacity to revise definitions of minimal and post-minimal sculpture
as framed by the emergence of global contemporary art and culture. I narrate how these mute,
abstract works contributed to an international discourse of structural and post-structural inquiry
alive in anthropology, art history, and cultural criticism at large. Through extended close
readings and formal analysis, I unravel the provocative alignment of global motifs of
construction, nomadic architecture, and the gendered body inherent in these works. Recognizing
the unresolved status of abstraction’s contribution to a feminist and postcolonial cultural
imaginary, in the chapter’s final sections I explain what these sculptures had to say as part of a
cross-cultural inquiry into gender, family, and motherhood.
Whereas previous chapters have taken advantage of comparatively defined frames of
geographic significance, moving out from the localism of Yale to the linear course of Hicks’s
South American travels to the transnational contrast of Mexico and the United States, this
chapter confronts the first instance in Hicks’s career when a framework predicated upon a
specific site reveals its limitations. This chapter grapples with the analytical complexity of
thinking through Hicks’s artworks in a plurality of places, the backdrop of cosmopolitanism and
dispersed presence sketched above from which individual artworks draw significance. Especially
after 1964, thanks to her work as a consultant and entrepreneur across the Global South, Hicks’s
artworks condense a diversity of cultural references that defy both the logic of the nation state
and the singular stability imagined for the individual subject. Instead, they turn toward the more

193
unruly, plural identities and networks the multi-nationalism of late capitalist globalism
accelerated—and model predictively the formal complexities engaged by more global artistic
practices.
The geography of Hicks’s practice at this moment is both decisive and provocative,
furnishing a case study that maps a larger cultural relationship. At once increasingly prominent
in the contemporary art world, as featured in fiber art exhibitions like Wall Hangings, Perspectief
en textiel, and the Lausanne tapestry biennials, Hicks also clearly charted a path of production
and international engagement across a plurality of politically and culturally idiosyncratic
contexts, a group that challenges any attempt to understand her work according to an excessively
local or even national historical or theoretical lens. Instead, the industrializing, Extra-Western
territories Hicks engaged are most logically unified through the lens of the “Global South,” a
term that has recently been embraced by organizations like the World Bank to unite low- and
middle-income countries located in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, which are
understood in contrast to the high-income nations of the Global North.
353
The phrase replaces
terminology like “developing countries” or, “Third World,” which have fallen out of favor and
practical use in light of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the blurring of Cold War binaries
between capitalist and communist economies, and the general acceptance that though not
necessarily coined to do so, the enumerative inequality implied by “Third” and “First World”
countries propagates a ranked sense of the world, perpetuating the notion that territories labeled
“Third” were lesser than their Western counterparts. I am interested in aligning Hicks’s work of

353
Hardeep Singh Puri, “Rise of the Global South and its Impact on South-South Cooperation” Development
Outreach (October 2010), 7-9. For potential humanist applications, see Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Patricia Daley,
Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations (Routledge, 2018); Miguel Rojas-Sotelo explores an explicitly art
historical case study in, "The Other Network: The Havana Biennale and the Global South," The Global South 5, no. 1
(2011): 153-74.

194
the 1960s and 70s with the framework of the Global South in order to develop the potential for it
as a theoretical imperative applicable to both retrospective and prospective studies of culture.
Always already embedded with its opposite, “Global South” also at once conjures a sense of
“The Global North” too, making this lens a responsible term for one attempting to cultivate a
mindful consciousness of the potentially neocolonial economic relationships at play between
places like France and Morocco, or India and England during this period. To think in terms of a
“Global South” allows one to model not only a plural, diverse geographic context and shared
economic reality but also to posit a dynamic cultural imaginary tethered to both the idea and
reality of the countries involved, many of which remain informed by a shared postcolonial
legacy.
Jenni Sorkin has argued for an alternative history of “the social turn in contemporary
artistic practice” embedded not in performance or other dematerialized practices but rather those
that emphasize the production of objects and sophistication of craft skills, in Sorkin’s case to be
found in the pedagogy of women ceramicists in the United States.
354
Resurrecting fiber art’s
ability to “fill the emotional space” as well as the actual space demonstrates how compelling
materially present objects and the process of their making remained for artists, curators, and
viewers at this moment, a fascination that scholars and institutions have recovered and with it,
Hicks. In fact, as exhibition archives reveal, Szeeman expressed interest in a potential traveling
version of Perspectief en textiel, which had it come to pass would have followed, and affirmed
the trajectory he had laid out in Attitudes.
Hicks’s international engagements are evidence of this social turn, particularly on a more
global scale and complexity than that configured by her contemporaries. Invested simultaneously

354
Jenni Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).

195
in real workshops and factories as well as the exhibition-making of the contemporary art world
during this period, Hicks modeled how the formal development of classical genres such as
sculpture (and their development into new genres like installation and performance) within the
hermetic contexts of the Western art world might be meaningfully and materially related to a
practice embedded in the lives and livelihoods of non-artists and those largely unconcerned with
the stakes of the Euro-American art world.
As others have noted, though vibrantly supported by its own exhibition circuit and social
networks (even its own biennial), fiber art or the “new tapestry” (as its collective activity was
also described in Europe, according to more local and historic precedent) was only faintly
recognized by the greater art world.
355
Despite its appearance at MoMA, Wall Hangings is
remembered largely only by those invested in excavating the histories of craft media like fiber.
Returning to fiber’s history out of a sincere conviction that recognizing the tendencies it shared
with now canonized touchstones of postminimalism and process art as well as subsequent
developments such as Pattern and Decoration, performance, and installation art, reveals a shared
generational project. This is a collective revision of art that indexed the shifting relationship
between Western and extra-Western worlds. Confronted by the specter of the global and the
questions of cultural difference it made newly urgent, Hicks and her peers sought an abstract
sculptural language that dramatized the skill of the human hand. Aligning their work with human
industry to be found around the world and unsettled by the “evolving” landscapes of
manufacturing re-sited by the relocation of heavy industry to the Global South, they reached for
a material and procedural universalism.

355
Each Lausanne Biennial was commemorated by a companion catalogue, beginning with 1re Biennale
international de la Tapisserie Lausanne 62 suisse (Musee des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, 1962). For a historical survey
see Giselle Eberhard Cotton and Magali Junet, edit., From Tapestry to Fiber Art, The Lausanne Biennials 1962-
1995 (Skira/Fondation Toms Pauli, 2017).

196
Open Compositions
In 1974, in a handwritten taxonomy on the back cover of the small catalogue that
accompanied her first major museum retrospective at the Stedelijk, Hicks offered the category
“open compositions” (“compositions ouverte,” in French), to encompass works like The
Evolving Tapestry. It was a category that contained what Constantine and Larsen had separately
identified in Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric, 1973 as “two different kinds of forms,” exemplified
by Banisteriopsis, 1965-1966 on the one hand and The Principal Wife, 1968 on the other [See
Figures 72 and 65].
356
Hicks’s category of the “open composition” weds together these stacks
and suspensions (these terms are mine), two forms that are relatively distinct structurally,
arguing for a symbiotic relationship between them. As Julia Bryan-Wilson has explored in
reference to the Floorpieces of Harmony Hammond, the horizontal is the classical orientation of
the reclining nude, usually female, in Western art, whereas verticality often announces the
triumphant statue of a heroic man.
357
Indeed, even when Hicks’s stacks rise from the ground with
the floor as their support, they are not vertically erect but rather laterally spreading like plateaus
or mountain ranges. Similarly divergent from the norm, her suspensions, although vertical,
dangle languidly, dramatizing their dependence on a wall or ceiling. Extending this vein, in an
essay entitled “Soft Power,” Glenn Adamson likens the fiber art of this era to “limp penises,” and
encourages the reader to consider how “a certain uncomfortable flaccidity,” may have
discouraged the mainstream canonization of this new sculptural language. By challenging “the
whole edifice of artistic potency” with these “flaccid forms,” Adamson contends that one should

356
See Sheila Hicks (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1974), back cover.
357
“[Hammond’s Floorpieces] also slyly burlesque the alignment of women with passivity and floor-based textiles.
Horizontality is not just lesbian-specific; it is the primary position of women in art history, as evidenced by the
ubiquity of the odalisque or reclining nude,” Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2017), 91.

197
not be surprised that “all the fiber artists…lack the grand art-historical pedigree,” chiefly because
of their form’s “radical refusal of mastery.”
358

If we take these works, both the stacks and the suspensions, as two sides of the same
coin, they materialize a complete meditation on both literal and figurative questions of support
and liberation. For Hicks, “Material had to express its own voice…No armatures. I was dead set
against armatures; I was using fiber and soft material. I wanted it to be natural and piled up, not
artificially draped over armatures. It had to have a certain inherent truth and observe gravity.”
359

As fiber scholars have posited, such theorizations echo others formulated in the 1960s, as part of
a desire to move beyond the familiar conceits of painting and sculpture, in particular to occupy a
space that was neither one nor the other such as that plotted by Donald Judd in his search for
“specific objects.”
360
As fiber did for Hicks and her peers, welded metal afforded Judd a material
largely unfamiliar to the histories of painting and sculpture, and also one that succeeded equally
from the wall to the floor, allowing for a continuity of material and form between these
historically distinct orientations. That said, whereas Judd felt backed into a corner by modernist
precedent and thus forced to play a game of negation (“not sculpture,” “not painting”), Hicks and
her peers built with a spirit of possibility and experimentation free from precedent or limiting
end-games.
The capacity of fiber to mediate between genres and also step beyond them, re-inserting
art into the logic of everyday things was captured by Hicks’s generational peer Jackie Winsor
who recalled in hindsight that “I was interested in rope because it is both a fat line and many

358
Glenn Adamson, “Soft Power,” in Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present (Prestel, 2014), TK.
359
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
360
Jenelle Porter, Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present (ICA Boston, 2015), 11-12.

198
lines. Those first pieces that I made sculpturally came out of fiber and drawing.”
361
To the
generation that embraced it, fiber was useful for its status as a double agent. It embodied the
logic and formal unit of the drawn line, the bedrock of Renaissance formulations of sculpture and
painting alike. Simultaneously, it was also valuably not a rarefied formalist ideal (like the purely
conceptual grid), real only in the mind or when realized via art. As Winsor’s rope exemplifies,
fiber was always already a thing of the world, not an aesthetic abstraction bred in captivity and
suited only for a life in the hermetically sealed modernist art world.
362

Whereas Hicks’s practice in this period arguably sought to blur disciplinary and medial
distinctions, Benjamin Buchloh has characterized contemporary sculptors such as Richard Serra
as a critic of, “hybridizing genres,” at pains “increasingly to distance himself” and “obsessively
differentiating the sculptural from the pictorial.”
363
Buchloh’s diction is telling. In describing the
theorizations of Robert Morris and Donald Judd, he claims they “insisted on the hybrid status of
the new objects now suspended between painting and sculpture.”
364
In contrast to Buchloh’s
puritanical characterization of Serra, this is the space Hicks’s work most comfortably occupies. It
does not seek to separate painting from sculpture but finds a way to logically bring these two
traditions together by way of fiber.
Hicks’s “open compositions” (including Banisteriopsis, 1968-1994, The Evolving
Tapestry: He/She, 1967-68, and The Principal Wife, 1968) materialize both dynamics in
sculptural form.
365
Multiplicity arises in their logic of primary units that allow for both relatively

361
Whitney Chadwick, “Jackie Winsor,” Oxford Art Online, https://www.oxfordartonline.com/page/jackie-winsor,
accessed March 14, 2021.
362
Tim Ingold differentiates these two linear modes as “the thread” and “the trace,” and ties them respectively to the
juxtaposed arguments of Gottfried Semper and Alois Riegl. See Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Routledge,
2007), 41-44.
363
Benjamin HD Buchloh, “Richard Serra’s Early Work: Sculpture between Labor and Spectacle,” Richard Serra:
Forty Years (MoMA, New York), 54.
364
Buchloh, “Richard Serra’s Early Work,” 54; emphasis mine.
365
Joan Simon et al., Sheila Hicks: 50 Years (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, 2010).

199
standardized repetition coupled with the creativity of arrangement that allows for a variety of
final forms. The interactive process arises in the interpretive process of arranging and assembling
the piece. To contextualize Hicks’s embrace of indeterminate display for her work, one might
also think of the practice established by composer John Cage, which embraced content brought
about by chance procedures. Similar to Hicks’s “open compositions,” Cage “sought a balance
between the rational and the irrational by allowing random events to function within the context
of a controlled system.”
366

367
Indeed, as exemplified by The Principal Wife’s titular allusion to a
system of polygamy (Hicks drew formal and conceptual inspiration for The Principal Wife from
witnessing polygamous family structures, particularly “the extended family connections she saw
in North Africa.”
368
), these works materialize the poly-vocal dynamism of a large family, noisy
with negotiating spouses, and alive with children. Intellectually and socially the late 1960s and
1970s can be thematically understood as embracing openness as a positive and generative
position – from open marriages to liberated thinking to postcolonial pluralities and free trade.
In works like The Principal Wife, 1968 and Banisteriopsis, 1965-66 each discrete cord or
tuft is wrapped into one unit. Once assembled together, they create the total work. Between one
installation and another, the same work may be arranged and appear differently. Similar
variables would also be courted by contemporaries like Eva Hesse in her rope works like Right
After, 1969.
369
The unitary design points back in part to the fact that these works were created

366
Marc G. Jensen, “John Cage, Chance Operations, and the Chaos Game: Cage and the ‘I Ching,’” The Musical
Times 150, no. 1907 (2009): 97–102, https://doi.org/10.2307/25597623. 97
367
This affiliation was recognized by Larsen at the Stedelijk: “these twenty long, long chains are, as the floor sitting
pieces, elements to be composed on site almost like Cage’s compositions are adapted to time and place.” Larsen,
“The New Weaving,” Craft Horizons 29, no. 2 (1969), 51.
368
“Sheila Hicks, The Principal Wife,” RISD Museum, accessed Mar. 16, 2021,
http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/1207_the_principal_wife.
369
Lambasting a Whitney retrospective for Richard Tuttle in 1975, critic Hilton Kramer would sarcastically describe
the prospect of being, “treated to a series of modifications in the installation,” evidence that art’s user-generated
potential would struggle to fascinate the skeptical despite a generation of artistic and curatorial fascination with it.
Hilton Kramer, “Tuttle’s Art On Display At Whitney,” The New York Times, Sept. 12, 1975.

200
with the temporary logic of exhibitions in mind. As an assembly of smaller parts, they could be
more easily and cheaply shipped to their destination, “divided, scattered, shipped in laundry
bags,”
370
or even carried by the artist herself as part of her personal luggage. This freight likens
them to clothing, recalling Peggy Guggenheim’s custom’s declaration of a Brancusi as a
“household good,” while also by way of their distinct material and formal devices registering
social shifts afoot well beyond art’s worlds that marked a distinction from such modernist
forebearers.
371
Studying the crating and storage procedures that govern sculptures such as Robert
Morris’s Felt, 1967-1969 or Hesse’s No Title, 1969-70 (often anticipated and pre-ordained by the
artists themselves) and recalling the sight of luggage carts piled high at the airport, I see a
generational embrace of a sculpture calibrated to match the increasingly international mobility of
its makers and viewers.
This mobility also quietly communicated the trauma of dislocation, and identities newly
derived from and dispersed across global sites, paradoxically both significantly separated by
distance and newly intimate thanks to unprecedented expediencies of travel and
communication.
372
Artists like Hesse, Tuttle, and Robert Morris who turned to lighter weight,
more casually packed and shipped materials like rope, fabric, and felt designed objects of easy
mobility and cheap, uncomplicated freight, reflecting the increasing normalization of
international air travel especially for residents of the North Atlantic in the United States and
Europe. As exemplified by the similarly unitary, lightweight, meant-to-be-moved sculptures of

370
Sheila Hicks, letter to W. Bertheux (Dec. 28, 1968), Stedelijk Archives [SC60056NC], Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam.
371
Hilton Kramer, "Peggy Guggenheim as History," The New Criterion 4, no. 8 (1986), 5.
372
Describing Isamu Noguchi’s Kouros, 1945, Amy Lyford has identified how such “multipart, interlocking
structure gives it a portability…mobility.” “Noguchi's Kouros and the other interlocking sculptures,” writes Lyford,
“could be taken down in just a few minutes. A mobile monument, Noguchi's Kouros thematizes the heroic male
nude as a movable effigy, and…does so in ways that subtly mimic (if unconsciously) the sculptor's own
relocations.” In, Amy Lyford, “Noguchi, Sculptural Abstraction, and the Politics of Japanese American Internment,”
The Art Bulletin, 85, no. 1 (2003), 137.

201
Rasheed Araeen, such as Chaar Yaar II (Four Friends), 1968/2010, this new mobility was also
reshaping the lives of people from across the postcolonial Global South, encouraging their
participation in (and productive critique of) the Western art world.
373
Though Hicks’s objects
would often echo her travels and international outlook more overtly than such peers with their
more pronounced allusions (both titular and formal), artists working alongside her processed a
new era of touristic exposure and cosmopolitan awareness in a generational shift toward
sculptural materials that were far lighter, easier to pack up and move.
Once beyond customs, Hicks’s units could be added or taken away depending upon the
contingencies of the exhibition space afforded. Diagrammatic assembly instructions instruct a
curator on a possible installation arrangement if the artist could not be present [See Figure 71].
The ultimate piece would not be threatened if individual units went lost in transit, storage, or
some other incident. And at the conclusion of the exhibition, the piece could be disassembled
without destroying the possibility of its future exhibition. Units might remain together, or, more
likely, could be split up and shipped off to a variety of disparate locations. Realizing this
anticipated dynamic, in several instances individual units have entered museum collections on
their own, lost from the company of their other constituent parts.
374
As such, the event of the
exhibition and the support of its space was a moment when the piece was most intact and in one
way of thinking, most fully realized. Whereas, at other times, the composition was subject to and
accepted the task of acting out a logic of dismemberment and unpredictable diaspora. We might
be inclined to value the moment of wholeness over dismemberment but both, especially when

373
Rasheed Araeen, “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts,” Third Text 1:1 (1987), 6-25.
374
See for example the very sad single strand left behind at the Stedelijk: “The Principal Wife: Sheila Hicks,”
https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/collection/92164-sheila-hicks-the-principal-wife, 1968.

202
considered together, compellingly register the susceptibility of bodies, both animate and
otherwise as they dare to circulate through the space of the world.
The Raw and The Cooked
In a 1968 letter to curator Wil Bertheux of the Stedelijk Museum, as he worked to
organize Perspectief in Textiel, Sheila Hicks included the following notes:
BANISTERIOPSIS
(used by the Jivaro Indians for hallucinatory
experiences)

When the yellow linen thread
was piled high in the atelier

The bulk and weight
seemed worth preserving
and treating.

I thought of Mayan temples like Uxmal,
corn silk from Nebraska,
and conveyer belts.
375

Organizing her typed lines like phrases in a poem, Hicks emphasizes a desire to honestly exhibit
the raw material qualities of large quantities of linen thread by underlining its “bulk” and
“weight.” As such she reached for what Rosalind Krauss called, “an analogy with inert matter,” a

375
Sheila Hicks, letter to W. Bertheux (Dec. 28, 1968), Stedelijk Archives [SC60056NC], Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam.

203
kinship, “with things untouched by thought or unmediated by personality,” in the final chapter of
Passages in Modern Sculpture, 1977, which synthesized the work of postminimalists like Hesse
and Serra, theorizing their relationship to preceding developments in modern sculpture since
Rodin.
376
Hicks repeated and elaborated on this sentiment for The Evolving Tapestry:
EVOLVING TAPESTRY

Equal units
all bound together
with variable features

Tapestry volumes xxx amassed
accumulated
heaped
assembled
horded (as art)

then divided, scattered, shipped in laundry bags
Once again stressing “volumes,” (as she had to Constantine too) Hicks visually stacks the words
that follow, “amassed / accumulated / heaped / assembled / horded (as art),” as she would the
actual “equal units” of Banisteriopsis and The Evolving Tapestry, like “cordwood.”
377
In both
Banisteriopsis and The Evolving Tapestry, what we see is a mound, a stately mass with the
gravitas of bulk and weight.

376
Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.: MIT Press, 2007), 249.
377
Jack Lenor Larsen, “The New Weaving,” Craft Horizons.

204
Within the neutral space of a museum gallery these works register as abstractions rather
than representations, but consider the material and visual culture, the sights typical of the craft
environments typical of Hicks’s milieu. The motifs Hicks brought into the spaces of
contemporary art echoed those found in the contemporary craft contexts through which she
traveled. Take for example the “silken tassels for bridles and martingales” strung by Moroccan
men and banded at regular intervals just as Hicks’s suspensions like The Principal Wife, 1968
were [see figure 75]. Compare its display at MoMA, its luscious cords strung over a bar so that
they lavishly dangle, with the “Vivid Skeins” that “Festoon the Street of the Dyers in
Marrakech” where “newly dyed wool drips from walls and bamboo poles sling from roof to roof.
On some days the street shrieks with a single color; veritable rainbows appear at other times.”
378

Meanwhile, The Evolving Tapestry mimics the image of carpets regularly folded and stacked
easily spotted across the Global South, from the markets of South Asia, the Middle East, or
North Africa and throughout Europe and the United States at many a carpet emporium, market,
or bazaar too. Hicks’s own photographic archive reinforces such comparisons as in “Sorting
Coconut Fiber,” 1966, “Workshop, Wuppertal, Germany,” 1967, and “Sheila Hicks sorting wool,
Rabat, Morocco,” c. 1970-71 [see figures 76-78].
Drawing from Hicks’s notes, we might organize these works’ figurative and thematic
allusions along a boundary between the relatively raw and natural (corn silk, or the adoration of
piled, unwoven thread) and the cultivated, what George Kubler called, “man-made things,”
objects of civilization, advanced craftsmanship, and culture (from Uxmal to conveyor belts). At
once, Banisteriopsis and The Evolving Tapestry exhibit both their raw, literal materiality and the

378
Jean and Franc Shor, “From Sea to Sahara in French Morocco: Jet Planes Lace Vapor Trails over Modern Farms,
but in the Markets of Marrakech You Can Buy an Evil Eye for Three Centes,” National Geographic, Feb. 1955,
168-182.

205
compelling ways that material may be processed, taking on a new identity and demonstrating
human handicraft skills. Banisteriopsis works first at “preserving” the sight, the raw quality of
“the yellow linen,” when it was “piled high in the atelier,” for spectators, but also what a skilled
hand can occasion upon such raw matter.
Likewise, The Evolving Tapestry is decidedly non-pictorial (much unlike a historic
tapestry, usually a vehicle for a painting’s image). It is not a surface for depiction but rather for
the demonstration of the effects of gravity upon the matter that makes up that surface. Krauss’s
Passages describes what “came to be known as process art,” as swayed by the faith that, “the
properties inherent to a specific material could be used to compose the work, as though what was
being tapped was nature as a readymade, instead of some aspect of culture.”
379
The
comparatively raw affect of process art as Krauss described looked more natural than processed
(especially when compared to the metallic, machine finishes of the minimalism that preceded it)
and thus explored a boundary between nature and culture. In the 1960s and 70s describing this
boundary was more the province of anthropology than art criticism.
Krauss claimed that Eva Hesse, “gives her objects anthropological imagery, as though
attention to that initial change from raw to processed brought her into a sculptural space that was
itself archaic.”
380
As such, the style of this work not only confused the line between nature and
culture but also between the present and an archaic past. As Krauss observes, postminimalism
and process art’s “anthropological imagery” arose by visualizing the ambiguous space between
“raw” and “processed,” an effect akin to what works like Hicks’s Banisteriopsis preserved for
viewers.

379
Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007).
380
Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 272.

206
These works again and again offer demonstrations of possibly ancient craft processes,
stylizing them into the sign of contemporary art. Especially in the late 1960s and 1970s, Krauss’s
diction, calling it “anthropological imagery,” carried the implication that these stylistic allusions
suggested an ethnographic Other, particularly the Extra-Western or Indigenous cultures attended
to more often by anthropology than art history. In the 1960s and 1970s, critics like Krauss and
Western museums largely did not attend to contemporary art beyond the North Atlantic,
effectively neglecting practices akin to the post-minimalism she charted alive beyond the United
States or Europe (for example, in the sculptures of Mrinalini Mukherjee in India
381
).
382
By
engaging a contemporary world and archive beyond that of Europe and the United States, artists
like Hicks materialized a more diverse model for North Atlantic culture, and an inheritance for
contemporary artistic practice that was more global. Such incorporation would encourage the
turn to a more worldly archive typical of artists associated with late 1970s movements such as
Pattern and Decoration, which celebrated and drew inspiration from extra-Western and
decorative sources, such as Robert Kushner’s love of Islamic carpets garnered on a trip to the
Middle East.
383
Hicks’s notes echo this sense. From the “Jivaro Indians” to the Mayan temple at
Uxmal, these are affiliations that would largely remain for several years as they had been, the
province of anthropology and its museums rather than art and its predominantly Eurocentric
institutions.
384
Such “anthropological imagery” sought a more universal abstract language.

381
Shanay Jhaveri, Mrinalini Mukherjee (Shoestring Publisher, 2019).
382
For a contemporary exhibition characteristic of this limited map, take for example Kynaston McShine’s Primary
Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture, 1966, as detailed in James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and
Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London, 2001).
383
Katz, With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art.
384
Take for example the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which would not open its galleries dedicated to
the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas until 1982—whose collections were largely inherited from the
dissolved Museum of Primitive Art, which closed in 1974. See Alisa LaGamma, Joanne Pillsbury, Eric Kjellgren,
and Yaëlle Biro, “The Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas,” The Metropolitan
Museum of Art Bulletin, 72, no.1 (Summer 2014).

207
Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1949 had begun
with a chapter entitled, “Nature and Culture,” and ultimately demonstrated that the distinction
between “nature” and “culture” was not given but constructed by human rules and laws. Levi-
Strauss was a prolific author of the postwar period, and while many works help illuminate his
thinking (which often organized certain constants of human experience along oppositional
binaries), particularly relevant is the diction expressed in the title of his 1964 publication Le Cru
et le cuit, or The Raw and The Cooked (coincident with Hicks’s move to Paris). Hicks befriended
the anthropologist and his wife, Monique Levi-Strauss as early as 1968, maintaining an intimate
relationship that continues to this day, particularly between Hicks and Monique. As the daughter
of an American mother, Monique Levi-Strauss connected quickly with Hicks by noting a shared
geographic affiliation, telling the artist that, “my mother is buried in Omaha.”
385
Upon their
initial meeting, Hicks expressed her admiration for Tristes Tropiques (published in 1955) to
Monique, evidence that she had been intellectually in dialogue with Claude for at least a decade,
beginning with her time at Yale, and that anthropological theory, rather than art criticism had
provided the most meaningful intellectual framework and body of knowledge for her aesthetic
investigations.
386
Possibly his most popularly accessed work; Levi-Strauss’s memoir and
travelogue Tristes Tropiques recounts his early research and life among the native peoples of
Brazil, making the narrative a logical mirror for Hicks’s own travel in the immediate wake of its
publication and intellectual investment in the South American continent indexed by her allusion
to the Amazonian Jivaro. By the 1960s and Hicks’s arrival in Paris, Levi-Strauss was recognized
as a leading intellectual figure, not only in France where reverence was largely uncontested but

385
Monique Levi-Strauss, in an interview with the author, October 2017.
386
Monique Levi-Strauss, in an interview with the author, October 2017.

208
internationally as well by the 1970s thanks to burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in
Structuralism in books like Krauss’s Passages.
Encouraged by his wife Monique, Claude Levi-Strauss visited Hicks’s studio and six
months later, wrote a short text to accompany the artist’s show at the Galerie Suzy Langlois in
Paris. The following text would subsequently reappear as a contribution in several subsequent
publications, exhibitions, and printed materials:
Among world civilizations, those of ancient Peru were probably the only ones
which availed themselves of the latencies in textile arts. Not only did they succeed
like others in elaborating richly decorated surfaces, but they were making bas-
relief and even sculpture out of threads. Overcoming the neglect and oblivion in
which these incomparable works have fallen, Sheila Hicks has retrieved and
assimilated their tradition while marrying it felicitously to others such as those of
Persia and India. Far from copying them, she has renewed them by original
discoveries which appropriate them to the raw materials, the techniques and the
aspirations of our time. Her wall hangings have the living warmth and the
thickness of fleece; their complex structure and their shadows seem to chisel out
perspectives attributable only to dream palaces; they offer the mellow depth,
radiance and mystery of the starry sky. Nothing better than this art could provide
altogether the adornment and the antidote for the functional, utilitarian
architecture in which we are sentenced to dwell. It enlivens it with the dense,
patient work of human hands, and the inventive charms of a creative mind
constantly stimulated by experiencing the gamut of those new materials which
modern industry supplies, while remaining faithful to the immemorial rules of the
most ancient perhaps of all arts of civilization.
387

Beginning with “ancient Peru,” Levi-Strauss connects the precedents and inspirations for Hicks’s
earliest works to the new sites of the Global South newly informing her work of the late 1960s,
naming India and “Persia” as new touchstones. Though not significantly involved in
contemporary Iran, Hicks had made a point to visit Afghanistan (a nation whose modern territory
was historically associated with several “Persian” empires of centuries past). She advertised the
journey to her peers with a picture of herself and Magdalena Abanokowicz in burkas (which
effectively obscured their identity, rendering them anonymous if not for its caption’s disclosure)

387
Claude Levi-Strauss, in Sheila Hicks: Murs et Fibres (Paris: Galerie Suzy Langlois, 1969).

209
in her self-published Boutonnière (also Buttonhole), a pamphlet Hicks began to author and
circulate as part of her recurring participation in the Lausanne Biennials.
388
As Hicks’s hand-
selected interpreter, Levi-Strauss reinforces the diagnosis that Hicks’s evolution into the
dimensional in the late 1960s was a development toward the discourse of the sculptural, aligning
her with ancient Peruvian “bas relief and even sculpture out of threads.” To Levi-Strauss’s expert
eye, Hicks’s “original discoveries” renew these ancient traditions (à la Kubler’s notion of the
series) not by “copying them” but interestingly, “appropriate them to the raw materials, the
techniques and the aspirations of our time.” Here, Levi-Strauss anticipates a core issue in the
aesthetics and ethics of cultural exchange, one that shaped earlier modernist primitivism and
continues to charge contemporary cultural debates surrounding cultural appropriation. Once
again, the importance of “raw materials” is made clear, echoing Hicks and Krauss, but Levi-
Strauss importantly sophisticates their impact, underscoring that it is not simply matter in it of
itself that is of interest, but the skilled techniques it can index when presented as an abstraction
coupled with a psychic, generational significance also, what Levi-Strauss calls “the aspirations of
our time.”
Toward the passage’s middle and end, Levi-Strauss’s attention turns to architecture,
describing “complex structures” which “chisel out perspectives attributable only to dream
palaces.” Scorning bland manifestations of architectural modernism, Levi-Strauss admonishes
the cold, hard-edged interpretations of modernist architecture increasingly ubiquitous in public
and private spaces of the late twentieth century. Describing Hicks’s work as “the antidote for the
functional, utilitarian architecture,” like a prison in which “we are sentenced to dwell,” Levi-
Strauss’s rejection of a certain strain of modernism, especially an anti-affective, minimalist

388
Sheila Hicks, Buttonhole (May 1977).

210
impulse is clear, clarifying Hicks’s distinction and dialectical relationship to both her
architectural and sculptural forebears, from chilly corporate lobbies to the milled metal boxes of
Donald Judd. Instead of a de-personalized machine aesthetic that represses the affect of
handmaking, Hicks’s work, “enlivens…with the dense, patient work of human hands and the
inventive charms of a creative mind.” For her own part, Hicks would rehearse the material
universalism that Levi-Strauss’s anthropological approach gave to textiles, stating for many
years variations on the conviction that, “in all the cultures of the world, textile is a crucial and
essential component. Therefore if you’re beginning with thread, you’re half way home. There’s a
level of familiarity that immediately breaks down any prejudice.”
389

Asked about her relationship to the minimalism of “Judd, Andre and Richard Serra,”
sculptor Jackie Winsor reached for a similarly universal, potentially pre-historic or ancient
mindset, stating that “they weren’t the first abstractionists.”
390
Winsor’s twine wrapped logs
suggest a sculptural vocabulary developed out of and alongside a logic of rugged life embedded
not in the modern city but the forest, a twentieth century frontier where ancient techniques were
potentially still alive in acts of craftmanship. Describing maybe her most famous work, Hang-Up
Eva Hesse remarked “it’s almost primitive in its construction. It’s very naïve in the way it’s
constructed.”
391
Recognizing watchwords such as “primitive” and “naïve” alive both explicitly
and implicitly in the motivations of this generation of artists, my contention is to recognize the
abstractionists of this era (Serra, Hesse, Winsor, Hicks, Araeen, etc.) as a generational hinge,
aware enough of earlier, dominantly figurative modernist primitivism not to repeat it and far

389
Ford Foundation, “Sheila Hicks: Begin with Thread,” YouTube video, 4:56, October 14, 2014,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6AmOfuBw5s.
390
Whitney Chadwick, “Jackie Winsor,” Oxford Art Online, https://www.oxfordartonline.com/page/jackie-winsor.
391
Helen Molesworth, “Eva Hesse: Oh, More Absurdity,” Recording Artists, produced by Zoe Goldman and Gideon
Brower (2019; Los Angeles: Getty Center), podcast, https://www.getty.edu/recordingartists/season-1/hesse/.

211
enough removed to move beyond its limitations. Their abstraction was informed by a less naïve
and colonially skewed understanding of the cultures that fascinated them, from Winsor’s
Newfoundland woods to Hicks’s “principal wife” and interest in “fetish-making / Illusions and
object-worship.” As Hesse’s interpretation of her own work suggests, this generation’s art was
embedded not in appropriated icons or figurative images, but rather what was imagined to be a
primary, universal vocabulary of material techniques or logics of construction.
Despite the popularity and influence of figures like Levi-Strauss or the promise of
universal connection in the “anthropological imagery” he and Krauss detected, the value of this
anthropological turn in art did not carry on uncontested. James Monte, curator of the Whitney’s
1969 Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials questioned the ease of displaying raw materials alone
in the exhibition’s catalogue, stating, “the notion that materials alone possess some shamanistic
artistic properties, which, because of their new or exotic nature, can guarantee the quality of
painting or sculpture has been consistently disproven by the offerings of many artists over the
past few years.”
392
Such work then existed on an ironic fault-line. In Monte’s estimation, while
this work fetishized the look of the raw and unprocessed, the skilled hand of the artist was still
palpable in works of real quality. Levi-Strauss affirmed this idea in describing Hicks as
“antidote,” because of her work’s visualization of “the dense, patient work of human hands,”
evidence of skilled craft and process palpable in the finished work. Exceeding warnings such as
Monte’s, this late modernist faith in a shamanistic ideal would none-the-less continue to mount
across the increasingly global art world until this imaginary was infamously called to question by
the numerous critics of the exhibitions “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal
and the Modern, 1984-5 and Magiciens de la Terre, 1989. The strong critique of both exhibitions

392
James Monte, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969), 4.

212
has obscured post-minimalism’s search for a cross-cultural form of abstraction embedded in
material and process.
You Say to Brick
Building upon the architectural diagnosis alive in Levi-Strauss’s writing on Hicks, in
Constantine and Larsen’s Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric, we are offered the following origin
story for the evolution of Hicks’s work from the largely planar occupations of the preceding
chapters to the more dimensional formats of the late 1960s:
During a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, she was struck
by the magic of a single brick transformed through structural
multiplication into a wall. Her fertile mind saw the equivalence of
the simple brick to a single pliable thread. Structure began to take
form, to be manipulated, and to be composed. For Hicks, an idea
that has its own logic may start with just such a single element.
Realization began with two different kinds of forms:
Banisteriopsis, composed of over 3,000 similar elements which she
describes as pony tails; and Principal Wife, which began as single,
unrelated elements made by wrapping massed warps.
393

Echoing Monte’s skepticism, Hicks’s bricks are not “shamanistic” but they are “magic.” The
passage narrates the tension between platonic ideals (“structure” and “form”) and their
embodiment, dependent on the skilled, hand-labor required to manifest them as material things.
The phrase, “a single brick transformed through structural multiplication into a wall,” notably
represses the labor of its bricklayers. This way of speaking encourages us to forget the skilled
humans that lift the bricks and assemble them into a pattern locked by mortar. The only index of
the bricklayers in this diction is the wall they leave behind. In lines that assure us of “an idea that
has its own logic,” we might detect echoes of the tenets of conceptual art outlined by Sol Lewitt
in 1967, including that the idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” and particularly, Lewitt’s

393
Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen, Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (Kodansha International, 1972), 178.

213
insistence that, “execution is a perfunctory affair.”
394
For Robert Pincus-Witten (credited with
coining the term post-minimalism), such thinking would lead to process art’s imagination of
materials that drive themselves into being, as articulated by works like “The Drawings That
Make Themselves by Dorothea Rockburne.”
395
Even as they picture Hicks staring at a brick wall
under construction, Constantine and Larsen stress formal idea as prior and primary over any
subsequent labor. They repress the novel material dimension of Hicks’s work, much as Monte
had in remarking on Anti-Illusion.
The story of Hicks and the bricks calls to mind not only the tensions of conceptualism but
a particular instance of minimalism too. While Hicks began work on the yellow Banisteriopsis in
1965 after staring at a brick wall and “noticing the equivalence of the simple brick to a single
pliable thread” (emphasis mine), Carl Andre offered up another low-lying yellow work,
Equivalent VIII, a platform of bricks, similarly stacked, six wide, ten long, and two tall in 1966.
As Julia Bryan-Wilson has argued, as much as Andre’s Equivalent VIII ties him to a legacy of
working-class crafts like bricklaying it also testifies, because of its distinct formal differences
from an actual wall, to the real social and vocational distinction between the sculptor and the
mason, even at this tempting moment when they are apparently so very close. Bryan-Wilson
claims, “Equivalent VIII lets us see precisely what bricklaying is not—it is not a matter of merely
arranging bricks on the ground, especially not flush on top of each.”
396
Hicks’s sculptural works
perpetuate this tension. They paradoxically register the work of a sophisticated craftsperson,
while also seeking an aesthetic or intellectual definition, to be more than a wall, or a wall

394
Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum (June 1967).
395
Robert Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism (Out of London Press, 1977).
396
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London:
University of California Press, 2009), 43.

214
hanging. To make a statement of Hicks, Constantine, and Larsen’s carefully chosen titles: they
“evolve” “beyond craft.”
Much of minimalism and postminimalism (take for example, Eva Hesse’s Expanded
Expansion, 1969) was haunted by the paradox of craft labor in the modern museum art, often
approximating the constructive syntax of walls as their double while also repressing their
precedent, seeking to express their ability to exist without architectural support, to liberate or
articulate their difference from the built environment. As sculpture increasingly lost the body as
a visual referent or even phenomenological point of comparison, it inevitably set itself into
conversation with the built environments it entered and courted comparison with architecture and
interiors. Despite introducing a table (his first in a large line of furniture) in 1970 hot on the heels
of his remarkably formally similar Untitled, 1969 (which was arguably the model for it), Donald
Judd subsequently and energetically policed the difference between art and design, likely
because he recognized his own work’s susceptibility to such confusion.
397
Although not always
so obviously about architecture, sculpture of the late 1960s and 1970s certainly looked less about
beings and more about buildings, drawing attention to forms evocative of habitation and
processes of construction, or building-as-action.
398
Jackie Winsor would credit her upbringing,
recalling her father “building houses…in my childhood I was as familiar with a plumb and
square as I was with oatmeal.”
399
Attracted to references that were rural and antimodern, Winsor
and her peers put potential confusion with minimalist modernist design at a distance and courted
affiliation with other references without departing from the imaginary of architecture and
building wholesale. Whereas Winsor’s diction of logs, rope, and twine evoked an architectural

397
Leah Pires, “A Chair Is a Chair,” Triple Canopy (April 21, 2015):
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/a-chair-is-a-chair.
398
Getsy, Abstract Bodies, 8.
399
Whitney Chadwick, “Jackie Winsor,” Oxford Art Online, https://www.oxfordartonline.com/page/jackie-winsor.

215
vocabulary derived from her childhood in rural Newfoundland, one devised to protect against the
cold climates of the North Atlantic and make use of natural materials typical thereabout, Hicks
gravitated to a syntax derived on the one hand from the unitary logic of standardized elements
like bricks coupled with the soft architecture of textiles configured as tents—indicative of
architectural traditions further south.
To witness how this fantasy extended to contemporary theorizations of more literal
architecture, recall Louis Kahn’s parable of a conversation with a brick: “You say to brick,
‘What do you want, brick?” Brick says to you, ‘I like an arch”—a fable Hicks’s would have
likely heard more than once, exposed as she was to Kahn’s crits as a student at Yale. When stuck
for an idea, Kahn encouraged his students to ask their materials what they wanted to be, an
advocacy for self-governing that moves beyond universal humanism to imagine all material as
animate and enfranchised. Kahn’s bricks are imagined as self-determining according to their
material inclinations, just like the bricks Hicks witnessed in the garden. Many of Kahn’s most
noteworthy buildings made imaginative use of the humble brick in postcolonial settings during
this period, like the Institute of Management, 1962-75 in Ahmedabad, India, and the National
Assembly, 1961-82 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a building that gave powerful monumental form to
the work of parliamentary self-governing. Both buildings materialize a powerful reconciliation of
modernist monumentality with local needs, materials, and construction skills. As Krauss claimed
for Hesse, Kahn idealized an “archaic” space anachronistically realized in the twentieth century,
saying he desired to build “ruins in reverse,” a potentially problematic aspiration especially as he
ventured into Extra-western contexts long exoticized by Western intellectuals and artists for their
apparent counterpoint to modern urbanization in the West.

216
At its most basic level, this movement away from the wall and into space, for Western
artists as diverse as Hicks, Hesse, and Kahn should be interpreted as a gesture toward liberation,
suggesting an analogy imaginatively mapped onto actual bodies. Fiber artist Sheila Pepe would
hit on this equation in Women are Bricks (Mobile Bricks), 1983, a set of handmade bricks
arrayed atop cement rollers across a found carpet. The work echoes the tale of Hicks and the
bricks almost too well, materializing its various elements and points of reference while
heightening the stakes of its inquiry as well. As Pepe’s piece explores, the brick (maybe like any
unit) is ripe for anthropomorphic projection, in this instance imagined as a diverse assembly of
women engineering a means of individual and collective mobility—and atop the carpet, alluding
to the textile’s historic and contemporary facilitation of nomadic and mobile rather than fixed
architectures.
For her part, and counter to the permanent monumentality of Kahn’s work, Hicks
explored her medium’s own historic mobility, essential to its dual architectural and decorative
function across cultures but especially those (usually extra-Western or Indigenous) defined by
nomadic existence. As if trying to unravel a puzzle, she wrote:
Tapestries have hung on wall.
Tapestries have been walls.

Dwelling have been tents.
Tapestries have been walls.

Nomads move their dwellings.
Tents, walls, tapestries move.

217

Walk around inside the tent.
Circle the outside.
Inside the tapestry. . .
Outside the tapestry. . .

Then ON the tapestry
UNDER the tapestry.

Inside, outside, on, under
a t a p e s t r y.
Facades and fetish-making
Illusions and object-worhsip
Hieroglyphic messages written with thread
twined, knotted, woven, braided, wrapped
400

Hicks notes how, breaking with the paradigm usual for Western architecture, textiles have often
served as mobile walls, walls that do not stay put but are designed to move. Historic and
contemporary comparisons abound, from the tipis erected by various Indigenous groups across
North America to the lavishly decorated panels of Mughal rulers in early modern India to the
lyrical profiles built by the Tuareg people of Africa. During her time in Morocco, Hicks would
have witnessed whole cities arising alongside the logic of both temporary and semi-fixed tent

400
Sheila Hicks, letter to W. Bertheux (Dec. 28, 1968), Stedelijk Archives [SC60056NC], Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam.

218
and strung textile architectures, such as those strung across the thoroughfares and above the stalls
of the souks of Rabat or the Djema el Fna in Marrakesh.
401

In her notes on Banisteriopsis, Hicks compares it to the monumental, permanent
architecture of the Mayan temples at Uxmal, though encouraged by her meditation on “tents”
and the dwelling of “nomads” here, comparison with more mobile, less permanent architectures
is equally logical. The bundled thatching of Banisteriopsis echoes the constructive texture of a
Shepherd’s hut of the Thar desert, near Khuhri, Rajasthan, India or the bundled packages, also
vibrantly yellow, that create the façade of an El Molo hut in Kenya [see figure 79]. The layered
folds, piled sensibility, and earthen palette of browns, burnt reds, and toasted almonds of
MoMA’s The Evolving Tapestry are well-matched by the huts of the Rendille, also of northern
Kenya.
Serving multiple functions, the “tapestry” may function vertically as an internal or
external wall, or horizontally, so that users stand “on” it as a floor or “under” its ceiling.
Underscoring a similar mobility and universality of textiles as architectural precedent, early and
many contemporary “dwellings” were and are textile, as Hicks asserts, “tents,” that facilitated
nomadic rather than fixed, soft as opposed to hard architectures. In addition to this transcultural,
transhistoric architectural imaginary, Hicks also animates the textual image of “tapestry” into an
incredibly shifting thing, mirroring the temporary, mobile status of tapestries and tents that
fascinated her. Hicks’s words chart how the identity, the definition of tapestry is shaped by a
phenomenological observation, recognizing the mobility and architectonics of tapestry, that
“tents, walls, tapestries move,” but also by moving the observing body around it in order to

401
As pictured in, Jean and Franc Shor, “From Sea to Sahara in French Morocco: Jet Planes Lace Vapor Trails over
Modern Farms, but in the Markets of Marrakech You Can Buy an Evil Eye for Three Centes,” National Geographic,
(Feb. 1955), 172-173.

219
understand “t a p e s t r y” as something literally interpenetrated by bodies and contextualizing
spaces, so that a “tapestry” is always dependent or predicated on some question of support like
the proverbial wall.
Making an object of these observations, like Equivalent VIII and Banisteriopsis, The
Evolving Tapestry offers the form of a low wall. It condenses the possibility that the tapestry
could become its own wall, manifest its own support. Yet, in their soft and short stature, these
stacks propose not monumental, finished, fixed and supportive walls. Rather, they look like a
parapet or a wall still in the process of construction. Manifesting the process of craftsmanship,
the shift from raw material to constructed thing, these works stop short of architectural function
in order to preserve a kind of epistemological questioning. They still process, stacking it up to
make it stand still. As Hicks’s allusion to Uxmal evidences, their contextual relationship to the
architectural and material cultures of North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia traced above
developed precedents logically encountered in Hicks’s own peripatetic trajectory. The logic of
Hicks’s stacks also echoes similar profiles, thatched textures and techniques, and lash-bound
architectural constructions found in Mexico and both the contemporary material culture and
ancient artifacts she would have encountered in the Andes such as the brush piles collected for
use as fuel in lieu of wood and coal, or alternatively, the textile-dense and stringy mummy
bundles excavated by modern archeologists at sites such as Pachacamac.
402
Combining motifs of
masonry and antique temples with those of stacked logs and the architectural possibilities of the
nomadic tent, they counter the typical, fixed architecture of the Western gallery.
403

402
As pictured in William H. Prescott, “The Luster of Ancient Mexico,” National Geographic (July 1916), 7; and
Philip Ainsworth Means and H.M. Herget, “The Incas: Empire Builders of the Andes,” National Geographic (Feb.
1938), 262 and 239.
403
Simultaneous to stacks like Banisteriopsis, 1965-66 and The Evolving Tapestry, 1967-8 Hicks developed
suspended works like The Principal Wife, 1968. They twin and develop this architectural motif in that they

220
Fantasies in the Garden
In the same note theorizing the nomadic associations of textiles, Hicks underscored the
collapse of time and geography courted by the potentially ancient “anthropological imagery” of
her work (and that of her peers at the Lausanne Tapestry Biennials), asking, “How to distinguish
between those made by the virgin weavers of Machu Picchu and the violated Biennalle
(candidates( aspirants?”
404
Contrasting the “virgin” to the “violated,” Hicks’s rhetorical
question not only adapts Krauss’s demarcation between raw and processed, but also projects it
onto the human body, using the diction of sexual assault to do so. Such thinking suggests a
feminist mind, alive to the vulnerability of women in both ancient and contemporary society, and
projects this critique onto inanimate, abstract art and the questions it raises for spectators trying
to understand and set it into a timeline. Although never explicitly figurative, Hicks’s works of
the late 60s and after increasingly evoked human bodies. The overtones of Hicks’s diction are
especially notable for her, as she resists identification as a feminist or any framing of her work as
that of a “woman artist,” even as her titles and textures increasingly allude to women and female
experience (beginning explicitly with The Principal Wife, 1968), encouraging the viewer to see
them as mindful of feminist political movements and consciousness raising especially as they
attempted to globalize during this period.
Before anthologies of feminist writing like Sisterhood is Powerful and Sisterhood is
Global (edited by Robin Morgan in 1970 and 1984, respectively) would concretize this global

approximate the verticality of a pillar, introducing an eccentric profile when measured against actual structural
pillars likely already shaping the space they enter. Playful and ambient, responsive to a passing draft or potential
touch, they do not pretend to be load-bearing. Drawing attention to an exceptional pillar recalls the classical motif of
the caryatid, a column that takes the form of a woman. This motif points to a theory of architectural style particular
to columns, where classical types such as Doric and Ionic were thought to indicate particularly gendered
sensibilities, from the rational male to the more eccentric female. Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary
of Modern Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 2000), 44-60.
404
Sheila Hicks, letter to W. Bertheux (Dec. 28, 1968), Stedelijk Archives [SC60056NC], Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam.

221
turn, the question of feminism’s global potential was an investigation underway in Hicks’s work
and that of her peers. In Postminimalism, 1978, Robert Pincus-Witten claimed that a “new set of
formal and moral values,” had questioned the old guard of abstraction, and arose out of “despair
over the conduct of American politics (Vietnam, Watergate etc.), and energized by the
insurgency and success of the Women’s Movement.”
405
In order to understand this new art,
Pincus-Witten draws an intersectional, geopolitical map that expands beyond the Euro-American
West as both an aesthetic and political field, tying the international conflict of Vietnam to the
response of feminist activism, all leading back to developments in contemporary art. Several
paragraphs later Pincus-Witten reiterates, “the new style’s relationship to the women’s
movement cannot be overly stressed; many of its formal attitudes and properties, not to mention
its exemplars, derive from methods and substances that hitherto had been sexistically [sic] tagged
as female or feminine, whether or not the work had been made by women.”
406
Writing from the
vantage point of the more legibly politicized art world and culture of the late 1970s United
States, Pincus-Witten casts postminimalism as a kind of transitional style, heading toward the
more iconographic, explicit strategies of what we traditionally understand as feminist art. Shortly
thereafter Ana Mendieta would introduce “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World
Women Artists of the United States,” 1980 at the feminist A.I.R Gallery by articulating the
exclusion of women of color like herself, stating “American Feminism as it stands is basically a
white middle class movement…this exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or
incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will
to continue being ‘other.’”
407
Pincus-Witten and Mendieta’s remarks underscore the potential of

405
Robert Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism (Out of London, 1977), 14
406
Pincus-Witten, 16.
407
Ana Mendieta, Introduction, Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United
States, exhibition catalogue (New York: A.I.R. Gallery, 1980).

222
feminism to revise both the art world and society at large. Theirs was an overtly political,
embodied reading, one that has largely been lost in our contemporary understanding of the stakes
of postminimalism, process art, or abstraction generally after minimalism—though its recovery
is underway by scholars more recently attending to abstraction’s ability to conjure questions of
race and gender during this period.
408
I turn back to these signal critics, including Pincus-Witten,
Krauss, and Mendieta, in part to align Hicks with the influential history and theories of advanced
art they established, but also to use Hicks’s work to revive what I see as the recognition of a
humanist, universalist dimension that sought abstract forms to concretize a spirit of transnational,
cross-cultural feminist solidarity between subjects around the world.
Returning to Passages in Modern Sculpture, Krauss insists that no matter its strangeness
(whether because of its abstraction, materiality or something else) that at its most primary level,
“our bodies and our experience of our bodies continue to be the subject of this sculpture.”
409
No
exception, Hicks’s compositions are definitively her most anthropomorphic works, not least
because within her oeuvre they are the closest in scale to the human body. As has already been
faintly outlined, this begins with their conveyance of a sense of weight and heft, an amount of
mass that approximates that of the human body. In fiber, Hicks’s works offer a fantasy of an
extremely pliable body, one with the power to transform itself and its relationships to others—
echoing the artistic processing and curatorial re-arrangement the literal material itself proposes.
The title Banisteriopsis comes from the Latin plant name Baanisteriopsis Caapi, more
popularly known as ayahuasca, which is used, as Hicks notes, “by the Jivaro Indians for

408
See Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016); David
Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2015); Anna Katz, With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-85 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2019).
409
Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 279.

223
hallucinatory experiences.”
410
Elsewhere, in an undated sketchbook entry, Hicks created a hand
inscribed, illustrated list of “Drogues,” including “Pavot” (poppy), “Chanvre Indien” (Indian
hemp), “Hallucinogènes,” and “Barbituriques,” and exhibited it as part of her 2018 retrospective
at the Pompidou, quietly encouraging viewers to imagine her work produced or heightened by an
altered state. Drawing from both the experience and the sight of the body in space, Hicks’s
sculptural works encourage spectators to imagine an experience that defies the limitations of the
human form.
Crucially, while these works are abstract, they are not free from external reference.
Instead, like characters from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the forms these sculptures configure are
metamorphic. They are both literally pliable and rearrange-able, while also condensing a variety
of visual cues that liken the body of the viewer to everything from pyramids to plants, from the
biological, like corn, to the industrial, filled with conveyor belts. This metaphoric, metamorphic
logic gives Hicks’s sculptures, from Banisteriopsis and The Evolving Tapestry to The Principal
Wife tension and power, tempting the viewer into a flight of association and fantasy. As James
Monte’s invocation of the “shamanistic” suggests, such work also put faith in sculpture’s ability
to occasion not only a physical but a metaphoric and even metaphysical transformation for its
artists and spectators.
In her essay, “What Women Do, or the Poetics of Sculpture,” Anne Wagner describes
how Banisteriopsis is “heaped in giant piles that together somehow manage to evoke…stacks of
military braid in need of a uniform.”
411
Wagner sees a reference to costume, particularly the

410
Hicks would not be the only sculptor to connect ayahuasca to the drive to give form to matter. For one, the
Englishman Julian Haynes would build a seven-story pyramid floating upon the Amazon outside Iquitos, Peru: Ted
Mann, “Magnificent Visions,” Vanity Fair, Nov. 2011, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/12/amazon-201112.
411
Anne Wagner, “What Women Do, or The Poetics of Sculpture,” in ed. Jenni Sorkin and Paul Schimmel,
Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture By Women, 1947-2016 (Hauser & Wirth/Skira, 2016), 81.

224
regalia that denotes a member of the military (this reference would become explicit in
continuations of the series in formally similar works like Full Regalia, 2007). The idea of a
soldier, of military men, indicates a masculine presence. In 2016, noting that “a bright tropical
humidity comes off this piece like steam,” the critic Sebastian Smee finds “straight, muscular
tubes,” that are ultimately “kinky” in Bamian (Banyan), a diction that on the one hand points to
“straight” or normative sexuality, contrasted with the frisson of kink. He concludes that, “the
dangling suggests relaxation. But there is something strenuous and determined about these lower
branches. They corkscrew cruelly through space, like boys’ boarding-school towels given an
extra twist or two.”
412
As Smee intimates despite their apparent abstraction (or all the more
because of it), these works consistently conjure gendered reactions, at times coupled with latent
eroticism.
As scholars such as David Getsy suggest, to detect and acknowledge such cues generally
runs counter to both the discourses surrounding both abstraction’s production and
interpretation—an inclination that has historically kept feminist (and related, subsequent queer)
art historical approaches afield of abstraction as a mode of visual culture.
413
While Wagner and
Smee here suggest a masculine presence, more often it is the feminine that is invoked in Hicks’s
forms. Allow me to return to the passage offered by Larsen and Constantine in Beyond Craft, this
time with a sharper sense of Parisian geography in hand. While there may be brick walls in the
Luxembourg Gardens, there are also Beaux-Arts figurative sculptures, a prominent feature
omitted from Constantine and Larsen’s description of the setting. The Luxembourg gardens are a

412
Sebastian Smee, “Modernism, in All Its Sensual Delight,” BostonGlobe.Com, February 23, 2016,
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2016/02/23/modernism-all-its-sensual-
delight/JbwEjj3JI3lIFWsi5x05oK/story.html.
413
David Getsy, Abstract Bodies, 1-41; for evidence of the absence of abstraction within the purview of feminism
and visual culture studies, see Amelia Jones, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (Routledge, 2003).

225
markedly gendered territory, featuring a variety of sculptures, including an exhaustive program
of queens of France as well as other women of historical note.
414
Visiting these figures (in one
after another, after another, after another—) one finds signs and details of the same elaborate
costumes Wagner detects in Banisteriopsis. Where else have so many heroically dressed (as
opposed to nudely displayed) sculptural women stood, surveying a capital of culture with such
dominion?
The idea of the garden, coupled with the hallucinogenic promise of Banisteriopsis,
imagine an ideal setting where some kind of magic may be possible, as in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, where the dramatic festal action is only possible once the protagonists have left the
reality of town for the possibility of the forest where gendered hierarchies may be reversed.
While it may not confuse us as completely as Puck’s flower does the lovers in Shakespeare’s
play, or as ayahuasca might, Banisteriopsis and the compositions that follow in its wake cultivate
a space for a kind of magical thinking, for a thinking other than the normative tradition, not only
the academic, figurative, memorial precedents in the Luxembourg Gardens but also the
contemporary trajectory of sculpture figured by Minimalism and Andre’s bricks discussed
earlier. If late modernist abstraction and its post-minimalist phase in particular sought a style of
humanist universals at the level of material and technique as I have argued, this inquiry led
Hicks’s gendered sculptures to a comparative meditation on gender and the role of women in
societies. If one of its metaphors is botanical, we might say that Banisteriopsis grows from the
same soil as Equivalent VIII, but rearranges similar conceptual elements to create a world of

414
Including: Anne of Austria, Anne of Brittany, Anne of France, Anne Marie Louise of Orléans, Bertha of
Burgundy, Blanche of Castile, Clémence Isaure, Jeanne III of Navarre, Laure de Noves, Louise of Savoy, Margaret
of Anjou, Margaret of Provence, Marguerite of Navarre, Marie de' Medici, Mary, Queen of Scots, Matilda, Duchess
of Normandy, Saint Bathild, Saint Clotilde, Saint Genevieve, and Valentina Visconti.

226
forms that is decidedly distinct. They rethink the history of sculpture and encourage an
alternative history of women’s role in that history to take root.
Let Down Your Hair
The most pronounced evocation of the gendered body in these works is undoubtedly
thread’s evocation of hair. They convincingly conjure the image of great quantities of
mammalian hair, grown to extreme lengths and manipulated into strange forms. Describing the
works and confirming this formal sense, Hicks calls the tasseling units ponytails.
415
The yellow
ponytails, the basic units of Banisteriopsis, evoke the sporty hairstyle of a young, blonde, girl,
hyperbolizing the possible femininity that radiates out from the work.
416
Confirming that Hicks’s
work was repeatedly understood as gendered female, in the same review Larsen claims that, “a
great ‘Prayer Rug’ seems conservative in contrast, aloof like a well-bred matron.”
417

Joan Simon describes the tufts of Banisteriopsis and The Evolving Tapestry as “bundles,”
and argues that this form derives from the “mummy bundles and wigs (pelucas) [Hicks] had seen
and photographed in South America.”
418
In addition to these formal touchstones, the seeds of the
suspensions and the stacks were sown by earlier works made in Mexico, as evidenced by

415
We hear this nomenclature in the earliest discussions of these works by her and others, suggesting that this mode
of understanding emerged contemporaneously or soon after they were made. For example, in his review of
Perspectief en Textiel, Jack Lenor Larsen claimed that Hicks, “describes them as being ponytails. They are bundles
of wrapped yarns turning on themselves and at the other end thousands of fine yarns cascading on themselves.”
415

We may jump quickly to associating the “ponytail” with human hairstyling, but Hicks later suggested something
more literal, stating, “Think of a horse and think of a tail. And think of pulling linen strands into that shape and then
griping them and wrapping them together.” As such, the formal element of the ponytail efficiently condenses a
metaphoric conduit between humans and the animal kingdom.
416
This intense sense of the feminine was not unique to Hicks’s work but endemic to fiber across its manifestations,
as has been articulated by Adamson, Elissa Auther and Jenelle Porter. For a summary of their readings, see Jenelle
Porter et al., Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present, 19.
417
Larsen, "The New Weaving," 50.
418
Joan Simon, Sheila Hicks 50 Years, 102. Simon’s diction may be the result of her desire to link these works to the
quixotic and mystical description of George Kubler in The Shape of Time. She invokes one of his most iconic
passages: “We can imagine the flow of time as assuming the shapes of fibrous bundles…with each fiber
corresponding to a need upon a particular theater of action, and the solution to its problems. The cultural bundles
therefore consist of variegated fibrous lengths of happening, mostly long, and many brief.” George Kubler, as
quoted by Joan Simon, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, 102.

227
Tenancingo, 1960 or the looser assortment of works Hicks referred to then as wigs, sleeves or
skirts, such as wig, 1960 [See Figure 16-17] or Falda, 1960.
419
Evoking the cords of the
suspensions, these works grow wormy strands from a roughly cylindrical base and are especially
suggestive of hair cascading from a human head. They resemble sea anemones, or as Hicks
suggests in naming them, some strange kind of hair accessory or eccentric garment.
Tenancingo’s tangled cascade of very fine black threads conjures the specter of a decapitated
head, one so shaggy as to be formally overtaken by hair and lose its face in the follicle fantasy.
Holding it, one is confronted with the approximate weight and certainly the scale of a human
head, as well as the spine-tingling but also sensually alluring sensation of stroking one’s fingers
through the hair of an intimate.
In The Principal Wife, without the passages of intense wrapping, one can imagine the raw
linen hanging without interruption, presenting a thick opaque surface of relaxed threads like a
bounty of long gray hair let down in the morning after one has just woken up.
420
Loose and
unbound, the familiar strands suggest the complete relaxation, the abandonment of comportment,
decorum and the polish of self-consciousness we achieve while sleeping, or when just beginning
to rouse. That said, the raw linen is never completely free in these works. The wrapping and the
intense bands of color produce a dynamic of visual difference so that the cords continually move
between states of constriction and relaxation, creating a kind of internal pulse in the work as it
flits in and out of the negative space at its margins. Exposed and free versus controlled or
covered hair was often historically taken as a sign of a woman’s marital status, and if not this,

419
The name Tenancingo comes from a town and municipality in central Mexico, particularly known for the
production of rebozos, a type of shawl, woven here since the colonial period. Hicks’s wigs, skirts and sleeves are
mentioned briefly and pictured in Sheila Hicks (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1974), 11.
420
I am reminded of that worn by Meryl Streep as Clarissa Vaughn or Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in the
opening sequence of The Hours, 2002.

228
her age or psychic liberation. In title as well, The Principal Wife genders, insists on its
femininity, its status as a wife.
In search of a genealogy for such objects particular to Hicks and noting the funereal
overtones of mummy bundles and Tenancingo, one might trace them back to various elegiac
objects, such as painted portrait miniatures where actual hair was incorporated into the painted
pigment; jewelry, where hair was woven into a band for a bracelet; or even wreaths [See Figure
64]. Notably, human, or animal hair is a part of the body especially resistant to decay after death.
In a slightly different but related key, in addition to their pharmaceutical pursuits, the “Jivaro
Indians” mentioned by Hicks for Banisteriopsis are noted for their practice of taking and
producing shrunken heads.
421
Here, Hicks’s material culture sets the potentially Western,
suburban American associations embedded in the iconography of “ponytails” initiated with
Banisteriopsis into conversation with human hair or other suspended adornments preserved and
falling from the crown of a shrunken head—such as the feather tassels crafted by the
Mundurucú. Both may and have become objects of the museum.
422

Hicks has also compared these objects with the material culture of the pre-conquest
Andes: “Think of the intricately knotted fringe of a Paracas mantle or an ancient plaited wig: the
way the yarn ends were handled, and then enlarge it 20 times.” One especially well-known
mantle, made by the Nazca people of Peru around 100-300 C.E., carries a fringe border of
metamorphic anthropomorphic figures, “humans impersonating gods and acting as
intermediaries between the real and supernatural worlds,” underscoring that Hicks’s twentieth-

421
Rahul Jandial, et. al. "The science of shrinking human heads: tribal warfare and revenge among the South
American Jivaro-Shuar." Neurosurgery 55, no. 5 (2004): 1215-1221; Wm. C. Farabee, "Mummified Jivaro Heads,"
The Museum Journal, Penn Museum, Vol. X No. 4, 1919, accessed via web: 04 Jan 2021,
http://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/738/.
422
Geraldine Kendall Adams, “Pitt Rivers Museum removes shrunken heads from display after ethical review,”
Museums Association, 18 September 2020, https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-
journal/news/2020/09/pitt-rivers-museum-removes-shrunken-heads-from-display-after-ethical-review/#.

229
century abstractions seek a way to figure a similarly molten performance for the modern subject
even in a time of scientific secularism [see Figure 63]. In this same mantle, “Severed human
trophy heads are shown as germinating seeds, suggesting the practice of ritual sacrifice and the
interconnected cycles of birth and death,” a precedent for the specter of the decapitated head as a
symbol of power and generation in Hicks’s textural vocabulary, as well as one that connects the
human form to that of plants.
423
Building upon these cephalic associations, the fringe of Hicks’s
ponytails (or contemporaneous miniatures such as Écailles, 1976) echo that strung as a device
for tethering stylized masks on the same mummy bundles of the ancient Andes (such as the so-
called False Face for Funerary Bundle, 3
rd
century B.C.-A.D. 1
st
century in the collection of The
Metropolitan Museum of Art) [see figure 45].
Hicks alludes to ancient wigs like those made by the Wari peoples of present day Peru’s
southern coast that crowned mummy bundles with woven caps and body-length braids twined
from real human hair c. 600 CE.
424
Other compelling precedents include examples produced by
ancient Egyptians, where again real human hair braids dipped in beeswax and animal fat
assemble into an unsettling mass.
425
A more mysterious and singular comparison is to be found
in a pair of objects in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art crafted by the Chancay peoples
between 1000-1460. Entitled Representation of a tree (element for figural scene) (by the
museum), they evade classification as a functional textile, and in their branched motif, achieved
via camelid wrappings, suggest trees but also the branching of arteries or rivers.
426
The wrapping
found here anticipates that employed in Tenancingo and many works after. In this particularly,

423
“Mantle (‘The Paracas Textile’),” The Brooklyn Museum, accessed Mar. 16, 2021,
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/48296.
424
“Cap with human hair braids,” Wari Middle Horizon Period, 600-900 BCE, South Coast, Peru, Museum of Fine
Arts Boston. Pictured in Dorie Reents-Budet and Dennis Carr, MFA Highlights: Arts of the Ancient Americas (MFA
Publications, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2019), 48.
425
“Wig,” ca. 1040-992 BC, Third Intermediate Period, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
426
“Representation of a tree (element for figural scene),” Chancay, 1000-1460, Dallas Museum of Art.

230
the wrapped sections preserved the undyed natural off-white of the original fiber, as the rest of
its length was dyed a deep black. Hicks’s borrowed this technique from Ikat precedents, another
insistence that underscores the universality of the wrapping technique, and its ability to furnish a
variety of effects, from coloristic to dimensional shifts.
His or Hers?
Rising from the floor, The Evolving Tapestry: He/ She troubles gendered binaries, as its
alternative, potentially dual pronouns indicate, provocatively appended not to a human person
but to an abstract sculpture. Here it is described by the artist Donald Moffett many years later, in
a provocative essay entitled, “Sex with Sheila Hicks”:
The Evolving Tapestry: He/She (linen and silk, 1967–68) is a big work,
heavy, massive, unstable. It can reach almost human height, though it is
described as ‘dimensions variable.’ It is mutable, changeable, unsettled, of
indeterminate organization. It can become two discrete pieces, separate
but shown together, with a resemblance to figures, abstracted. The title of
the piece encourages you to assign genders to these abstractions.
Inexhaustible and imprecise, the work can also be arranged as an
intertwining of its constituent parts, forming a blended lump of ‘one’
where there had been two. Shuffled, the two figures lose their corporeal
integrity. A carelessness and slight malevolence creep in. Cruelty seeps
out, like a vapor, but it is an acceptable level of cruelty, and in an
acceptable place—where, more precisely, cruelty can be in order, or rather
part of the order, and often is. Like fate. Like nature. Like people.
427

Noting that “it is described as ‘dimensions variable,’” Moffett mocks the standardized language
of the museum, likely a record of that moment many years earlier at MoMA in 1969 when the
museum’s linguistic system was confronted by The Evolving Tapestry, an object that resists
language’s standardization—including the naming of gender. Moffett gives The Evolving
Tapestry weighty significance, calling it “a big work, heavy, massive, unstable.” Describing its
physical gravity recalls Hicks’s own intention and the rawness discussed earlier as a hallmark of

427
Donald Moffett, “Sex with Sheila Hicks,” Art and America, 30 November 2012, accessed August 18, 2017,
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/sex-with-sheila-hicks/.

231
much postminimalism and its pursuit of “anthropological imagery.” That said, reckoning with
this stack of some three thousand handfuls of silk and linen, his description also excavates
(“unstable,” “unsettled,” “imprecise”) its psychological energy.
428

Moffett acknowledges how the work reads “at human height,” as “figures, abstracted,”
and how the title encourages one to “assign genders.” Once separated, the two stacks look quite
similar [see Figure 61]. While its title suggests a clear distinction between male and female
identities, the formal dynamics of The Evolving Tapestry suggest the fluidity between these
categories. The rearrangement of the form, “as an intertwining of its constituent parts, forming a
blended lump of ‘one’ where there had been two” escapes the male/female gender binary
established by the title and creates what might be read as a transgender being, or a being with no
gender at all, somehow the product of mixing He and She.
More provocatively, the possible rearrangement afforded by the format of Hicks’s open
composition defies the bodily and escapes a gendered binary altogether. As Moffett suggests,
“shuffled, the two figures lose their corporeal integrity.” Noting though that there is more that is
formally similar in the separated arrangement of The Evolving Tapestry, as He and She, their
collapsing into one another may not defy so much as confirm its admission all the while that the
distinction of one being from another into gendered roles is largely an imposed projection rather
than a distinction predicated on essential, incommensurable differences. Here again Hicks
plumbs questions that are anthropological, destabilizing the singularity of Western social
conventions and pointing toward possibilities beyond them.
Between the two arrangements, its color and constituent units are constant and
unchanging, and when separated into He and She the difference in relative size between them is

428
This number is provided by Joan Simon, in “Unbiased Weaves,” Sheila Hicks: 50 Years (New Haven, Conn.;
London: Yale University Press, 2010), 102.

232
subtle at best. One would be hard pressed to label one She and the other He without significant
doubt that these labels might not be believably exchanged. Indeed, in her reading of the work,
Cynthia Fowler invokes French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not
born, but rather becomes, a woman,” arguing that the piece invites a recognition of the ways in
which the sculpture explores how identities are externally assigned rather than internally or
essentially decided.
429

In 1977, Hicks recalled how, “[My Father] saw my imaginative powers and felt he had to
help me set boundaries. He began talking about my old doll house and how I shouldn’t expect to
just fold up my life periodically and move on. So I had a tug of war with him, and when I was
seventeen or eighteen I left home and never went back.” Projecting the formal dynamics of The
Evolving Tapestry, to “fold up” and be mobile, both onto herself and onto her childhood doll
house, she casts her father in a kind of Oedipal struggle between parent and child, particularly
gendered here as strong father against possibly stronger daughter. Calling it a “tug of war,”
Hicks configures the scene as a physical as much as mental contest, a conflict importantly
mediated by a fibrous object, a rope, that materializes both the connection and the contrast
between the gendered subjectivities of father and daughter. The taught, phallic rope likewise
recalls Rapunzel’s fairytale braid, a decisive prop for the liberation narrative of a female child.
Hicks continued:
I loved doll houses, because I always wanted a place to live. They were all
collapsible and mobile. I could take them apart, switch around all the
furniture. The people were interchangeable too. ‘Mother’ could be at home
or out working. ‘Father’ could be at home or working. That came from my
feeling that everyone was really replaceable. My own mother and father
had equal say, even equal personality, so they were interchangeable. My
two younger brothers and I grew up with equivalent feelings, and we five

429
Cynthia Fowler, “A Sign of the Times: Sheila Hicks, the Fiber Arts
Movement, and the Language of Liberation,” The Journal of Modern Craft, 7:1 (2014), 36; and Simone de
Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York:Vintage Books, 1973), 301.

233
people were a nucleus always moving in space. In fact, traveling seemed
the natural thing to me.
430

Hicks styles herself as someone for whom feminist ideals, particularly equality,
were a given from an early age; for her, gendered roles, particularly those
demonstrated by compensated labor (“out working”) versus unpaid, domestic
presence (“at home”), were “interchangeable,” much as we see in the duo of He
and She. For Hicks, it is so radical that the real people contained by these
identities are also interchangeable, and (somewhat darkly) replaceable. This is a
vision of family life, of interpersonal relations, where a new family, new siblings,
parents, and later, lovers, husbands and children, is always possible. “Everyone
was really replaceable.” Such thinking embraces and models via abstraction what
would later be called chosen or intentional families.
Hicks posits that this model of radical equality, modeled first as a child at
home and doubled in the aesthetic space of the doll house, foreshadowed both her
and her work’s peripatetic lifestyles, “in fact, traveling seemed the natural thing to
me.” The question of gender in The Evolving Tapestry may in fact be a bit of a red
herring, especially if we imagine it as an allegory between lovers. As much as He
and She imagines sexual partners, it also could be parent and child. As such, the
work materializes the confusion of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage, where the child
explores the strange fact of both their corporeal continuity and severing from the
body of their parent.
431

430
Sheila Hicks, in Eleanor Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979),
365.
431
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative,” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Vincent B.
Leitch, edit. (W.W. Norton, 2010), 1163-1169.

234
What shifts in the division versus the reunion of He and She is the work’s ultimate
silhouette, the character and amount of positive space it can occupy and carve out from the room.
In this way, it may be more accurate to liken The Evolving Tapestry not to a human or even an
animal, but to a monomorphic rather than dimorphic sexual being. Sexual monomorphism is
defined as a “condition in which the two sexes are morphologically similar (e.g., same body size,
form, and color), making it difficult to tell which sex a particular animal is unless the genitalia
can be observed.”
432
This phenomenon may be observed in a variety of species, including
mammals and several primates. Exhibited beside The Principal Wife at MoMA in Wall
Hangings, these works together point to the fact that a high degree of monomorphism, or
morphological similarity, may encourage or shift how common forms of polygamy are in a
species mating behaviors.
433
Noting the formal continuity of these works across time, especially
when Hicks returned to these structures many years later (as in Chords of Accord, 2017), we find
that Hicks’s stacks and suspensions are intensely monomorphic across time, demonstrating a
desire to signify a serial, familial affiliation even in the face of chronology’s and gendered
society’s mandate to differentiate.
Family Trees
As has been said, Hicks drew inspiration for The Principal Wife from witnessing
polygamous family structures, particularly “the extended family connections she saw in North
Africa.”
434
Polygamy was and remains officially recognized by Moroccan law, and, generally
understood as sanctioned by Islamic law was also practiced across North Africa, including in

432
"Sexual monomorphism," Cambridge Dictionary of Human Biology and Evolution, by Larry L. Mai, Marcus
Young Owl, and M. Patricia Kersting (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
433
For an example of this discussion, see Cooper, Jennifer D., Peter M. Waser, Eric C. Hellgren, Timothy M. Gabor,
and J. A. DeWoody, "Is Sexual Monomorphism a Predictor of Polygynandry? Evidence from a Social Mammal, the
Collared Peccary," Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 65, no. 4 (2011): 775-85.
434
“Sheila Hicks, The Principal Wife,” RISD Museum, accessed Mar. 16, 2021,
http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/1207_the_principal_wife.

235
formerly French Algeria and further south and east extending into the Middle East. Despite the
advocacy of women’s rights activists and predictions of its eventual demise, polygamy, or
particularly “polygyny” or the taking of multiple wives survives across a “polygyny belt” that
stretches from Senegal in the west to Tanzania in the east.
435
It was also a practice typical of
populations elsewhere, including the Jivaro peoples referenced by Hicks in relation to
Banisteriopsis. The Principal Wife, by exploring formally “how many parts can become one, and
yet can split and recombine into new, and still whole, units,” employs abstraction to contemplate
an alternative family and related social architecture compared to that typical in Europe and the
United States and in Hicks’s own life.
436
Hicks describes it as such:
THE PRINCIPAL WIFE
The Principal wife is spliced and grafted
together.

te

together.
Spliced and grafted

The Principal Wife is hung from above.

435
Hanan G. Jacoby, “The Economics of Polygyny in Sub-Saharan Africa: Female Productivity and the Demand for
Wives in Côte d'Ivoire,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 103, No. 5 (Oct., 1995), 938- 971; James Fenske,
“African polygamy: Past and present,” Journal of Development Economics, Volume 117 (2015), 58-73.
436
Sheila Hicks, The Principal Wife,” RISD Museum, accessed Mar. 16, 2021,
http://risdmuseum.org/art_design/objects/1207_the_principal_wife.

236
Hung or wrapped around a branch like a Boa Constrictor.

The Principal Wife is dry
but adorned,
turning away.

but adorned,

turning away.
Here we get another metamorphic vision, one where we must hope that what is being described
is a sculpture. Otherwise we become witness to something quite surreal and violent. And yet,
noting that “she” is “dry / but adorned, / turning away,” Hicks suggests the animation only
possible in a living thing. “The Principal Wife is dry,” suggests infertility, a potential rationale
for polygamous marriages. Again, Hicks genders her work as definitively female—but is it
human? Even for a “Boa Constrictor,” it would be especially inhumane to subject a body to
being “spliced and grafted / together / spliced and grafted.”
Indeed, this diction is more appropriate to trees. Not only an accurate description of the
work formally, this is a fantasy of what is afforded by a polygamous system explored through the
structural, genealogical metaphor of the family tree. Always hanging, The Principal Wife

237
dramatizes structural issues of support, but it also points to issues of familial support and
extension. In a backyard snapshot of 1969 we see the naked back of Hicks’s young son, Cristobal
Zañartu, a child of her second marriage to Enrique Zañartu, at play with his slightly elder sister,
Itaka Schlubach, the daughter of Hicks’s first husband in Mexico, Henri Tati Schlubach [See
Figure 67].
437
The two siblings climb upon a tree in their grandparent’s yard, stringing a corded
work by Hicks between its forking trunks and between each other, animating it like a
monumental toy, larger than both of their bodies, into a performative site-specific installation for
the camera directed by their watchful mother. Hicks’s chosen family expanded when she
remarried, assuming the responsibilities of motherhood for not only her own biological children
but others too, she effectively became the primary or “principal wife.” The diction of the trees
and the formal play of her corded suspensions ushers in a dream, at first gruesome, of bodily
dismemberment but also extension and affiliation through creative stringing and grafting.
Looking at these works closely, one feels the drama of the wrapping hand, imagining the
hours of fastidious labor required to create these tight moments of tension. This wrapping
pantomimes a repetition compulsion, symptomatic of a desire for control or mastery (linking it to
the constriction and release physically associated with the anal drive). Such repetition may be
likened to similarly hyperbolic surface effects, from the cacophony of nails that stud Nkisi
Nkondi figures made by Africa’s Kongo peoples to the looping gesture of Yayoi Kusama’s
virtually textile Infinity Nets.
438
In Playing & Reality, 1971, as part of his well-known thesis on
“transitional objects,” child psychotherapist D.W. Winnicott describes a boy “obsessed with
everything to do with string,” with parents who, “whenever they went into a room…were liable

437
Véronique Vienne, “Sheila Hicks and the Art of the Yarn,” Metropolis, 1 June 2011,
http://www.metropolismag.com/ideas/arts-culture/sheila-hicks-the-art-of-the-yarn/.
438
On the psychoanalytic dimension in Hesse and Kusama, see Mignon Nixon, "Posing the Phallus," October 92
(2000): 99-127.

238
to find that he had joined together chairs and tables: and they might find a cushion, for instance,
with a string joining it to the fireplace.” Winnicott’s descriptions conjures a home charged with a
web-like materiality not unlike what we might imagine characterizing Hicks’s, alive with thread
employed extensively and imaginatively. It also prompts consideration of the psychic dimensions
afoot in any household (whether configured by material analogies or not) and Hicks’s in
particular, the proliferating human connections, from those between mother and children as well
as those between Hicks and her geographically dispersed collaborators. In fact, the described
image of the strung living room well matches the image of Itaka and Cristobal tangling
themselves up with her sculpture in the tree. The string, Winnicott concludes, mediates a fear of
separation, the boy “was dealing with separation by his use of string, as one would deny
separation from a friend by using the telephone.” Whereas in the preceding chapter, Hicks’s fiber
replaced the figure of the letter, now it becomes a metaphor for the telephone—again configuring
the gap between people and places.
Winnicott discovers the boy’s obsession by playing a “squiggle game” where patients
respond to an abstract line drawn by the doctor. Instead of recognizing the abstraction as a figure,
maybe a sheep or bowl of pasta realized via a few key additions, “nearly everything thing I did,”
recalls Winnicott, “was translated by him into something associated with string…lasso, whip,
crop, a yo-yo string, a string in a knot, another crop, another whip.” As works like The Evolving
Tapestry, Banisteriopsis, or The Principal Wife demonstrate, Winnicott’s game stymied by string
(always already an abstract squiggle) reminds how fiber paradoxically engenders metaphoric
cognates while still retaining a literal sense of itself as auto-symbolic. String, fiber, and thread
are natively abstract, and in their pure materiality slip easily into representing the immaterial and
universal drive for connection, embodying our base, life-long desire to connect ourselves to the

239
world, to defy difference and any sense of separation from other things and beings at a basic
psychic level. Promoting such a universal theory, Winnicott deems, that:
string can be looked upon as an extension of all other techniques of
communication. String joins, just as it also helps in the wrapping up of objects
and in the holding of unintegrated materials. In this respect string has a symbolic
meaning for everyone; an exaggeration of the use of string can easily belong to
the beginnings of a sense of insecurity or the idea of a lack of communication…as
a denial of separation string becomes a thing in itself, something that has
dangerous properties and must needs be mastered.
439

Describing how to exhibit The Principal Wife, Hicks described it as a “boa constrictor,”
associating the work with a creature whose predatory signature is ‘to wrap,’ enforcing a truly
lethal amount of compression, and a dire concern about connecting. Looping over a branch-like
bar and dangling into the open air, The Principal Wife does indeed behave like a monumental
snake. Imagining the likely interests of Hicks’s children as well as their travel with her between
Europe and India at this moment, understanding The Principal Wife as a snake points toward the
threatening and hypnotizing snake Kaa, originally imagined by Rudyard Kipling at the end of the
nineteenth century as a helpful steward but animated and depicted anew at this moment as a
threatening villain by Disney’s The Jungle Book in 1967. As Winnicott argues for the troubled
child and his thread, the figure of the snake is endemically about power and control, especially if
we take Kaa and his ability to hypnotize the child Mowgli (toward his death) as a point of
reference. The snake, like Hicks’s sculptures is physically pliable and encourages spectators to
become mentally if not also physically pliable too.
One might tie this specter, which compresses themes of anality and predation to Hicks’s
simultaneous role at this same moment as a mother to her two children as well as for the
daughter of her new second husband. Speaking of Rauschenberg’s Small Rebus, 1956 (which

439
D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Tavistock, 1971), 11-13.

240
includes a family portrait—father, daughter, mother—among its several collaged images),
Thomas Crow describes, “its satisfying rhythms of concentration and release”—with words that
echo Winnicott’s psychoanalytic diction of mastery (and for that matter Adamson’s introduced at
the start of this chapter as well) [see figure 78].
440
In Rauschenberg’s work, he finds the legacy
of mythological narratives, particularly the Fall of Icarus, a story not only about hubris and youth
but also the tragedy of a parent that survives their own child. If Small Rebus figures this via
representation, The Principal Wife navigates it via abstraction, imagining the tentacular
branching of a family tree but also the precarity of the child (and the child turned parent). The
suspension, Trapèze de Cristobal, 1971, titled for the artist’s second child, emphasizes this
tangle and drama, casting Hicks’s son as a precarious circus performer, a modern Icarus.
Mirroring this mandate to protect from danger, Hicks has recalled how stacks like The Evolving
Tapestry are formally sympathetic to the barriers she erected against the windows in her studio
during the May 1968 Paris riots to protect her children and those of her employees from
shattering glass.
As conceptual connector, string and Hicks’s cords amassed from it materialize the
psychological and social function of metaphor by connecting and configuring a relationship of
likeness between the unlike. As such, Hicks employed it as an anthropological tool in an
investigation of comparative cultural studies—plumbing cross-cultural questions of gender,
motherhood, and family. Drawing upon the psychoanalytic touchstones I have introduced (Lacan
and Winnicott), Hicks’s engagement with the motif of the mother and wife as a cultural force
inclines her work toward the latter’s theorization of a subject who is not traumatized by the

440
Thomas Crow, “Rise and Fall: Theme and Idea in the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg,” in Robert
Rauschenberg et al., Robert Rauschenberg: Combines (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art : Steidl, 2005),
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/61724501.html. 231-255.

241
recognition of an other, but rather by way of mothering (the first other) formulates an idea of
“the other which is not hostile but sustaining.”
441
Hicks’s extra-Western allusions, and particular
her interest in the figure of the wife and/or mother as expressed by her titles proposes an
extension of a kind of Winnicottian logic applied to understand not simply the logic of a local
nuclear family but rather an international global family. Embracing a relational rather than
isolated existence, and the specter of the other and difference as energizing and sustaining rather
than threatening, Hicks’s sculptures meditate on a globalist model that values the interdependent
relationship between cultures rather than the singularity or exceptionalism of any one nation or
cultural identity.
There is also an implied violence (the whip, the crop) and control (the lasso) in
Winnicott’s story (which developed for the boy into games pantomiming suicide by hanging and
murder by strangulation). Similar specters haunt these works. A sense of violence was also
detected by Moffett, when he states, of the Evolving Tapestry, that a “slight malevolence creep[s]
in. Cruelty seeps out, like a vapor, but it is an acceptable level of cruelty, and in an acceptable
place—where, more precisely, cruelty can be in order, or rather part of the order, and often is.
Like fate. Like nature. Like people.” His description recalls the dark understanding of nature
offered by Werner Herzog in Burden of Dreams; standing in the South American rainforest,
Herzog asserts, “It's the only land where creation is unfinished, yet taking a close look at what's
around us there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective

441
Justyna Wierzchowska, “Motherless Subjects and Mothered Selves: The Implications of Jacques Lacan’s and
Donald Winnicott’s Writings on the Formation of the ‘I’ for American Studies,” Comparative American Studies, 16,
(2018).

242
murder.” If cruelty or violence does indeed “seep out, like a vapor” from these works, it emits
principally from the way they map a drama of dismemberment and fragmentation.
Particularly relevant here is the work of Debora L. Silverman on the relationship of
Belgian Art Nouveau to the violence of the Belgian Congo. Focusing on artists at work in
Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Silverman diagnoses a “Style Congo”
and “art of darkness” formalized in their proto-abstract forms. For example, the famous organic,
sinuous curve of Art Nouveau is read as an African rubber vine or conversely a whip, both tied
to legacies of colonial violence.
442
Recognizing Hicks’s dangling suspensions as similarly
botanical, particularly akin to the hearty vines and pronounced root structures typical of trees
across the Global South shows how this nineteenth-century imaginary persisted and was
reformulated for the shifted relationships of late twentieth-century globalism. Indeed, the
particular raw materials extracted uniquely from sites like the Congo that interest Silverman as a
precise vocabulary of Art Nouveau craftsmanship were still alive and internationally circulating
in the postwar period, as evidenced by the latex repeatedly employed by Eva Hesse.
Though I do not wish to darken the doorstep of Hicks’s generation with such specific
histories of colonialism, I do believe her interest in similar formal and material conceits (a
development of the organicism of earlier generations) and their resonance with extra-Western
associations both cultural and natural helps us see how this latter work inherited and processed
the trauma of (post)colonialism. Hicks’s generation, as I see it, reached not for an othering
exoticism but a relational, reciprocal universalism that recognized the logic of a postcolonial and
diasporic subjectivity alive everywhere, including in the West.

442
Debora L. Silverman, "Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I." West 86th: A
Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (2011): 139-81.

243
Hicks’s sculptures visualize a drama of units, parts that may be assembled but also
dismembered, and how that logic draws from the inevitable rearrangement of matter, through
cycles of birth, growth, coupling, parenthood, age, frailty, death, and decay that drive the
animation and exchange of nature, between humans, plants, animate and inanimate, organic and
inorganic matter. When materialized, this vision is traumatic as it reminds us of our own
mortality, the fact of our fragile bodies and their eventual decay. Less severely, works like The
Principal Wife gives structure to family matters, to our desire for communion with others but
also the struggle of maintaining this connection, of escaping the limited container of one’s own
body, of merging or distinguishing one’s individual subjectivity from another’s in both given and
chosen relationships.
Those that collected these objects, who made them part of their home, concretized this
function. In May 1971, Mrs. Anthony Garvan, wrote to Edward L. Kallop Jr. at the Charles E.
Slatkin Galleries in New York, to express her continued interest “in purchasing the ‘thing,’” a
version of The Principal Wife available for sale. She remarks that, “You said you might be able
to work on the price a bit—that would be an excellent idea as I then have to sell my husband on
the whole installation which may be more complicated than I can now for see.”
443
On the one
hand, Garvan expresses pragmatic concerns, but also alludes to the larger forces shaping a
gendered home. Not only is Garvan’s identity and expendable income predicated on her husband
(“I then have to sell my husband”) but domestic architecture itself must be negotiated as a new
addition is considered.
444
Garvan would indeed receive The Principal Wife, as a Christmas gift

443
Beatrice Galvin, letter to Charles Slatkin (Philadelphia, May 1971), collection files for The Principal Wife,
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
444
A curator of American art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Beatrice Garvan married Anthony Garvan, a
historian of architecture at the University of Philadelphia, following the divorce of her first marriage. They would
remain together until his death in 1992. “Anthony Garvan, 80, Architecture Historian,” The New York Times, 14
January 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/14/obituaries/anthony-garvan-80-architecture-historian.html.

244
from her husband and live with it installed in her home for over forty years [See Figure 74].
Standing before a Christmas tree, one witnesses Garvan unwrapping the gift flanked by an older
woman, possibly her mother or mother-in-law, who looks less amused than Garvan. Garvan
wraps the work’s cords in her arms, as if carrying a bounty. She becomes the site from which it
suspends and displays itself, embodying its themes of affiliation and matriarchy, an expression of
what links her to her husband as well as a sign of her own status.
In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Levi Strauss pioneered what would become
known as alliance theory, or a general theory of exchanges, predicated on the universal
prohibition against incest. Ultimately, he argued that this global phenomena, the base mechanism
of cultural exchange, the creation of society and a diverse, worldly (rather than sealed, hermetic)
family is “predicated on the absolute circulation of women” for marriage, “how women are
branded as gifts to be yielded up or received.”
445
In her review of the landmark book, Simone de
Beauvoir would note how “relations of reciprocity and exchange do not appear between men and
women; they are established between men by means of women.”
446
Humanizing Marcel Mauss’s
theory of the gift, de Beauvoir argued that “Lévi-Strauss shows us that women are the existents
for whom the rules are enacted. It is not men who are prohibited or encouraged to marry, but
women who are thus ordered for the men.”
447
Shannon M. Mussett argues that this insight would
greatly shape De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, “where she finds that women are consistently
utilized as mediating objects for the benefit of male identity and power.”
448

445
Shannon M. Mussett, “Introduction,” in Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann [edit.], Simone de
Beauvoir: Feminist Writings (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 53.
446
Simone de Beauvoir, “A Review of The Elementary Structures of Kinship By Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in Margaret
A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann [edit.], Simone de Beauvoir: Feminist Writings (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2015), 60-61.
447
Shannon M. Mussett, “Introduction,” in Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann [edit.], Simone de
Beauvoir: Feminist Writings (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 54.
448
Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann [edit.], Simone de Beauvoir: Feminist Writings (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2015), 53.

245
In some ways like our bodies, Hicks’s open composition sculptures are all made of
smaller units, and may be broken apart and put back together in a variety of combinations, still
surviving that which a human body would struggle to approximate without recourse to a
Frankenstein-esque graft. While fiber can take endless punches and blows as it moves, a human
body would be decimated, stopped in its tracks if any of its parts went missing. These works
allow for a fantasy of what the human body can never be and will never accomplish. Likewise, if
a work can be complete with only some of its parts, it becomes difficult to definitively say where
one ends and another begins. As such these works are not only “spliced and grafted” together
physically but also conceptually. Hicks created many works that received the same title,
especially The Principal Wife and The Evolving Tapestry. While individual mounds or
suspensions might visually register as distinct sculptures, they might also be understood as
connected conceptually, united as one work even while separated physically.
This points back to an understanding of subjectivity that exists beyond the limits of the
discrete body. These works are keenly interested in questioning how the supposedly discrete
object that is the individual self exceeds its own apparent embodiment. Thinking in terms of
trees, it is a theory of affiliation and personal legacy captured by Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa
Dalloway, that:
somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she
survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of
the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it
was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the
people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees
lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.
449

449
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, (Broadview Press, 2012), 51.

246
Thinking with the trees and the mist, one might expand this fantasy beyond the human to
consider biological subjectivities represented by trees such as the Aspen, which above ground
can appear as many separate organisms, but ultimately are connected by a common root system
and are in this way more truly one singular being made up of a colony of clones. This is a
rhizomatic logic, exemplified also by various fungi. The allusion to trees is suggested by the
work’s form as well. Hicks mentions the “branch,” but more precisely the diction “spliced and
grafted” draws from the language of arborists.
The established understanding of these works as tree-like is underscored by Bamian
(Banyan). The second part of the title, (Banyan), comes from the name of a fig tree defined
taxonomically by the fact that it begins its life as an epiphyte, or a plant that grows on another
plant. We see the Banyan, and the tentacles that recall Hicks’s suspensions in one instance
hanging from its canopy in a photograph from 1870 taken in Hyderabad [See Figure 68]. The
Banyan is also the national tree of the Republic of India, marking Hicks’s work there from 1966
to 1980, where she collaborated with the factories of the Commonwealth Trust, to produce
fabrics likewise named for this place, such as Kerala.
450
Compare the branching of exposed roots
captured by Eliot Porter to the similar formal dynamic animating Bamian (Banyan) and similar
works such as that captured in The Principal Wife [See Figures 70].
The Banyan and trees visually similar to it grow across the Global South, from the Ficus
macrocarpa (native to South Asia in Pakistan and India and eastward to southeast Asia, and
Australia while also invasive elsewhere) to the Ficus pertusa and citrifolia (native to the
Caribbean, Central, and South America). Thus, its invocation uses the tree’s international spread
to meditate upon the similar dispersal of Hicks and her objects. Likened to human subjectivity,

450
Lee Nordness, Objects - USA (New York: Viking, 1972), 336.

247
the tree condenses questions of kinship and transcultural relationships on both a very local and
international scale, escalating from the nuclear to the universal human family.
The Principal Wife and works like it imagine for Hicks and her family (both biologically
and socially acquired), a union with others that stretches far beyond the limits of one body, that
crosses vast distances of time and space, to become “part of people she had never met,”
buttressed by “the people she knew best.” This extends to become a metaphor for a worldly
rather than a regional or national culture to be shared among subjects. The Principal Wife
speculates and tests for this immaterial, misty network as well as for more remote human points
where the self may “survive” without the armature of a body.
Homeless Orphans
I have noted how Banyan pointed to India by way of its national tree. In addition to this
itinerary, its other titular suggestion, Bamian, takes its name from Bamian, or Bamyan, a
province in central Afghanistan, whose name in Persian translates into English as “the land of
shining light,” now the former home of two colossal stone Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban in
2001. These works would have still been available to the world, and Hicks during her travels
there, as the centerpiece of a consecrated archeological site in the late twentieth century. They
were 55 and 38 meters tall, and constructed around 615 and c. 550, respectively.
451
In his
writings on the Buddhas, Morgan Llewelyn recalls the descriptions of Enlightenment Grand
Tour visitors like Goethe, who deemed the works, “crazy idols…on a gigantic scale,” and Lord
Byron, who echoes Glenn Adamson’s erotic analysis of the “soft power” of fiber art in
appraising their “monstrous flaccid bulk.”
452

451
Llewelyn Morgan, The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press,
2015), 4.
452
Morgan, 11.

248
As this titular allusion suggests, Hicks aspired to similar monumentality for the sculptural
conceits she developed in the late 60s and 1970s. This ambition is captured by a striking image
of a yellow mountain of ponytails and tassels (assumedly a version of the yellow Banisteriopisis)
circulated for an exhibition entitled Viva Zapata, 1989 where two human figures stand minuscule
before it. Recognizing that these are not real people, but tiny wooden figurines, the imaginary
scene underscores that Hicks’s sculptural investments of the 1960s and 1970s would not grow
beyond their initial proportions within the context of the museum. The image, used to promote to
an exhibition at Bellas Artes in New Mexico, is also evidence of Hicks’s comparative obscurity
by the moment of its premiere in 1989.
Elsewhere, 1989 became a landmark year. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent
end of the Cold War augured “The End of History” for political scientist Francis Fukuyama and
others such as the influential historian Eric Hobsbawm, who recognized such developments as
the bookend to “the short twentieth century.”
453
In search of parameters for their field, historians
of contemporary art have also gravitated to 1989, in recognition of such world historical turns
but also in response to meaningful shifts within the international art world itself. Authorities such
as Terry Smith have remarked upon the legibility of “the shift—nascent during the 1950s,
emergent in the 1960s, contested during the 1970s, but unmistakable since the 1980s—from
modern to contemporary art.”
454
Cuauhtémoc Medina argues that the early 1990s brought, “the
collapse of the Euro-American monopoly over the narrative of modernism”
455
and historian
David Joselit has centered 1989 as a “watershed” for its “deregulation of the established

453
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992); Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of
Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (Vintage, 1994).
454
Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5.
455
Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses,” What is Contemporary Art? (Sternberg Press, 2010),
10-21.

249
hierarchies that had long divided fine art from commercial and indigenous or folk practices in the
West,” particularly in exhibitions such as Magiciens de la Terre, 1989, and the 3
rd
Havana
Biennial, 1989 that evidenced a shifted relationship between Western and extra-Western artists,
as well as between the cultures from which they emerged.
456

As I have traced, Hicks was one of the most prominent of the fiber artists, but as its
heyday waned and exhibitions such as MoMA’s Wall Hangings, 1969, the Stedelijk’s
Perspectief en textiel, 1969, and Hicks’s own solo exhibition there in 1974 all receded into the
rearview mirror it became clear that these would be the high watermarks of fiber art’s
mainstream institutionalization and Hicks’s star with it. Instead of a development canonized by
art history, fiber art, by 1989, was largely forgotten except by those who continued to practice
and teach its techniques. Disappointed with the fleeting logic of exhibitions and the related
challenge of museum acquisition, not to mention the relative lack of interest of the press beyond
magazines like Craft Horizons, Hicks grew disenchanted with sculptural works like
Banisteriopsis and The Principal Wife as the late 1970s unfolded. Demonstrating an awareness
of larger art world currents, Hicks would use her recurring participation in the Lausanne
Biennials to experiment with ‘new’ media, imagining a suspension with threads of neon mixed
into its core, and interactive, participatory, and performative conceits, proposing a “fête des fils”
or a children’s party in 1971 as her contribution, a title that puns on the word for thread, “fil.”
Expanding upon such participatory possibilities and incorporating her workshop practices in a
way she had been unable to previously, she would pursue a residency is Israel with the support of
the Israel museum, where she would travel to farms, kibbutzim, and various other relevant craft
and weaving contexts throughout Israel to create an exhibition that drew from exposure to all of

456
David Joselit, Heritage and Debt, Art in Globalization (MIT Press, 2020), 4.

250
these communities. When presented with an exhibition opportunity as the 1970s drew to a close,
Hicks deployed readymade assemblies rather than constructed sculptures, breaking with the
formalism of her earlier works. Exhibiting curtains and stacks of military and nursing uniforms,
Hicks used readymade garments to replace the orientations established by and outsourced the
labor required to make her earlier sculptures. A new processed, mass-produced, rather than raw,
textile vocabulary suggested a politicized and more conceptual intention that made sense for the
late 1970s, telegraphing her disenchantment with the contemporary art world, and awareness that
its rewards and new values were incommensurate with the look and labor her earlier sculptures
represented.
The comparative lack of engagement and critical response to her work, and its limited
existence beyond a particular milieu must have felt coldly ironic, as Hicks stated, “One of the
reasons for participating in biennials and other collective manifestations is the desire not to
become marginal—but the efforts and the time spent are disproportionate to the small result.”
457

As this remark makes clear, despite her star status in the world of fiber art, Hicks was conscious
of her comparatively marginal status within a greater art world beyond, and as time passed
increasingly discouraged by it. Disagreeing with a new anonymous selection process devised for
the ninth tapestry biennial (to take place in 1979), Hicks mobilized her status as a leader in the
field to destabilize the exhibition’s realization, including circulating a “world-wide petition” of
critique that garnered 145 signatories and threatened the legitimacy of the biennial and its
organizers.
458
Hicks never returned to the Lausanne Biennial, a stubborn stance that makes her
frustration clear. More importantly, it encourages one to admit that the Lausanne Biennial and

457
Monique Levi-Strauss, Sheila Hicks.
458
Giselle Eberhard Cotton and Magali Junet, From Tapestry to Fiber Art: The Lausanne Biennials, 1962-1995
(Skira, 2017), 90.

251
the “fiber art” they sponsored had become a stale proposition not only for Hicks, but also for the
art world that had variably recognized and ignored it. Fiber art, as a movement either within or
beside contemporary art had seemingly run its course.
Meanwhile, Hicks’s generational peers likewise passed from early to mid-career (or in
the case of Eva Hesse become subject prematurely to the hagiography of art criticism and its
canonizing powers). Their abstractions and the universalist cultural mood they traced became
history, and was replaced by returns to representation, figuration, and appropriation in art making
that turned increasingly toward critique, skepticism, and irony typical of the postmodernism of
the 1980s. Hicks’s sincere abstractions had no significant home in the art world of the 1980s,
neither its post-conceptual camp and its critique of mass cultural iconographies nor the
performative return to painting of Neo-Expressionism, which often tempted viewers to see it as a
travesty of any expectation that art index a skilled hand.
In her work with architects and in grand interiors, Hicks hoped to find something much
more permanent than a temporary exhibition and more dependable than the shifting fads of the
contemporary art world. Monique Levi-Strauss has sensitively described how in turning away
from the art world, Hicks gave up certain freedoms afforded by the exhibitions and objects
discussed in this chapter to avoid the heartbreak of seeing her work go homeless. She describes
how, “Sheila decided to concentrate on architectural projects,” where, “she would no longer be
totally free to determine the size of the work; she would have to submit to the conditions of the
architects and their projects, but at least she would know what would happen to her efforts.”
459

The number of Hicks’s autonomous sculptural objects is limited, and their production generally
trails off in the late 1970s. Prompted by a shifted market, the artist returned to the motif of the

459
Monique Lévi-Strauss, Sheila Hicks. (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1974),
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/991520.html, 42.

252
stacks and suspensions and their logic of the circulating art object when she returned more
exuberantly to the gallery and museum world in the new millennium. With some cold irony,
these “new” sculptures are often formally indistinguishable from the stacks and especially the
suspensions first formulated roughly half a century earlier, and which she had mourned then (as
they went unsold and uncollected) as “homeless orphans.”
460
The “open compositions”
anticipation of mobility and dismemberment ultimately won out, setting Hicks’s fragments up
for a new life as circulating objects, dependent on the contingency of the ever-shifting world.

460
Sheila Hicks, as quoted by Monique Levi Strauss, Sheila Hicks (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1974), 42.

253
Chapter 5 — “Inspired and ‘happy’”: Collaborations, Corporations, 1964-2004
Until recently, Hicks never secured nor sustained herself with the kind of gallery
representation and commercial success that has elevated generational peers such as Jasper Johns
or Ed Ruscha within the contemporary art world.
461
Instead, in need of both practical income
and creative community she embraced and participated in a different market of visual and
material culture, that of corporate design and site-specific architectural commissions. This stance
ultimately bed-rocked her entire career beginning in the mid 1960s but became the core of her
activity after the heyday of fiber art drew to a close, a conclusion punctuated by the strong signal
of Hicks’s own pointed protest and subsequent abandonment of the Lausanne biennials in 1979.
What I will refer collectively to as Hicks’s corporate work became a world apart for her
from the art world proper and sustained her throughout the 1980s and 1990s when her status
within the contemporary art world became increasingly obscure.
462
Meanwhile, largely without
her participation, the commercial contemporary art world became increasingly profitable;
museums proliferated and an arms race of temporary exhibitions that kept pace with the logic of
biennials and art fairs accelerated around the world as part of increasingly globalized economic
interdependencies forged following the end of the Cold War.
463

Hicks largely remained in this effectively separate domain. Well-connected and secure
there, she worked productively and profitably until the art world rediscovered her in the first
decade of the twenty-first century. Narrating this gap, here in the final chapter of my study, I

461
Definitions internal to art history include, Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (MIT Press, 2012); from
sociology: Howard Becker, Art Worlds (University of California Press, 1982); Harrison and Cynthia White,
Canvases and Careers (University of Chicago Press, 1965); Olav Velthuis, Talking Prices (Princeton University
Press, 2007), 11-15.
462
On the historiography and the discursive, ideological impact of this term on the development of art after 1960,
see Lee, “Introduction,” Ibid.
463
For one account of this reconfiguration, see David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT Press,
2020), 1-35.

254
trace and analyze Hicks’s alternative trajectory, examining her commissioned works and
corporate collaborations, from work with Knoll and the Ford Foundation in the 1960s to Target
in 2003 amid the first signs of a new millennia and her re-emergence as a contemporary artist of
note.
I examine Hicks’s most massive works through the lens of the new corporate logics and
globalist media theory that informed the multinational firms that commissioned her. At the close,
this chapter also posits Hicks as a link between the late modernism and utopian “globalism” of
the 1960s and 1970s (effectively repressed by the skepticism of postmodernism and other critical
responses to neoliberal globalization) and its revitalization as both a memory and model for new
hopes in the twenty-first century, as a subject of historical revision and set of styles and aesthetic
urgencies revived by younger artists, curators, and collectors newly invested in figures like
Hicks.
464
As I will argue, Hicks’s idealist globalism, committed to moving and thinking freely
across national borders and between cultural contexts, both logically suited and complicated the
rise of globalization as a multinational corporate force, anticipating later art world responses to
the free-market ideology that came to maturity in the 1980s and hit its stride in the final years of
the twentieth century and first of the twenty-first.
Collaboration Culture
Much of what we recognize as the arena of contemporary art depends upon a symbiotic
relationship, a co-dependency between for-profit galleries and ostensibly non-profit museums.
The business models of both are largely ensured (especially in the United States) by the
consumption and charity (respectively) of collectors, a comparatively small group of viewers

464
Caroline A. Jones, The Global Work of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2016), xiii.

255
largely comprised of the world’s richest individuals.
465
As acknowledged in the preceding
chapter, Hicks would not secure the kind of sustained, committed gallery representation and
related broad popularity with collectors and museum curators necessary to sustain a career in the
classical modernist mold until well into her career and the twenty-first century. By modernist, I
mean making with apparent autonomy, producing artworks supposedly without concern for or
awareness of the specific needs or demands of particular consumers. Even casual study of her
career, and statements made across it, suggest in fact that Hicks never really wanted this life, nor
the expressive autonomy it supposedly afforded. Instead, she valued more collaborative,
symbiotic ideals like those imagined for the Bauhaus workshop or medieval cathedral.
466

Within the modernist, gallery-oriented system, artists ostensibly produce artworks
according to their own sense of self-direction and galleries, collectors, and curators are largely
expected to accept (or reject) what has been made after the fact. As such, artists are imagined to
work independently, at which point business takes over. Of course, such a system has never
functioned with such a complete air gap and is a bit of a modernist fiction.
467
That said, for the
purposes of understanding Hicks as a model for an alternative way (and potentially, an example
that reveals its sexist, elitist orientations) as this chapter seeks to do, one must appreciate the
discursive difference, real and mythological, between an artist who invites collaboration as a
founding rule of their practice as opposed to halting any possibility of it at the studio door.

465
John Zarobell, Art and the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2017); Mukti Khaire, Culture and
Commerce (Stanford University Press, 2017).
466
Both were and remain susceptible to an over-idealization that forgets the hierarchies and imperfect nature of the
collaborations realized in either instance.
467
Alison Gerber, The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers (Stanford University Press, 2017).

256
Whether ideal or real, this midcentury model stands in contrast to what contemporary
practice has normalized in recent decades.
468
The solitary modern artist has been rejected as an
oppressive myth, and collaboration has been increasingly celebrated as a benevolent force across
society well beyond the artist’s studio where it is increasingly courted.
469
As art historian Claire
Bishop traces in her much cited essay, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,”
such social and public art practices welcome viewers as participants and idealize them as
collaborators in the realization of artwork.
470
Curators of contemporary art regularly share or
cede their agency and authority with the living artists with which they collaborate on temporary
exhibitions, commissions, and increasingly big-budget, monumental commissions. The fully
globalized art market is in effect a series of collaborative, overlapping regional dominions, from
the circuits of biennials and art fairs which anchor and index regional priorities, to the
geographically discrete domains of particular gallerists who share super star artists with other
dealers around the world in their collective efforts to most profitably meet market demand.
471

Embracing a collaborative, multinational stance well before its arrival in the art world
proper, I posit Hicks as a precedent for this new normal both inside and far beyond art’s

468
A version of this antimony indicative of its circulation in a greater cultural imagination, particularly the solitary
artist as an artifact of an older era contrasted with the ‘collaborative’ multi-person studio as typical of a younger,
more 21
st
century outlook was dramatized in the comparison of the painter Larry Poons and the sculptor Jeff Koons
presented by The Price of Everything, directed by Nathaniel Kahn (2018; HBO), film.
469
Feminist scholarship in particular has mobilized artistic couples as a conceit for demystification, as in Bibiana
Obler, Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Art and Taeuber (Yale University Press, 2014) and Whitney
Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, edit., Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (Thames and
Hudson, 2019). Curator Leah Dickerman incorporated the work of other artists in her version of a traveling
retrospective dedicated to Robert Rauschenberg, with the goal of underscoring the often collaborative nature of his
art and approach, explicitly making a case for its relevance to more contemporary practice: “Often working in
collaboration with artists, dancers, musicians, and writers, he invented new interdisciplinary modes of artistic
practice that helped set the course for art of the present day,” see Leah Dickerman, Emily Liebert, and Jenny Harris,
Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends, Museum of Modern Art, 2017,
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3634.
470
Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum, February 2006,
https://www.artforum.com/print/200602/the-social-turn-collaboration-and-its-discontents-10274.
471
The muli-modal, multi-player ecosystem and geography is captured well by Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the
Art World (Norton, 2008); see also Jones, The Global Work of Art.

257
worlds—a way of working that was effectively more real and widespread as a mode of working
than the privileged autonomy imagined by modernist ideals. I see Hicks as a way of thinking
through contemporary artistic practices still in formulation. It also recognizes her and her
commissioned works as reflective of a greater social reality, metaphors for thinking through a
larger world of client-centered or consumer-driven work that profited as much from the effective
circulation of ideas and information as the production of material goods. Hicks’s material works
created motifs for thinking through the divided consciousness of the global flows of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—always supposedly approaching a digital future, freed
of brick and mortar offices and animated by paper-less technologies driving automated
productions and yet all-the-while still very much driven by embodied, increasingly diverse
peoples working hard, engines driving a stubbornly material world.
Collaboration is often understood as either morally neutral or assuredly net good.
472

Often, however, its usage risks camouflaging dynamics that betray inequalities at play across the
contemporary art world and the greater social field likewise. Often, “collaboration” appears as a
press release-approved way of talking about relationships between people, things, and ideas that
are often less than equal. For example, contemporary art has increasingly normalized the use of
multiple assistants and complex, hieratic studio systems (which would have been both
sacrilegious and economically impossible for many modernist artists) in order to realize
artworks, especially for high-value artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst who make
technically complex works which require many skilled workers to be realized to the high degree
of finish and perfection expected by paying customers.
473
In such instances and others, the

472
Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke University
Press, 2011).
473
Sarah Thornton, 33 Artists in 3 Acts (Norton, 2014); Sarah Cascone, Damien Hirst Lays Off 50 Employees From
His Production Company to ‘Focus on His Art,’” ArtNet News, Oct. 1, 2018.

258
utopian diction of collaboration risks papering over inequalities of authorship and agency. While
it may be increasingly invested in collaboration, contemporary art has also become an
increasingly corporate, professionalized world, significantly different from its modernist forbears
and increasingly akin to other wage labor systems—another reason to consider the relationship
between art’s increasingly collaborative and incorporated cultures.
474

As I have explored in preceding chapters, Hicks’s welcomed “collaboration” in many
forms, from an inspirational collaboration with ancient forms to working collaboratively with
skilled crafts people in her workshops in Europe and across the Global South. Collaboration, as
embodied by these and other practices, has generally been discouraged by modernist ideals. The
modernist artist generates their own, “original” ideas, and executes them in solitary confinement,
alone in an attic studio.
475
The taboo against collaboration reinforces other tenets of the
modernist faith, including celebrations of unique individualism and the Romantic model of art as
a vehicle of direct, personal expression. Collaboration testifies to our inter-subjectivity rather
than our individuality and forces us to consider the circulation of ideas and forms between
people, including facing the reality of art as a commodity, and its innovations as part of a larger
market of things, ideas, and people.
These tensions are captured in revered modernist parables. One of the most well-known
(and melodramatically illustrative) is the story of Mark Rothko’s commissions for the Seagram
building. Commissioned in 1958 and completed in 1960, Rothko had agreed to create a series of
works to decorate The Four Seasons restaurant installed at the base of the iconic Mies van der
Rohe skyscraper. Designed by Philip Johnson, The Four Seasons became exactly what it was

474
Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Should Artists Professionalize?,” Oct. 18, 2013,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KbdrK7GQNA.
475
For a description of the imagined stereotype, see Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1975), 14.

259
meant to be, a watering hole for the elite and mighty, a destination for power lunches and the
finest dining the United States could afford its richest and most influential citizens.
476
As the
story goes, well on his way to completing the seven mural-scale paintings the space could
accommodate, Rothko changed his mind. Apparently struck with a crisis of conscience befitting
a movie hero, Rothko was suddenly horrified by the prospect of his work as décor for a lavish
restaurant catering to the world’s most elite.
477
Giving up the commission, Rothko lost the venue
but gained decades of admirers, including all those susceptible to the seduction of stories of
artistic freedom and creative liberation.
Freed from their original destination, Rothko’s paintings (of which he ultimately
executed thirty) had nowhere to go. According to his own description, “there really is no place
for them.” As such, they were not so unlike Hicks’s “homeless orphans,” (discussed in the
preceding chapter) the sculptures she created throughout the 1960s and 1970s for temporary
exhibition that, unsold, ultimately had nowhere to go after the show closed and the world moved
on. In fact, typical of the modernist logic I have described, by disdaining the restaurant as a
palatable home, Rothko made it all the more likely that the only place or home for his orphans
would become the museum. Indeed, a selection appeared in Rothko’s MoMA retrospective in
1961, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1962, and most famously, many would ultimately be
acquired and enter a precisely calibrated space designed to the artist’s specifications at London’s
Tate Modern in 1970, the year of the artist’s death.

476
John Ortved, “The Dress Code for Power Lunching at the Four Seasons,” The New York Times, Jan. 5, 2016;
Suzanna Andrews, “Showdown at the Four Seasons,” Vanity Fair, Sep. 8 2014.
477
For evidence of the theatrical drama and masculinist heroism this story has inspired in interpreters, see John
Logan, Red (Dramatists Play Service Inc., 2011); or, its treatment by Simon Schama, Power of Art (2006; London:
BBC), video.

260
The Rothko story offers us much as a foil for understanding Hicks’s career, and what was
at stake in rejecting his example. In it, we see a verified titan of late modernism and abstraction
in literal crisis, doubting his own judgment, and ultimately (with his decision to abandon the
commission) supposedly standing on principal and therefore reinscribing modernism’s rejection
of all kinds of perceived threats, including its susceptibility to the temptations (and tethers) of
decoration, the market, the museum, and the public sphere. In this way, it occasions another
valence for collaboration, that of the collaborationist, someone willingly intertwined with
unflattering partners, someone who trades principles for personal security and preservation. In
the theater of the story, like Oedipus at the crossroads, Rothko toys with the prospect of a
practice predicated on commissions, and with it the possibility of collaboration via clientele.
Most obviously he would have been collaborating with designers, but the allegorical backdrop of
the restaurant also underscores the collaborative force of consumers at play here, positioning
Rothko like a lowly waiter taking orders from moneyed diners. Tantalizing down to the smallest
morsel of detail, Rothko even engaged the discourse of one of painting’s most collaborative
genres, the mural and all its political, monumental, architectural, and space-conquering
associations—then ultimately rejected it all full sale.
478
With all of this melodrama, Rothko both
verified his status as an embodiment of classic modernism and shows us its fissures, the
alternatives to it that would begin to dissolve many of its hallowed protocols.
Of course, increasingly popular with collectors both locally and internationally, Rothko’s
work had been décor for years by then. It is not so much the fact of his work as a commodity as
his performed disgust at recognizing it as such that matters in the Rothko parable. Taboos
abounding, what was at stake for Hicks in defying Rothko’s example? What was to be gained in

478
For a recent history of the potential ‘murals’ had as a recent transnational artistic opportunity, see, Barbara
Haskell, edit., Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 (Yale University Press, 2020).

261
taking, rather than ignoring, the kind of opportunities and connections he left on the table?
Whereas Rothko sought and secured total control over the spaces his work entered (adjusting
lighting, dictating paint colors), Hicks would embrace collaboration with architects and interior
designers whose work would supersede and determine the viewing conditions of her own
contributions. Hicks would happily not only work for decorators, but make work easily labeled
decoration without fear of stigma. As embodied by the rise of architects like Mies van der Rohe
and Johnson in buildings like the Seagram complex, modernist design had lost the low overhead
patina of avant-garde experiment and instead become the dominant idiom of multinational
corporate power. Without gallery representation, nor robust demand for her work by private and
public collections, Hicks found a profitable role for herself within a new empire of modernist
design and architecture that stretched from capitals of the North Atlantic like New York City and
Paris to new developments across the Global South such as the Palacio de Iturbide and Camino
Real Hotels in Mexico designed by Ricardo Legoretta to King Saud University in Riyadh Saudi
Arabia under the direction of Gyo Obata, principal of the multinational architectural firm
Hellmuth, Obata, Kassabaum.
479

“I have made a place,” Rothko declared of his Seagram paintings, a declaration that
encourages art historian Briony Fer to draw them into comparison with the turn toward
installation art in the 1960s (a turn within which Hicks was participant). Pointing toward the
period beyond the 60s to which this chapter attends, Fer calls the Seagram murals, “a template
for the spectacular encounter as it would develop in the postmodern imagination, not least in the

479
Betty Freudenheim, “12,000 Men and a Woman: U.S. Artist’s Saudi Role,” The New York Times, June 23, 1986,
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/23/style/12000-men-and-a-woman-us-artist-s-saudi-role.html.

262
spaces of the postmodern museum.”
480
Maybe Rothko had made a place, a room solely his own,
but, turning away from the gallery and the museum, Hicks and her collaborators would make
other places—rooms, buildings, campuses—that make Rothko’s place look puny by comparison.
Ignoring the modernist taboos illustrated by the Seagram parable, and likewise turning away
from the museum that became Rothko’s only hope, Hicks created places for herself and her work
beyond and outside modernism’s strictures as well as the reactionary fallout of the “postmodern
imagination” and “the postmodern museum,” that Fer describes. Beyond the museum and the
gallery, her work took on increasingly grandiose proportions, decorating banks, airports,
corporate headquarters, and private foundations that collectively controlled and animated
immense economic and transnational circuits.
“To act Globally,” Around Midtown, 1964-9
Hicks accomplished a place in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art
not as a committed resident of New York City (by then a new world capital that condensed the
economic and political power of the United States in the post-World War II period), but instead
as a resident of rural Taxco el Viejo in Mexico. Counter to conventional wisdom, I argued in
chapter three that Hicks’s distance heightened the value of Hicks and her works for museums
like MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago seduced by weaving as a matrix of alterities.
Hicks’s relationships in cities like New York and Chicago (and the international visibility they
would afford) were ensured by her savvy abilities and energies as a foreign correspondent. She
presented herself confidently and successfully from afar both to influential curators at MoMA, as
well as the greater modernist design community by which their curatorial work was informed

480
Reaching for diction that sounds most appropriate for textiles, Fer describes Rothko’s paintings as appealing to
“touch,” with words like “tangible” and “texture.” Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Remaking Art After Modernism
(Yale University Press, 2004), 16.

263
and framed. That said, Hicks’s emerging relationships were not exclusively carried out from a
distance. These remote communications were fortified by decisive trips away from Mexico to the
United States and Europe. On these occasions, Hicks would not only secure a place for her work
at museums like MoMA but also—right around the corner—with powerful citadels of design and
corporate power, beginning with her relationship with Knoll, the highly influential, international
design firm that ushered in the new look of office work in the 1950s and 60s.
481

Hicks’s relationship with Knoll began with an exhibition of her work in 1962 at the Knoll
showroom in Mexico City, and in 1963 at the Knoll showroom in Chicago’s Merchandise
Market, what had at the time of its construction in 1930 been the largest building in the world
(and for most of the twentieth century, occupant of its own zip code). The Merchandise Market
was a hub for wholesale and retail especially for the architectural and interior design markets.
Pairing Hicks’s weavings with Saarinen furniture, the Chicago installation consecrated her work
as a fitting partner to famous names in the Knoll coterie and midcentury modernist design writ
large. Importantly, this showing preceded Hicks’s exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago by
mere weeks, encouraging anyone paying attention in Chicago (or from afar) to take note that
Hicks and her work fit comfortably in spaces both explicit and repressed about their relationship
to a market for art and design.
Impressed by photographs of the Chicago installation, the company’s design leader and
co-namesake, Florence Knoll invited Hicks to their New York headquarters to meet her on
January 7, 1964, at the Knoll offices, located just steps from the Museum of Modern of Art
where her work had recently been acquired.
482
Hicks’s recent acquisition successes likely

481
Earl Martin, edit., Knoll Textiles, 1945-2010 (Yale University Press, 2011); Robert D. McFadden, “Florence
Knoll Bassett, 101, Designer of the Modern American Office, Dies,” The New York Times, Jan. 25, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/style/florence-knoll-bassett-dead.html.
482
Sheila Hicks to Florence Knoll Bassett, Knoll New York archives, December 20, 1963.

264
encouraged powerful endorsements and the kind of novel word of mouth that would have
propelled Knoll’s motivation to seek her out and meet face-to-face (and similarly also raise her
profile for Knoll affiliates like Eero Saarinen, who would engage Hicks shortly as part of his
designs for the CBS building, literally down the block from the museum).
Hicks arrived for her audience with the doyenne of modern design boldly, in a handmade
skirt suit made completely from Inca, a fabric she had designed (and which the company would
ultimately mass-produce beginning in 1966) [see Figure 19]. Growing up as a child of the
Depression, Hicks was taught to make her own clothes and sew by her mother and aunts as
would have been typical especially for young women of her generation and class. By the 1960s
buying rather than making one’s own clothing would have become the norm, especially for
women like Hicks entering the professional milieu and corporate spaces of midtown Manhattan.
Taking a risk as such, Hicks clearly saw the symbolism of turning herself, ostensibly all by
herself, into an embodiment of her own designs and handiwork, driving home the idea of her as
an applied, skilled craftsperson inserting herself with quixotic intention into a world of futuristic
design objects made not by hand but often by machine out of cutting-edge materials rather than
ancient media.
Dressed in her own design in several senses (including at the levels of silhouette,
construction, and pattern), Hicks introduced herself to Knoll via the Inca ensemble as an
embodiment of her aesthetic interests, her approach incarnated and animated. The raised,
palpable weave, and two-piece, masculine suiting logic of Hicks’s ensemble evoked as much a
masculine as feminine sartorial orientation (anticipating the gender play of The Evolving
Tapestry: He/She, 1967-8 discussed in Chapter 4). Instead of a continuous, one-piece dress,
Hicks’s homemade skirt suit with dramatically visible buttons up the front recalls the thick

265
tweeds and shapes that defined Coco Chanel’s iconic suits as well as more contemporary two-
piece skirt-and-jacket ensembles designed by Hubert de Givenchy and Oleg Cassini and
popularized by Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy respectively in the early 1960s.
483

Introduced in the 1920s and informed by Chanel’s admiration for the suits and sportswear worn
by her then-boyfriend, the Duke of Westminster, the Chanel suit went on to define the liberated
but still glamorous twentieth-century woman, including Jackie Kennedy, Brigitte Bardot, or
Barbara Walters. Dressed in this guise, Hicks’s ensemble encourages us to appreciate her
significance beyond her own biography, as part of a grand demographic shift and groundswell of
women entering the workforce, specifically the male-dominated spaces of urban, information-
economy work that proliferated in the post-World War II period. By 1990, 99 percent of
secretaries were women.
484
As a woman, Hicks aligned with the thousands of women newly at
work in such contexts, especially as secretaries (later, “administrative assistants”) but was also
distinguished from them by her comparative independence and agency. Between 1950 and 2000,
women’s presence roughly tripled in the US workforce, gradually adjusting the ratio of their
participation from roughly 1/3 in 1950 to nearly half by the end of the century (by early 2020,
prior to the devastations of Covid-19, women accounted for more than half of the workforce).
485

Alongside this history and framed by fiber’s historic association with women, Hicks’s ultimately
monumental commissions for corporate spaces furnished metaphoric declarations of the
newfound presence of women entering and elevating through the ranks of the professional,
public sphere of work. Meanwhile, the textile industry, from the growth of raw materials to their

483
Thanks to Amy Ogata for drawing out this comparison.
484
Ellen Lupton, “Office Politics,” Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines From Home to Office (Cooper Hewitt
National Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution and Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 48.
485
“Facts Over Time, Women in the Labor Force,” US Department of Labor, accessed 18 March 2021,
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/facts-over-time#WomenLF; Tara Law, “Women Are Now the Majority of
the U.S. Workforce—But Working Women Still Face Serious Challenges,” Time, January 16, 2020,
https://time.com/5766787/women-workforce/.

266
processing into commercial goods increasingly relocated from the industrial West to the Global
South, where the majority of the labor involved throughout its production cycles was also
performed by women.
486
Although she was certainly no stranger to spaces of applied industry,
from her own small workshops to major factories, Hicks and her work also successfully
infiltrated new spaces of administrative labor, the bureaucratic halls of power, offices and
boardrooms of increasingly globalized Western corporations and their monumental architectural
headquarters.
With its overlapping basket weave patterning, Inca is a meta-fabric, mimicking, at the
macro level of its visible surface, the gridded logic and constructive pattern of the warp and weft
crossings of which any fabric is constructed [see figure 20]. It also points to weaving applied to
other media for other purposes, particularly basket weaving. As such, Hicks presented herself as
an especially focused weaver, kitted out as an allegorical figure representing weaving might be
in the iconography of a mural program, where costumes are chosen to communicate the
symbolism of particular figures. The dress also made her into a walking manifesto, for how her
methods and interests could be directed—from the theories of Kubler and Albers in the rarefied
classrooms of Yale or from the ethnographic field of South America and Mexico—toward
practical application, so practical as to become wearable clothing.
All of this, the idea of Hicks striding in all at once as a first impression besuited, all the
while selling herself and her potential contributions to the already sizeable, powerful company, is
a striking scene to imagine. As such, it is no surprise that Knoll offered her a contract on the
spot, and that Hicks set to work enthusiastically at speed. What role Hicks effectively embodied,
or what Knoll expected of her, is difficult to parse as Hicks’s actions and the company’s reaction

486
Sandra Niessen, “Regenerative Fashion: There Can Be No Other,” State of Fashion, 15 Oct. 2020,
https://www.stateoffashion.org/en/intervention/intervention-1-introspection/long-read-titel/.

267
to them never effectively aligned. Hicks began to assemble and submit a series of pattern albums
filled with her designs. As Knoll’s New York archives show, Hicks wrote frequently, making
suggestions generously about possible new materials, applications, methods, and tasks she and
others might pursue to (in her mind) great success. In addition to Hicks’s incoming submissions
and correspondence, Knoll internal memos circulated in response to her actions and entreaties
make it clear that Hicks was not exactly fitting in with corporate expectations and protocols. In
short, she exceeded them, confusing and overwhelming Knoll New York from the start. Internal
communications and correspondence make it clear that staff junior to Florence Knoll, those
actually tasked with fielding Hicks and interfacing with her found her behavior out of step and
somewhat exasperating, expressing shock and confusion at several moments when Hicks took
action without corporate approval or oversight, or independently approached individual branches
of the Knoll network without the acknowledgment or guidance of her supervisors back in New
York.
487

For example, remembering the Chicago exhibition at the Merchandise Mart as a
successful endeavor, Hicks approached and in several instances secured similar showings with
other Knoll showrooms across Europe in 1964 and 1965. Meanwhile, catching word of all of this
from New York, those back at Knoll headquarters struggled to wrap their heads around, and keep
up with Hicks, who seemed quite unwieldly, capable of running circles around them, and

487
Christine Rae served as Hicks’s central point of contact. A question of whether to absorb costs incurred in
photographing Hicks’s work is weighed against Hicks’s value as a networker: “our contacts thru Sheila alone have
been far more valuable,” Else Stone to Rene Suane, Interoffice Memo, Knoll New York archives, June 26, 1963;
Instructions regarding proper protocol for engaging regional Knoll offices are clarified sternly in a letter from
Christine Rae to Sheila Hicks, “Knoll Exhibitions,” Knoll New York archives, January 16, 1964; A desire to
uncouple from Hicks is expressed in: Duncan H. South to Donald R. Jomo, “Sheila Hicks’ contract,” Knoll New
York archives, June. 2, 1964; Suspension of Hicks’s work in pattern development is confirmed in Sheila Hicks to
Christine Rae, Knoll New York archives, July 1, 1964; “Will you let me know what has to be done about Sheila, as I
understand her work was paid by [acronym, unclear] and we are free to use these designs” in Letter to Christine Rae,
Knoll New York archives, Oct. 13, 1964; The limited parameters of Hicks’s role are reiterated in Interoffice Memo
from D.H. South, Knoll Archives, Oct. 27, 1965.

268
tripping up their finely tuned corporate hierarchies if she was not stopped (or at least politely
discouraged). Knoll’s archive shows that Hicks was filled with bright and energetic ideas (like
buying paintings by Piero Dorazio from Marlborough Gallery, or employing her as part of an
advanced textiles research and development team), which may not necessarily sound odd at all to
us now, in a moment when claims of collaborating with artists have been made by almost every
field.
488
With an admirable conviction and understanding of her own potential value, Hicks made
clear to Knoll corporate in early 1966 her desire to be hired as a “consultant” and “designer” as
opposed to invoicing for freelance contributions. The letter continues with confidence:
I am not…able to re-act very optimistically about making myself loosely
available on the free-lance basis unless I see or envision a stimulating, active
contact which exploits my specialties, that is: uses me in the context of a vital
program for development and research. In other words, I sincerely hope you ‘hire’
me to work with you and your group and treat me as insider when you fret about
textile development. That would make me inspired and ‘happy’. That would call
for a monthly or tri-monthly remunerative agreement, I imagine. It is not easy to
ask me to tell you which two reds are my favorites, for instance and pay me
accordingly, etc.
489

Hicks did not receive the treatment she solicited. Instead, her work for Knoll came to a hard stop.
Meanwhile, Inca, would become one of the company’s most popular designs, spreading as a
common texture throughout interiors around the world. Knoll’s less-than-elastic internal reaction
gives us a sense of period norms. In their eyes Hicks was too eccentric, too free-wheeling in her
sense of herself and all the ways her skills and interests could be applied. From the perspective of

488
So much so as to achieve the fever of parody, as in the example of the Brooklyn-based collective MSCHF which
has created and sold “Jesus” and “Satan Shoes,” Nike Air Max sneakers injected with holy water from the river
Jordan and human blood (respectively). When sued by Nike, the group’s lawyer framed the shoes as a “comment on
the absurdity of the collaboration culture practiced by some brands,” an irony fortified by the collective’s own
collaboration on the project with rapper Lis Nas X as part of the release of his new single “Montero (Call Me By
Your Name),” Taylor Dafoe, The Art Collective That Nike Sued for Pouring Human Blood on Its Sneakers Has
Agreed to Recall the Shoes,” ArtNet News, April 9, 2021, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/nike-suing-mschf-for-
satan-shoes-1956098
489
Sheila Hicks to B. Cadwallader, “Interoffice Memo, Re: Future Working Arrangements,” Knoll New York
archives, Jan. 11, 1966.

269
the present, it feels ironic, and somewhat surprising that Knoll did not embrace Hicks and all that
she offered, but this surprise helps us see just how conservative, or wedded to its own clearly
divided and organized channels of activity Knoll, and other corporations like it were. Hicks’s
short-lived tenure with Knoll affords clear evidence of who she was at the start of her career: a
creative twenty-something ready to rush with her enthusiasm and big ideas in a thousand
directions. Hicks wanted to be valued and utilized for every trajectory she was motivated to
pursue, rather than be limited strictly to the disenfranchised agency and precarity of independent
freelancer. She wanted to represent and advance Knoll like an executive director, rather than be
rendered obscure and anonymous by her full-time supervisors.
This early exchange, and its disconnects helps us understand what Hicks looked like
when considered through the lens of a highly organized corporate worldview. Set off on a path
by this effective mismatch with Knoll, the renowned titan of modern design, Hicks would
continue to effectively function as an imaginative free-agent. Kicked off by her short-lived and
mixed success with Knoll and its corporate protocols, Hicks consistently existed at arm’s length,
never fully incorporated into the controlled sphere of corporate work. What Knoll asked of Hicks
illustrates how corporate logic generally understands the work-product of individuals as a
company asset, shared and intended for application and development beyond its potentially
individual origins. Following the Knoll episode, Hicks gravitated to ways of working that
preserved some autonomy by producing largely finished, discrete objects as opposed to designs,
prototypes or ideas. Hicks cultivated a middle ground, between submitting entirely to the
anonymous collaboration of the corporation and the total autonomy of the modern artist ideal.
Her first corporate commission illustrates this well. Joining the coterie of designers
reshaping midtown Manhattan in the 1960s and echoing the logic of the Seagram commission

270
with which I began, Hicks created a series of Prayer Rugs in 1966 to decorate the restaurant at
the base of what was colloquially known as Black Rock, a new skyscraper built as the
headquarters of the Columbian Broadcasting System (CBS) by Eero Saarinen with interiors by
Florence Knoll [see figure 21]. Planar wall hangings, the Prayer Rugs built upon the format
Hicks had established in Mexico out of the technology and local skill already invested there in
the making of rebozos. This format and older technology was wedded with a textile gun that
Hicks encountered through her partnership with the Arterior corporation in Germany, evidence
of her re-location by then to Europe. This new tool shot fiber through the planar substrate,
creating pile that Hicks then bundled and wrapped into tassels that defined an arch-shaped field
reminiscent of the pattern typical of Islamic prayer rugs, itself based on basic architectural
elements of domed mosques and their arching interiors. Styling the headquarters of one of the
three major American television and radio corporations as a space for prayer, Hicks’s Prayer
Rugs implicitly proposed television as a new religion, alluding to the mosque and in particular its
calls to prayer broadcast from the minaret. Their tufts and tassels mimic the bundling technique
that would ground Hicks’s sculptures emergent alongside the Prayer Rugs in the late 1960s (as
detailed in the preceding chapter). Hicks did not limit her use of this motif and technique to her
work for CBS, effectively underscoring that her usage of the form and its multiplication occurred
according to her agency and dominion, not the company’s. A Prayer Rug cropped up as her first
submission to the Lausanne Biennials, and another was acquired by MoMA in 1966.
490
Like an
actual Islamic rug used for prayer is designed to do, Hicks’s rugs moved easily around the world,
defying the privatized logic of corporate ownership.
491

490
Sheila Hicks, “Prayer Rug,” The Museum of Modern Art,
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/3412?classifications=any&date_begin=Pre-
1850&date_end=2021&q=sheila+hicks+prayer+rug&utf8=%E2%9C%93&with_images=1.
491
Walter B. Denny, How to Read Islamic Carpets (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014).

271
Playing with the typical hierarchies of Western interiors, the Prayer Rugs move the rug
from the floor to the wall, equating it with the verticality of the wall it hangs from or the arches it
mimics. Recalling Rothko’s murals this reorientation also replaces the vertical, more expectable
easel painting with a more unexpected rug. In this, Hicks appropriated a game of logical and
structural inversions typical of Islamic architecture and decoration, where textiles often feature
the otherwise vertical arch as a pattern or framing device for carpets arrayed across floors. By
citing an architectural silhouette as if it were a non-representational abstraction, they also
collapse binaries of abstraction and figuration, troubling stereotypes of Islamic visual culture as
ardently aniconic.
492
Creating a cultural feedback loop, Hicks built upon this play in future works
when she was invited first to Morocco in 1971 and later to Saudi Arabia from 1983-6 because of
interest generated by her Prayer Rug series. At the invitation of the Moroccan government,
Hicks would advise on the work of heritage carpet makers particularly skilled in hand-knotting
techniques. Like their Prayer Rug precedents, these works would take the abstract motif of the
arch as a repeated theme [see figure 22]. Hicks’s commissions made the architectural context
they persistently framed—both at the level of process and finished product—into thematic
content.
493

This meditation on textiles incorporated into their architectural surrounds would be
elaborated in the 1967 Ford Foundation commission. Architect Warren Platner, a former
associate of Eero Saarinen, now working for Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates as head
of interiors, invited Hicks to create two panels to fill the expanse of two walls on the ground

492
Finbarr Barry Flood has underscored the potential for overstating the aniconic conditions of both Modernism and
Mosques, in “‘God’s Wonder’: Marble as Medium and the Natural Image in Mosques and Modernism,” West 86
th

23, No. 2 (Fall-Winter 2016).
493
This idea derived in part from Anni Albers, as discussed in “The Pliable Plane, Textiles in Architecture,”
Perspecta, The Yale Architecture Journal, 4, 1957, 36-41.

272
floor of the Foundation’s new headquarters designed by the firm. Rejecting what he called
“decoration” outright, Platner too was encouraged by what he saw in the Prayer Rugs for CBS.
“Thread is not to be used as an ornament,” he instructed Hicks, “but a construction material,
complimentary to the other and in a certain sense, superior to the others, because of being more
visible. The combination of thread and surrounding elements must give rise to a harmonious
dialogue.”
494

Undoubtedly harmonious, the array of embroidered golden orbs arranged neatly
according to an invisible grid ultimately echoed the use of brass finishes throughout the building,
such as in the doors, furniture, and trims, and the grided logic of screens baffling the ceiling
fixtures [see figure 77]. Creating a “harmonious dialogue of materials” underscored the purpose
of these spaces as meeting places especially for the interaction of external and internal parties.
Materializing a shift in institutional ambition, the Foundation was increasingly invested in
equally harmonious dialogues between people, collaboratively dedicated to urgent issues of both
national and international urgency beginning in the postwar years.
Hicks’s orbs were the conclusion of extensive tests and studies of different shapes
including squares, rectangles, rhombuses, hexagons, and octagons. The circle defied the usual
logic of modernist design and other geometric decorative motifs, more typically oriented toward
straight-edged rectilinear forms that easily replicate into a tessellated array as demonstrated by
the logic of mosaic tile work. The circle also defied the visual culture and infrastructural logic of
midtown Manhattan, at the heart of the city’s predominantly gridded layout, but also raising
toward the sky as a series of largely rectangular skyscrapers subdivided into arrays of gridded
facades of rectangular windows and walls.

494
Monique Levi-Strauss, Sheila Hicks (New York: Vane Nostrand, 1974), 26.

273
The orbs have been called propellers, and could be described simply as abstractly neutral,
free of external reference—but framed by the theater of The Ford Foundation, I see them as
golden coins.
495
Such iconography makes immense sense for the foundation, an organization
born solely out of the massive, historically unprecedented capitalist wealth, which the Ford
Motor company accumulated, and powerfully exerted because of its ability to direct that almost
unfathomable amount of money toward a diverse array of initiatives. As Peter D. Bell defined in
1971 (at that moment serving as representative of the Ford Foundation in Chile where he
followed in Hicks’s Fulbright funded footsteps), “‘Foundations,’ private, nonprofit institutions
that make grants for public purposes, depend for their existence on the private accumulation of
great wealth and on fiscal and moral incentives for its philanthropic use.” Bell deemed them
“principally an invention of twentieth-century industrial society in the United States,” stating that
at the time, “of the 32 foundations with assets exceeding $100 million, 29 are American.”
496

The Ford Foundation was a logical context for Hicks as they both shared globalist
ambitions. In the case of Ford, international activities had increased significantly in the postwar
period, leading other smaller institutions to follow suit, as “the number of foundations that made
international grants increased from 33 in 1963 to 152 in 1966” (on the eve of the opening of the
Foundation’s new landmark home).
497
Empowered by the acquisition of the estates of the Ford
brothers in 1950, the Foundation founded in their name enlarged its geographic ambitions from

495
The literalism of the golden color itself as a symbol of American currency would be short-lived, rendered
anachronistic (or made all the more precious?) by Richard Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard, a policy that
reshaped the international significance of the American dollar and its conversion value internationally which had
historically shaped its security as a currency of investment.
496
One might note the possible application of this definition to include many American museums, whose funding
depends largely upon private, from individual ticket sales to major trustees, rather than public funding. Channeled
through the museum-as-foundation, this funding is directed particularly to support contemporary and historic art and
artists. Peter D. Bell, "The Ford Foundation as a Transnational Actor," International Organization 25, no. 3 (1971): 465-78.
Accessed January 24, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706051.
497
Bell, 465.

274
charities local to the company’s Michigan headquarters to take on a national and international
purview with the broad mission of advancing “human welfare.”
498
In 1968, the Foundation held
$3.6 billion, making it the largest foundation in the United States (if not the world), and
apportioned around a quarter of its $250 million annual budgets to international contexts.
Although limited in expenditures when compared to forces like the United States
government, the activities of the Ford Foundation were exceptional for their “independence,
flexibility, persistence, professionalism, speed of action, and the capacity for innovation,
experimentation, and demonstration”—adjectives we might readily apply to Hicks’s ambitions
similarly in the late 1960s.
499
Sympathetic to Hicks’s interests, among its other investments in
international studies education, the Ford Foundation was “the largest financial supporter of social
science research in Latin America, and [became] a major force in the development of Latin
American studies in the United States.” Alongside her own education at Yale, where Latin
American cultural influences shaped the teaching of the Albers’s and George Kubler among
others, the Ford Foundation “awarded some $240 million in grants, primarily to American
universities for graduate training and research in ‘non-Western studies’” between 1952 and 1966.
Setting out in the early 1960s, the Foundation declared its intention to “be concerned with
society as a whole, and, in an era when both problems and solutions disdain national boundaries,
it must be prepared to act globally.”
500
In addition to the symbolism of currency, particularly that
flowing from American-style capitalism, Hicks’s golden orbs represented the Foundation’s
globalist outlook, their belief in a unified globe realized by the Foundation’s ability to mobilize

498
Bell, 467.
499
“The report suggested four subareas of activity: i) the mitigation of tensions which threaten world peace; 2) the
development among peoples of the world of the understanding and conditions essential to permanent peace; 3) the
improvement and strengthening of the United Nations and its associated international agencies; and 4) the
improvement of the structure and procedures by which the United States government and private American groups
participate in world affairs,” Bell, 465.
500
As quoted in Bell, 469.

275
its monetary wealth as a form of global power that transcended national borders. The circles
symbolize the Foundation’s stated understanding of the world not as a collage of idiosyncratic
shapes defined by “national boundaries” but as a “whole” world unified by its philanthropy.
Writing in Foreign Policy in 1990, Joseph S. Nye Jr. set forth the phrase “Soft Power,” as
a way to understand international relations in the wake of the Cold War’s apparent end.
501
Nye
introduces and defines “soft power” as “when one country gets other countries to want what it
wants.” (Introducing an analogy of parents and teenagers), “Co-optive or soft power,” he writes,
exists “in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do” what one wants, a
power most literally produced and secured by state-controlled military might. Soft power is “the
power of attractive ideas…to set the political agenda and determine the framework of debate in a
way that shapes others' preferences.”
502
It is governing via “intangible power resources such as
culture, ideology, and institutions.” As one would expect, “multinational corporations are
another source of co-optive [or soft] power.” Alluding to the growth and agency of organizations
like the Ford Foundation, Nye recounts how, “the rapid growth of private actors operating across
international borders, whether large corporations or political groups, was widely recognized in
the early 1970s.”
503

501
Arguing for the presence of such diplomatic strategies in the immediate postwar period, Greg Castillo has
invoked “the soft power of the home” as a “subset of what cold warriors called (somewhat interchangeably)
‘propaganda,’ ‘information,’ and ‘psychological warfare.’” See Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The
Soft Power of Midcentury Design (University of Minnesota, 2010), xi-xv.
502
Joseph S. Nye, "Soft Power," Foreign Policy, no. 80 (1990): 153-71. Accessed March 14, 2021, doi:10.2307/1148580.
503
“The appropriate response to the changes occurring in world politics today is not to abandon the traditional
concern for the military balance of power, but to accept its limitations and to supplement it with insights about
interdependence. In the traditional view, states are the only significant actors in world politics and only a few large
states really matter. But today other actors are becoming increasingly important. Although they lack military power,
transnational corporations have enormous economic resources. Thirty corporations today each have annual sales
greater than the gross national products (GNPs) of 90 countries. In the 1980s, the annual profits of IBM and Royal
Dutch/Shell Group were each larger than the central government budgets of Colombia, Kenya, or Yugoslavia.
Multinational corporations are sometimes more relevant to achieving a country's goals than are other states. The
annual overseas production by such corporations exceeds the total value of international trade. In a regional context,
a portrait of the Middle East conflict that did not include the superpowers would be woefully inadequate, but so

276
In her correspondence with Platner and others and what she produced for CBS and the
Ford Foundation, Hicks was undeniably interested in her material’s literal softness, its pliability
as an ironic foil to the hard, static materials more typical of a monumental architectural
vocabulary, especially in terms of the literal logic of construction and engineering. I am
interested in drawing out the “soft power” in addition to the literally material at play in Hicks’s
chosen materials. As I have begun to argue, her own ideology of borderless existence aligned her
logically with major forces of soft power like the multinational cultural forces of CBS and the
Ford Foundation that exceeded the limits of a particular national context.
Even in contexts where official American state power is opposed or distasteful, aspects of
American culture, like sports jackets, collegiate apparel, and television programs are welcomed
in often without suspicion and can dominate a market. Alongside her international fiber art peers,
Hicks took on increasingly monumental commissions for companies that themselves were
expanding without regard to national boundaries, according to the logic of late capitalist
globalization.
504
What particularly about fiber endeared it to the spaces of multinational
corporate expansion? How did fiber’s literal and conceptual softness help these corporation’s
style themselves as non-threatening forces of soft power, rather than manifestations of
neocolonial administration via finance capitalism?
505

“Communication Labyrinth”: Monuments and Mandalas for the Global Village
Set off on this globalist trajectory, and increasingly established in Paris, Hicks’s next
important commission were her bas-relief tapestries for AirFrance, created between 1969 and

would a description that did not tell of transnational religious groups, oil companies, and terrorist organizations. The
issue is not whether state or nonstate actors are more important—states usually are. The point is that in modern
times, more complex coalitions affect outcomes,” Nye, 157.
504
Tai Smith, “Tapestries in Space: An Alternative History of Site-Specificity,” Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present, 160.
505
Eric Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power,” Foreign Policy, Aug. 20, 2018,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power/.

277
1977 for its fleet of Boeing 747s, a period that carries us from the beginnings of her
commissioned work in the 1960s well into the next decade. Beginning with these reliefs as an
exceptional touchstone, art historian Sarah Parrish has also explored how Hicks’s work
participated in the logic of late capitalist globalization, calling the panels, “arguably [the] fullest
form” of Hicks’s “cross-fertilization of international influences” and proof that “Hicks gave
visual form to complexities of globalization that would not be systemically studied until decades
later.”
506
In in a particularly stirring claim, Parrish asserts, “Hicks’ artwork asserts the excessive,
untranslatable remainders that corporate spaces seemingly translate away.”
507

By conjuring a voice like Bell’s alongside Hicks’s work of the 1960s and 1970s, all
ostensibly before soft power and globalization’s supposed heyday and codified discourse of the
1980s and 1990s, I seek voices beyond the official historiography of “globalization” that Parrish
draws upon (including the writing of Anthony Giddens) in part to dissolve its monolithic and as
such increasingly familiar status as a term of inquiry. To Parrish’s point, as Bell’s writing on The
Ford Foundations makes clear, the world was self-consciously theorizing itself and the newly
global (rather than national, or local) logics were already apparent to many in the postwar years.
As I have argued in preceding chapters, this recognition took many forms culturally, from the
visual art of artists like Hicks and her generational peers in the art world to the academy’s
embrace of extra-Western cultures as equally productive of twentieth-century modernity.
As many scholars have urged, we can find “globalization” well beyond the late twentieth
century, centuries earlier and across cultures.
508
Art historian Pamela Lee deems “globalization

506
Sarah Parrish, “From Collectives to Corporations: Sheila Hicks’ Transnational Air/Craft,” Design and Culture,
Volume 8, Issue 1, 80.
507
Parrish, 83.
508
See for example the exuberant search for “early modern” globalization, as in, Anne E. C. McCants, "Exotic Goods,
Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World," Journal of
World History 18, no. 4 (2007): 433-62.

278
— a word as banal as it is ugly,” as she acknowledges “the longstanding controversies around
that term,” usually defined by “a historical compression in time-space relations—the social
acceleration of time and a virtual eclipse of distance—continuous with the liberalization of
markets and the rise of the network society.”
509
“Globalization,” writes Lee:
issues a challenge to representation equal if opposite to the colonizing impulse
ascribed to it. It is a kind of informe: a new ‘allover’ which seemingly trumps our
collective efforts to give shape it its multivalent interests, let alone contain its
deterritorializing mandate. Indeed the word ‘globalization’ and its linked
phenomena (‘globality,’ ‘glocality,’ and even ‘globalism’ the ‘ism’ here
connoting either an ethos or a period style) bear the distinction of being both
ubiquitous and amorphous: ubiquitous because inescapable to any world citizen
and yet amorphous because subject to infinite shape-shifting in both mainstream
and alternative media.

Meanwhile, echoing the panoply of word-choice Lee bemoans, Caroline Jones draws a
distinction between the “internationalism” of world’s fairs and the “globality consolidated by
biennials of contemporary art.”
510
Less cynical than Lee, Jones has invested in the recuperation
of “globalism” and what she calls “critical globalism” in particular, defined as,
an approach to art-making, a mode of reception for art-viewing, and a
hermeneutic for curatorial practice…rather than parasitizing earlier artistic
movements, globalism can be seen as potential within them, emerging as a
theoretical position from artists within the flux…Globalism is positioned…as an
aesthetic response to economic, technological, and cultural processes of
globalization.

Describing the “fray of recent struggles over the term globalization” also acknowledged
by Lee, Jones proposes “Critical globalism” as a refusal of the discursive contest
between “powerful advocates of neoliberal economics” and alleged “Luddites.” Jones’s
critical globalism eludes “this binary and rejects the hierarchy it encodes.” With it,

509
Lee, Forgetting the Art World, 3.
510
Caroline Jones, The Global Work of Art, x.

279
“culture can stake a claim on a seemingly smaller part of the discursive territory, then use
that Archimedean lever to dislodge the entire stacked debate.”
511

I am less interested in “globalization” strictly conceived as a particular historical moment
or policed intellectual terrain, partially because of how much it has been expanded, deflated, and
maligned (often justly). Rather, emboldened by Jones’s optimism and Archimedean analogy, in
my own appraisal of Hicks’s work I seek to recognize a “globalism” rather than a “globalization”
that preceded and has been recovered in response to the increasingly stigmatized status of the
latter. As Hicks exemplifies throughout her career, the globalist spirit proceeded full of hope and
without irony, in part because it had yet to recognize the limits of its utopian ideals and
ambitions. If “globalization” as lens emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, it emerged not just because
of the “intensification of worldwide social relations,” which scholars like Giddens detected, but
also as a reaction to the cynical and horrific fractures the world had already and would undergo
in the last years of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first.
Examining Hicks’s AirFrance tapestries as part of her larger corporate career, Parrish
engages analogies of translation, returning to the questions of language and writing in particular
that I explored previously in Chapter 3. Having dealt with questions of writing and language
already there, I turn to the AirFrance tapestries as an entryway onto another series of contexts
and attendant analogies that expand upon the prospect of translation broadly conceived instead as
movement. In the 1970s, Hicks would create works not only for airplanes, but also airports like
the TWA terminal in New York City, in addition to corporations including IBM and AT&T, all
of them conduits for the circulation of people and their communicative exchanges, creating icons

511
Jones, xiii.

280
for the new media and infrastructures that facilitated the realization of twentieth-century
globalism.
Such organizations contributed to a world that superseded the limits of translation (and its
apparent opposite, the untranslatable) that Parrish proposes. Instead, new technologies like air
travel for the masses, computing, and telecommunications would advance the immediacy of life
and experience across multiple formats. Instead of the processing, delay, and disjunction of
translation, Hicks’s commissions in the 1970s contributed to an ideology of immediacy and
intimacy, the global made local with no need for decryption. As such, they offered a symbolic
iconography for what media theorist Marshall McLuhan would call the “global village.”
A part of an all-over acceleration of experience that McLuhan described in
Understanding Media, how “our specialist and fragmented civilization of center-margin structure
is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic
whole. This is the new world of the global village.”
512
The phrase recurs throughout McLuhan’s
touchstone text and in addition is reformulated in other declarations such as, “the globe itself can
never again be more than a village.”
513
Relevant to Hicks’s engagement of specific local
traditions and craft contexts, McLuhan insists on the logic of the village (small-scale, provincial,
intimate) for understanding the whole world. Latent and at times more explicit in McLuhan is a
value system that idealizes the village, and its potential association with the extra-Western, over
the city.
Postcolonial and post-structural theorist Gayatri Spivak has critiqued McLuhan’s vision
as an "appropriation of the rural…colonialism's newest trick."
514
As Sue-Im Lee describes,

512
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 93.
513
McLuhan, 343.
514
Gayatri Spivak, as quoted by Sue-Im Lee, “ ’We are not the world’: Global Village, Universalism, and Karen Tei
Yamashita's Tropic of Orange,” Modern Fiction Studies 53, No. 3 (Fall 2007), 506.

281
“‘global village’ has been the dominant term for expressing a global coexistence altered by
transnational commerce, migration, and culture. More importantly, ‘global village’ translates that
altered material condition into a hitherto unrealized condition of proximity, intimacy, and
interrelatedness, the ultimate basis for a singular, collective ‘we.’”
515

Recognizing the socio-political implications of the shift he described, McLuhan remarks
elsewhere in the text that, “the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all
social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of
responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implosive factor that alters the position of the Negro,
the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of
limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs.”
516
According to
McLuhan, the global village reshaped social relationships, and created political agency for new
actors locally as well as internationally, affording previously subaltern figures an incorporated
status in the activity shaping the modern world. Embedded in the idea of the “global village” is
the world made smaller, more immediate. As McLuhan explains, “electric media…abolish the
spatial dimension, rather than enlarge it. By electricity, we everywhere resume person-to-person
relations as if on the smallest village scale. It is a relation in depth, and without delegation of
functions or powers. The organic everywhere supplants the mechanical.”
517
Far from
homogenizing, the global village,
creates insatiable village taste for gossip, rumor, and personal malice…while
radio contracts the world to village dimensions, it hasn’t the effect of
homogenizing the village quarters. Quite the contrary. In India, where radio is the
supreme form of communication, there are more than a dozen official languages
and the same number of official radio networks…Ireland, Scotland, and Wales
have undergone resurgence of their ancient tongues since the coming of the radio,
and the Israeli…now speak a language which has been dead in books for

515
Lee, 502.
516
McLuhan, 5.
517
McLuhan, 256.

282
centuries. Radio is not only a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces, and
animosities, but a decentralizing, pluralistic force, as is really the case with all
electronic power and media.
518

Throughout Understanding Media, McLuhan idealized new media like radio, part of a rush of
new twentieth-century media as harbingers of the global village effect, a newfound intimacy and
social agency for everyone everywhere facilitated by these media’s ability to interconnect as well
as sponsor a plurality of idioms rather than a monocultural broadcast.
We see this ideology take shape in the imagery and contexts of Hicks’s commissions of
the 1970s, as for IBM’s headquarters in Paris in 1972. Drawing from the syntax of wrapped
strands ongoing simultaneously in her sculptures (but without the pulse or freedom of the
unwrapped moments), La Mémoire, 1972 arranged cords wrapped almost completely edge to
edge in hot colors—orange, yellow, and red—into an evenly spaced woven grid [see figure 23].
Towards the grid’s center, intersections of the horizontal and vertical crossings were embellished
with cool rings of greens and blues. Again, like at the Ford Foundation, the grided motif mimics
the constructive logic of the tiled ceiling beside it, and the tight linearity of the cords echoes the
bent rods supporting the table and chairs Platner designed, suggesting another intermedial
“harmonious dialogue” like that achieved at the Ford Foundation. Hick’s title points to the
concept of human memory, or written texts created to record them, but framed by IBM, more
primary than this is the concept of computer memory, a technology which was shifting at the
time of Hicks’s making from “magnetic core”-based technologies to “semiconductor”-based
memories.
519
In diagrams and images of the soon-to-be outmoded magnetic core technology, one

518
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 306
519
“1970: Semiconductors compete with magnetic cores,” Computer History Museum, accessed March 19, 2021,
https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/semiconductors-compete-with-magnetic-cores/.

283
finds the same structural motif of a screen grid, its crossings encircled by metal rings that match
Hicks’s own [see Figure 24].
Demonstrating some part of the soft power at her disposal, Hicks deployed old media in
spaces dedicated to new media at a daunting scale. Spanning an entire wall, Hicks diagrammed
this soon to be outmoded technology, a “memory plane” made of wires run by “magnetic rings
called cores” that each contained one “bit” of data. Effectively the first incarnation of “RAM” or
“random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high speed,” the magnetic
memory retrieved stored information in less than a second, once again accelerating the
instantaneity described by McLuhan.
520
By borrowing the iconography of a formerly new
media—the magnetic core memory—for the pattern of an apparently ancient medium, Hicks
created a visual allegory of old and new media layered atop one another. The comparison
troubles the apparent difference between them and as such deflates the threat of obsolescence. If
a medium as ancient as fiber could find new life and relevance so late in life, maybe there was
also no reason to mourn the apparently rapidly outmoded technologies of electronics and
computing?
Enlarged to architectural scale, Hicks’s commissions like La Mémoire approach the
monumental. As such, they harken back to the scale of the archeological sites (places like Machu
Pichu and Uxmal), that Hicks valued across Latin America. These archeological sites had
relevance long beyond their apparent moment of peak use. If technology, like the magnetic
memory, was soon to be abandoned by the culture that built it, it was about to be not unlike the
ruins of Latin America, assembling a palimpsest of media archeology.

520
Brian X. Chen, “May 11, 1951: RAM is Born,” Wired, May 11, 2010,
https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0511magnetic-core-memory/.

284
McLuhan also described the concept of “hot and cold” media to organize a taxonomy of
media from the ancient to the extremely recent. I invoke the concept to draw a comparison to
McLuhan’s own impulse to reconcile old and new media, and recognize their interrelationship in
the twentieth century—from the stone temple, to weaving, to computers. La Mémoire constructs
this palimpsest of old, soon-to-be-outmoded, and anticipated new, and in its palette— hot reds,
oranges and yellow juxtaposed against blues and greens—finds its way to its own spectrum of
hots and colds, reconciling them into one composition.
In addition to the structural and conceptual logic inherent in any one computing device,
La Mémoire also helps us appreciate fiber’s value as an analogy for revolutionary technologies to
come, in particular the advent of networked computing—which was actively in development as a
practical possibility in the early 1970s—and the interconnected logic of the internet that would
emerge from this project and become a shared space of everyday life by the end of the century.
One of d’Harcourt’s taxonomy of ancient Peruvian textiles, “networks” had informed Hicks’s
earliest formal and theoretical formulations.
521
As illustrated in d’Harcourt’s volume, the
networks of ancient Peru echo La Memoire’s open screen grid. Such materially real nets, and the
already extant language used to describe them were applied to new technological structures such
as networks and their ultimate interconnection as the internet, which was popularized in the early
1990s according to another textile metaphor, that of the “World Wide Web.”
522

Inheritors of McLuhan’s discourse extended his midcentury awareness and confidence to
describe the dynamic of the internet as another accelerant of the global village effect. As such,
works like La Mémoire functioned as visual metaphors for technologies both existing and

521
D’Harcourt, xiii.
522
Sally Wyatt, “Danger! Metaphors at Work in Economics, Geophysiology, and the Internet” Science, Technology,
& Human Values, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring, 2004), 243

285
potential, a space of contemplation and projection for employees at work on technologies still in
development or maybe not even consciously recognized yet. Participating in the ideology of
technology as a force productive of “the global village” ideal, La Memoire also suggests the
standardized grid of a map with the shimmering blue-green marble of earth witnessed from space
plotted at its center. Aligning the iconography of the map and the network’s respective grids into
one, La Memoire draws their supposedly aligned ideological nets over the earth, suggesting the
utopian fantasy of the Internet as a force for unprecedented global connectivity.
As Sally Wyatt describes, metaphors “help people to comprehend the new, the unseen,
the unknown; but they can also mislead, sometimes deliberately, because the kinds of experience
they purport to connect may be incommensurate.”
523
Because of their appeal not only to our
visual comprehension, but also to our sense of touch thanks to fiber’s haptic appeal, Hicks’s
works gave a comfortable, tangible iconography to the new and unseeable capacities computers
would increasingly inaugurate, figuring the networks companies like IBM facilitated—and their
claims to productively link the world as one networked unity. This appeal to touch, as well as our
intimate sense of the textiles we wear daily also informs the ability of installations like La
Mémoire to help us empathize with the immense scale shifts of such global interconnectivity and
immediacy. In the words of Sue-Im Lee, “the conjoining of two vastly different scales of human
coexistence demonstrates the domesticating work performed by the smaller scale of the ‘village’
in defusing the threat posed by the immense scale of the ‘global.’ The ‘village’ is not just a
denotation of a smaller scale of coexistence however. It simultaneously connotes a particular
relationality at work.”
524
Works in fiber work similarly. Made up of thread, they are constructed
of an element we understand intimately and associate with a small, often almost imperceptible

523
Wyatt, 245.
524
Lee, 505.

286
scale, able to pass through the minute eye of a needle. And yet, in works like La Mémoire, the
thread amasses into a massive, cohesive design, approximating the shift of scale from local to
global and making the faraway or dauntingly monumental feel as familiar, safe, and immediate
as the cloth that sits against our skin. Scaling between minute and massive, intimate and
international, La Mémoire configures the kind of relationalities inaugurated by global
interconnection.
“This is the paradox about the web,” mused the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith in
2017 (perfectly, on Twitter). “It’s given us back the artifact. So instead of asking what the web
can do, we also ask what it can’t. There’s a million things the web can’t do—weaving, pottery,
textiles, fashion—& those things become more valuable.”
525
As Goldsmith contends, the oddity
and anxiety of new digital frontiers has encouraged us to revalue their apparent opposite, craft,
explicitly because of its analog status. We see crafted objects differently in the wake of the
digital, crave their materiality, and attend to their idiosyncrasy with an urgency of attention and
fervor unprecedented in earlier decades. Not only to be found in the increased exuberance for
craft media, particularly ceramics and fiber framed as art, one sees a similar thrall over more
literal examples of textiles and fashion, especially in the world of museums and exhibitions as
the record-breaking crowds that attend each year’s Costume Institute exhibition at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art demonstrate. Goldsmith’s calling out of the “artifact,” rather than
more mundane terms like “thing” or “object,” stresses that these object classes, “weaving,
pottery, textiles, fashion” now carry, no matter their age, the patina of prehistory, ancient, or
archeological culture. Like these millennia old objects, craft objects feel, as he says, newly

525
Kenneth Goldsmith, “@kg_ubu,” Twitter, 26 April 2017,

287
“vulnerable,” brittle like old paper or fragile like the shard of an old pot flecked with
archeological dust.
Contesting this sense of antiquity, in the Fall 1976 issue of American Fabrics and
Fashions (a publication Hicks would later steer as Editor-in-Chief), we see another elaboration
of Hicks’s affiliation with the growing global technocracy featured prominently in “Fibers in
Architecture: AT&T Headquarters.” Imagining that “it is July 4
th
2076,” the article looks back on
a century of an “increasingly mature attitude toward the environment…the beginning of
solutions for megalopolitan problems on the planet Earth.” One of which was “the harmonious
complex built in the New Jersey woods, outside of the then overcrowded Manhattan-City. The
largest company of that time, AT&T, had undertaken the pioneering task of re-humanizing
working environments for their one million employees.” Part of their “re-humanizing” approach,
was creating “a warmer, psychologically softer, more friendly atmosphere...made possible
through the use of fibers and textiles, counterbalancing the coldness of concrete, glass, and
metal.” Continuing its fictive retrospect, the article describes “Fiber-Objects, a new art-form
developed as a companion of architecture” and singles out one in particular commissioned for
AT&T’s new headquarters, “one of the masterpieces of the art of the twentieth Century” and
predicted that it “still stands at its original place in the AT&T complex. This monumental fiber
disc, ‘Communication Labyrinth’ has not lost its brightness and vividness in color. The
American-born artist who created it, Sheila Hicks, left works of Fiber-Art on all continents. Most
of them, fortunately, have survived the hazards of our tumultuous past Century.”
526

As it happens, neither of Hicks’s commissions for the AT&T complex in New Jersey,
Communication Labyrinth and The Silk Rainforest (both 1976) remain in place, and the entire

526
“Fibers in Architecture. AT&T Headquarters,” American Fabric and Fashions, No. 108, Fall 1976, 34.

288
campus was sold in 2001, failing to reach the aspirational centennial described by at least 75
years.
527
Manhattan remains plagued by an endless affordable housing shortage, and despite
ongoing experiments and formatting shifts (from open plan to shared workspaces, the relocation
of heavy industry worldwide, or the involuntary remote work inaugurated by Covid-19) working
environments are no significantly more “human” or humane than they were in 1976. While
disappointing, registering the vast difference between the utopian future imagined in 1976
(within which fiber and its literal and metaphoric softness was conceived as an essential
component) and the present we inhabit again underscores the idealistic globalist tenor of the
discursive spaces Hicks engaged, far from the irony and cynicism, or at least the vaguely jaded,
adjusted expectations that would characterize more recent outlooks.
Describing the company’s decision to collect and commission art for this new campus,
Hicks’s dedicated champion Mildred Constantine was also the company’s art consultant. “Such a
collection,” she remarked, “would serve to enhance the total working environment…Given the
organic nature of materials which the artists employ in the Art Fabric media, the great patterns of
movement and the expressive shaping in their work, we found these eminently suitable to the
architectural qualities of the complex.” Not only was Hicks commissioned to create two
monumental fiber focal points (the largest of the works created for the new campus) Constantine
also purchased a who’s who of contemporary fiber art, including “smaller works” by Magdalena
Abakanowicz, Olga de Amaral, Jagoda Buic, Maria Chojnacja-Gontarska, Aurelia Munoz, Sofia
Burtomowicz, Lia Cook, Jolanta Owidzca, Agnes Ruszcynska, W. Sadley, Sherri Smith, Moik

527
Sean Young, “Verizon Nears Deal for Former At&T Headquarter,” The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2005,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB111170142136989106.

289
Schiele, and Claire Zeisler.
528
With these acquisitions, Constantine claimed the AT&T Collection
represented the largest collection of fiber art in the United States.
“Textile-Tactile-Texture is a leitmotif, pleasant and warm,” notes the American Fabrics
feature. Again, fiber, from Hicks to the full cast assembled above, lent a haptic, tactile value to
the workplace, an ironic materialization when set against the backdrop of a corporation
predicated on apparent dematerializing forces like telecommunications, which make absent
people present, at least as a sound or a sight if not a tactile touch. McLuhan’s taxonomy of hot
and cold divided media according to their level of participation of the user’s sensorium, or how
much of the experience they mediated was lost via mediation. For example, if telephones replace
in person conversations, they were cold because they offered only the sound of a voice but left
the user to imagine the non-verbal aspects of embodied communication such as facial
expressions, hand gestures or bodily comportment. As part of a corporate mise-en-scène, fiber’s
value was its ability to warm up not only the hard interiors of the corporate work space, but also
the otherwise cold experience twentieth-century technology’s mediation of experience affords,
the kind of telecommunications capitalized by AT&T. Filling a monumental affective hole,
circular forms like Communication Labyrinth addressed the sense of lack created by a primarily
aural or visual medium, reminding of lost sensory experiences like the tactile.
Larger than the IBM commission, the two works created for AT&T, Communication
Labyrinth and The Silk Rainforest were again grandiose in size [see figure 25 and 26]. The
former was approximately 600 pounds. Approaching an explanation of the chosen title,
Constantine remarked that, like a telephone wire that speaks for itself, “Sheila believes that each
fiber communicates its special message in its own way.”
529
This idea again recalls McLuhan,

528
“Fibers in Architecture. AT&T Headquarters,” 36.
529
“Fibers in Architecture. AT&T Headquarters,” 36.

290
who famously declared it was not the message, but the medium that was the message.
Commenting on another version of the work, Hicks remarked, “The spiritual exercise of
CENTERING and focus is capital in all religious practices. This tapestry bas-relief was made
entirely by hand with a repetitive wrapping technique resembling the recitation of the prayer
rosary or Tibetan prayers, or Muslim prayer beads, or Hebrew prayer shawls.”
530
The work’s
again circular but now also spiraling formal logic alludes to the circumambulating patterns
typical of medieval European church labyrinths as well as references like the prayer tools
acknowledged by Hicks but also similarly spatialized rituals of meditation, such as the Buddhist
stupa or mandalas typical of several Asian religions.
In addition to these spiritual, meditative allusions, it is maybe easier to imagine viewers,
especially AT&T employees, recognizing formal similarities between Hicks’s wrapped strands
and the conduits of electrical cable that had historically undergirded AT&T’s communication
infrastructure and empire. Previous AT&T corporate commissions had likewise invoked such
cables as an allegorical prop, most prominently in Evelyn Beatrice Longman’s Spirit of
Communication, 1914, a golden statue of a nude winged man raising lightning bolts in his left
hand while exposed wires spark in his right hand from the end of a lyrical coil of cabling
elegantly encircling his arm, torso, and legs as he stands triumphantly upon a globe [see figure
27]. The sculpture, also known as “Golden Boy” has been relocated to various corporate
headquarters throughout the company’s history, included living for a time in New Jersey in close
proximity to Hicks’s much more abstract contribution. Unlike Longman’s boy, Hicks’s work
encourages us to bask instead in abstraction, and fiber’s metaphoric and iconographic
capaciousness. As it had in the IBM commission, the application of fiber in this context allows

530
Sheila Hicks, as quoted by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Labyrinth of Communication, 1990-91,
https://collections.artsmia.org/art/62048/labyrinth-of-communication-sheila-hicks.

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for both a monument to existing technology (the electric cables) and a symbol flexible enough to
anticipate new developments on the horizon, namely the advent of “fiber optic” cables that
would enter into commercial and eventually widespread use immediately following the opening
of the Basking Ridge campus in 1977. Eventually, this kind of fiber would totally reshape the
infrastructure of telecommunications, undergirding over eighty percent of data traffic, ushering
in the arrival of the internet and the so-called “Information Age.”
531

Sheila Hicks Incorporated
Learning and exploring through “trial and error” how to run a studio and successful
business, Hicks has described how she consulted both likely and unexpected “experts—not only
other artists, businessmen or lawyers or notaries, but also people who were running cleaning
shops or bakery shops here in the neighborhood.” The path was plagued by limitations, from
contemplating the extra-judicial to matters of conventional wisdom: “Everything I thought we
could try wasn’t legal or wasn’t the way it was supposed to be done.”
532

A recurring problem that shaped the formal, material, and financial parameters governing
Hicks’s increasingly large and thus more labor-intensive commissions was the concrete limits of
her own agency. Hicks described a conversation with an imaginary banker as emblematic of the
issue: “Madame, how do we know you’ll be here throughout the project and if you take a loan at
the bank, what guarantees can you give? This project depends so totally on you, your design,
your vision, and your signature that it’s worthless if it can’t be completed.”
533
This is a problem
that goes back to Renaissance workshops at least and informs any contemporary artistic studio

531
Vivek Alwayn, "Fiber-Optic Technologies," Optical Network Design and Implementation, Cisco Press, April 23,
2004.
532
Oral history interview with Sheila Hicks, 2004 February 3-March 11, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
533
Oral history, 2004 February 3.

292
animated by more than one set of hands. It is a crucial part of the meaningful difference between
the work of one and the work of many, particularly when the ultimate effort, the collaboratively
authored work-product is expected to cohere according to the expectations we hold for singular
(“you, your design, your vision, and your signature”) rather than plural authorship. It also models
in miniature the paradigm of corporate activity or mass-manufacture. The activities of the
corporation or factory, though carried out collaboratively by many (with competing agendas
afoot) enters the world under the singular sign—the signature—of the singular brand name.
I like to think of it as the Martha Stewart problem, because the crux of the issue here is
how to maintain the power of a single identity despite the limitations of any one person.
534

Stewart, thanks to the ways in which her business’s mystique depends upon the intersection of
her own identity with the application of applied, embodied (often craft or craft-related) skills
makes her an apt analogy for the dynamics at play in Hicks’s own signification. That said, her
example also furnishes a theoretical limit test and counterpoint, as the origin of Stewart’s
business is predicated on the monetization of making, demonstrations and performances of
processes that teach skills, as opposed to the sale of already made things. In the case of Stewart
and others at the helm of eponymous lifestyle brands (like Ralph Lauren), this tension is thrown
into high relief by the questions surrounding corporate structure and legacy planning involved in
any company attempting to gain the profitability and longevity afforded by becoming a publicly
traded and corporately managed company. What happens to Martha Stewart Inc. (officially,
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia) if (when) Martha Stewart no longer exists? How much of
what Martha does—baking a pie, trimming a topiary, selling a cookbook, branding a set of patio
furniture—can only be done by Martha? As Hicks’s own description illustrates, this tension also

534
Joan Didion, “Everywoman.com,” The New Yorker, Feb. 13, 2000.

293
adheres in the artist’s studio, where authorial identity is equally paramount, if not quite so
bureaucratically stage-managed. Anyone, even the most skilled, is limited by the number of work
hours in a day, and ultimately by the length of a life. How do others learn how to perform,
embody the skills apparently unique to someone else? Responding to this paradox, Hicks
explains her solution:
I had to find ways that it could be completed with or without me. My solution was to
build into the basic principles of the work the concept of a repetitive module. I
established the design, texture, scale, and color. I would teach others how to fabricate it
so they could go on without me. With a [margin of error], besides, that could add
charm…If I look down the list of our projects since 1967 I realized that I based the
thinking each time on modules that could be assembled in place that be adjustable. I took
into account the demands of working in large scale and having to make the components
in a small studio.
535

This strategy led Hicks to apparently unaesthetic advisors, as she explains, “I had to learn what it
was like to be a construction unit, so I talked to people in the construction business: To
electricians, plumbers, and small entrepreneurs, figuring out how they wrote their contracts.” We
see this “construction” logic at play across Hicks’s works, generally employed whenever her
work moves beyond the miniature scale. As described in the preceding chapters, the building
block, unitary logic undergirded the “open compositions” of the previous chapters and it also
allowed for the increasingly grandiose scale of her commissions, built of bundled skeins wrapped
repeatedly according to a simple gesture easily repeated by any practiced, trained hand.
This wrapping became Hicks’s “signature,” a repetitive gesture encoded in the work she
produced at increasingly monumental scales. Alongside it, another signature gesture emerged,
and was employed in other commissions, such as an untitled work from 1980 created for
Vanderbilt University or the monumental expanse (of several football fields) called for in Four
Seasons of Mount Fuji, 1992-3 [See Figure 75]. Here, Hicks gathered skeins of fiber, not unlike

535
Oral history, 2004 February 3.

294
those employed elsewhere but did not wrap them. Instead, they are twisted to created S or Z
directional twists alluding to the physics of fiber spun into thread. Some are under so much
tension that they created a double twist, twisting around themselves like braided pastry. I bring
up this technique not only because it became another tool in Hicks’s toolkit (and would shape
works for decades to come, as in Supple Column/Pillar of Inquiry, 2014), but because she
employed it as part of her mature identity, an emblem of her brand.
The twist began to appear as a stylized abstract form, atop stationery, letters, and business
cards, crafted and sent from Hicks’s Parisian studio [see figure 18]. It also appeared as a kind of
“signature” on select works, as in the tapestries she created for King Saud University in Riyadh,
such as the Palm Tree tapestry represented by its smaller scale model in the collections of The
Metropolitan Museum Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art [see figure 19].
To the unknowing eye, the three nestling forms could look completely abstract, or evoke
waves, leaches or some other slug-like animal, or the letter “m” rendered in cursive as much as
anything else, including a wrapped skein of fiber. Considering the icon as it appears on the studio
stationery, one can also appreciate the similarity between the twist and the way Hicks signs the
“S” in her first name, tilting it to the right to approach the horizontal orientation of the twist
symbol above and curling so much at its ends that they extend and reunite with the letter’s body
in a similar fashion. Whether as appended on correspondence or actual artworks, by the 1980s,
the twist presented an effective brand insignia, evidencing the studio’s persistent commitment to
abstraction made manifest via the material reality, the physics of fiber.
Atop this, it communicated (if latently) the central gestures of Hicks’s most signature
works, the repetitive wrapping of her sculptures rendered as a corporate insignia, a design
dematerialized from the specificity of the fiber from which it originated. As Hicks has remarked

295
on various occasions, there is nothing especially unique to the physics of this torsion or the
repetitive act of wrapping. They are techniques she borrowed from extant textile practices, most
especially those of the ancient Andes. And yet, it is ironically put forth here as a characteristic
insignia. Recounting Apple’s dedicated efforts in recent years to copyright various gestures of
touch screen interaction (“Pinch-to-Zoom, Slide-to-Unlock, Multifinger Twisting”), Alexander
Provan has described how such efforts to turn such embodied, arguably universally available
gestures into private property might encourage us to “notice the ways in which our interactions
with digital interfaces are changing, with increasingly complex functions facilitated by a new
level of haptic choreography, the goal being to integrate seamlessly sensation, cognition, and
computation.”
536
Years earlier, Hicks’s works explored and concretized a proprietary identity
associated with the gesture of the twist, a common material procedure and elementary physical
reaction particular to the physics of fiber—pre-figuring the mediated gestures of digital
technology.
In part, the twist icon also condenses Hicks’s materialized brand of abstraction, one that
particularly helps us see abstraction, pure form and readymade abstract materialities at play in
the apparently non-abstract figural world always already. This unsettling of perception is
dramatized the Riyadh tapestries like Palm Tree, 1984-5 (or another picturing a desert plane
textured by complex sand undulations). For the series of 56 gigantic works, Hicks was careful to
choose figurative subject matter that resembled apparently abstract motifs, from the radial
linearity of palm fronds to the chaotic wave patterning of a sand dune, the symbolism of an iris,
Arabic maps, or geometric embroidery designs appropriated from Palestinian dresses.
537
By

536
Alexander Provan, “Touch Screens,” Artforum, March 2013, https://www.artforum.com/print/201303/touch-
screens-39392.
537
Freudenheim, “12,000 Men and a Woman.”

296
directing our attention to such citations, Hicks underscores that the kind of patterns we might
recognize in the space of art are often also available, even originating, in the real physical world,
both natural and man-made, as part of an animated orchestra of abstract units and forms.
Examining it from extremely close range, Palm Tree dissolves into a tightly woven surface.
Colors that appeared solid or logically colored from afar are revealed to be made up of
unexpected mixings of counterintuitive color pairings—so that an apparently green frond
dissolves into key limes, emeralds, pinks, yellows and blues. By enlarging relatively small
objects to such grandiose scales and via such enlivened and numerous colors, Hicks encourages
us to appreciate the Palm Tree as an abstract image, not unlike the flowers of Georgia O’Keefe.
Studying them in detail, they also point to the similarities between the logic of tapestry
coloration and digital pixels, whereupon closer inspection apparently cohesive, smooth pictures
dissolve into mechanical orderings of a set palette of colored tones. On the one hand obviously
figurative and representational (a first for Hicks’s career thus far), these works apprehend
subjects, enlarge them to such a scale, and render them in such complex combinations of colors
that the ultimate image conjured by the materially particular tapestry plays between figurative
illusion and abstract materiality, not unlike the play of the twist icon which is both stylized token
and literal representation.
When appended to works like the Riyadh tapestries, the trademark verified them as the
work of Hicks’s studio, in a world where their validity as such may have increasingly been in
question. Hicks has remarked on her many imitators on various occasions, and as time passed
and her characteristic technique became more familiar, she ironically also became increasingly
anonymous, to become comparatively obscure by the 1990s. Similar works certainly did
proliferate. I spotted a suspended series of wrapped beige skeins in the window of an interiors

297
and antiques store in Santa Monica, California in 2018 that I swore could have been by Hicks,
labeled simply “1970s fiber art.” Meanwhile, sites like 1stDibs have recently taken to labeling
otherwise anonymous works as “Macrame in the Style of Sheila Hicks” or “Sheila Hicks Style
Fiber Art,” suggesting both the availability of Hicks’s style to artists beyond her supervision as
well as the authorial uncertainty that attends any works that might carry, correctly or incorrectly,
the artist’s name. Acknowledging the debt owed to Hicks, blogs instruct on how to make a “DIY
Tassel Wall Hanging” remarkably akin to Hicks’s studio-produced pieces. Elsewhere new
generations of workshops like Caralarga and The Citizenry’s Queretaro Workshop (both located
in Mexico) have knowingly taken up not only motifs stunningly similar to Hicks’s, but also a
workshop model much like her own started almost half a century prior.
538

Hicks’s last major work before her re-entry into the contemporary art world was May I
Have This Dance?, 2002-3, another monumental work that takes a knot, maybe the simplest and
most familiar of fiber-based gestures as its dominant motif [See Figure 76]. Commissioned by
the Target Corporation, it offered and attempted much of what previous works had, “to create
inviting, animated forms that would energize such a vast space.”
539
Like La Memoire and
Communication Labyrinth it is constructed of many individual cords that streamed together to
create a single unified current that doubled back and intertwined with itself into a titanic knot,
itself a large O, like the bottom of a pretzel. As she had at the Ford Foundation, May I traces the
unity of a coalescing orb, a tidal pattern and flow that echoes the themes of communication and
motifs of conduits to be found in La Memoire and Communication Labyrinth. Ultimately, its life
at Target was tragically short-lived, installed only from 2004 until 2010 when the corporation

538
Erica Chan Coffman, “DIY Tassel Wall Hanging,” https://honestlywtf.com/diy/diy-tassel-wall-hanging-2/, Sep.
3, 2019; Caralarga, https://caralarga.com.mx/pages/caralarga, accessed March 14, 2021.
539
Joan Simon, “Unbiased Weaves,” Sheila Hicks: Fifty Years, 116.

298
decided to redesign the space. Unable to find a similarly gargantuan new home, its component
parts were separated and divided, in some instances ending up in collections as autonomous
objects, such as the Escargots, 2003-2004 in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
There, wound upon their own length, they once again take the form of a spiral, a long, fortuitous
twist, suggesting the paradox of this symbol as both a signature of Hicks’s characteristic hand as
well as its dissolution into something shared, incorporated into a greater collaborative human and
material whole. Here, I arrive at my final interpretation of the twist insignia, or now the knot. It
is variably both the ouroboros, the unsettling sign of the serpent absurdly consuming its own tail
as well as the comforting, continuous flow of infinity, always in process.

299
Coda — Goodbye to All That
In March 2020, I was a fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, very much at work
on this project. Looking back at my calendar, I see that on the morning of Wednesday March 11,
I re-examined Hicks’s Bonsai Tapestry and Untitled (both 1986) in the subterranean Antonio
Ratti Textile Center. Zooming in and trying to decide what to say about their intricate particulars,
I tried to put my anxieties at bay, and ignore the general mood of uncertainty about what was
about to happen to me, the museum, and the world. Already advised by USC and the Met to
forgo international travel, I had put a research trip to Mexico on hold and was beginning to have
my doubts about weddings in New Orleans and San Francisco. That afternoon, I attended a
departmental meeting, one of several called with increasing frequency to discuss what the virus
might mean for us all.
These were not comforting meetings. Sinking ever deeper into an emotional elevator
shaft, I listened as colleagues predicted one horrible prospect after another. In this particularly
dire convening, the phrase “if the museum closes” was repeated so many times that “if” started
to sound a lot like “when.” I felt like a minor character in a disaster movie (Escape…from the
Upper East Side?). Partially sedated by a mix of irony, overwhelm, ignorance, disbelief, and
farce, I left the museum that day, expecting to be gone for a week, maybe two. Little did I know
that that would effectively be my last day. I took a picture of yellow forsythia in one of the giant
urns in the Great Hall, said goodbye to the guards, and walked out into a bright spring evening.
Examining my own schedule (and publicly available timelines), it is objectively true that
things, unprecedented historic changes, started to happen quickly.
540
I do remember it this way,
but I also remember moments like stuck honey, time slowing or simply a stunning sense of

540
Derrick Bryson Taylor, “A Timeline of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” The New York Times, March 17, 2021,
https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-timeline.html.

300
simple pause—likely occasioned in part by the mystery of my own potential destruction and
society’s collective collapse alongside? I remember opening my kitchen window that Friday,
dishes drying, sun pouring in and suddenly feeling, smelling the possibility of spring, flashbacks
to ten years prior, other Fridays, big green lawns, memories, possibilities. Alerted by a text
message from a friend (warning that the police would close all routes from Manhattan that
evening) I had spent some part of Thursday frantically buying canned soup, one of those 2.5-
gallon rectangles of water, and withdrawing $500 from the bank. I also stopped to buy a house
plant. This is what it was like. Spotting a man ahead of me in line with the same text message, it
didn’t occur to me to question its legitimacy.
541
We were both insiders, earnestly preparing for
the end.
“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends,” begins Joan
Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” her adieu essay about leaving New York.
542
With the
pandemic, and maybe this project as well, I’m not so sure on either count. I have left New York
on many occasions, but twice in the way that Didion means. First, to begin my PhD at USC, and
second thanks to the pandemic. Though this much is clear, it remains hard for me to see the
beginnings and the ends of things—but I do feel prepared for this, the goodbye. Preparing for it
has been at least a year in the making, in part beginning with that day of departure at the Met.
This preparation comes possibly more from without than from within, in many ways occasioned
by historical forces much larger than me and whatever I might argue or try to decide—echoing a
reckoning resonant with questions of scale and the difference between history and the past

541
“No, New York City Is Not Shutting Down Over the Over the Weekend, Despite What That Viral Text Message
Said,” NY1 News, Mar 12, 2020, https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2020/03/12/no--new-york-city-is-
not-shutting-down-over-the-weekend--despite-what-that-viral-text-message-said.
542
Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1968), 225.

301
wrestled with across many of the preceding pages. This goodbye is like a wave, fog, or a storm
rolling in that stays for far longer than any good rain should.
A skepticism of finite beginnings or endings is likely a good sign for this project, as
within the story of a single human character, I have reached for a narrative beyond the tidily
biographic, which stereotypically begins with birth and ends with death. This story has been
animated by many human agents for sure—compelling protagonists like Hicks, Josef and Anni
Albers, George Kubler, and Barbara Chase-Riboud who continue, as characters, to compel my
narrative investments as both a writer and a reader. And yet, for now, this version of their story is
over. This story has also been animated by many objects (including many created by unnamed or
unidentifiable subjects) with an agency all their own.
543
They have cultivated a heightened
attention to a different kind of contemporary art, objects that cross our path but whose lifetime
began in some instances thousands of years ago and whose presence has been unevenly
recognized since then (including a fair amount of time buried underground). They have unsettled
any easy sense of a singular beginning or end. Significant in different ways at vastly different
times and in markedly distinct contexts, these objects blur any confidence in a sense of clear
entrances and exits onto the imagined stage of history—in part because they insist on the
recognition that there have been and are many stages attended to by distinct audiences who
inevitably slip into the seductive belief that what they are watching stands alone. Never truly
alive or dead in the way that we humans are, nor limited by the logic of our mobility, the ancient
objects that first caught Hicks’s eye and mine in turn demonstrate the agency of actors beyond
any one historical theater’s reparatory cast. They produce surprising, exciting cameos that beget
new plots and dramas and draw in new, unanticipated audiences.

543
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Clarendon, 1998).

302
By the weekend of March 13th, the Met, along with the Whitney (where I was also a
fellow), and most museums across the city and region had closed, cancelling hundreds of
programs and initiating the still unresolved domino effect of cancelled exhibitions, stalled loans,
and doomsday budgetary forecasts that have irrevocably revised the contemporary art and
museum landscape. I retreated, first to upstate New York, and then to the comfort of family in
Ohio. By March 18, only one week later, the museum had broadcast a $100 million projected
shortfall, and its expectation to remain shuttered at least until July.
544

In the days that followed, we continued to have many meetings—but now, exclusively
from a distance, by phone, or online. As national borders closed, the pandemic worsened, and no
collaborative multinational solution arose, it became all too easy to feel that a world that had
already been falling apart and growing increasingly cynical about the promise of the global had
been accelerated toward an outlook that was, if not decidedly more darkly national and
isolationist, was at the very least undeniably local. As the storm set in, wherever we went, there
we were—largely stuck and bound primarily to its logic with little opportunity to escape to much
of any elsewhere, whether within miles or continents. As early as March 5
th
, Peter Goodman
described how the pandemic “confined millions of people to their communities and even inside
their homes, giving them time to ponder whether globalization was really such a great idea.”
545

Citing the work of Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of
Oxford, Goodman underscored how, “the coronavirus is merely the latest force to reveal the
deficiencies of globalization as it has been managed in recent decades — an under-regulated,
complacent form of interconnection that has left communities vulnerable to a potent array of

544
Robin Pogrebin, “Met Museum Prepares for $100 Million Loss and Closure Till July,” March 18, 2020,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/arts/design/met-museum-coronavirus-closure.html.
545
Peter S. Goodman, “Global Outbreak Is Fueling the Backlash to Globalization,” The New York Times, March 5,
2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/business/coronavirus-globalism.html.

303
threats. From the worldwide financial crisis of 2008 to climate change, ordinary people have
concluded that the authorities cannot be trusted to keep them secure.”
Early correspondence from the Met predicted “reopening with a reduced program and
lower cost structure that anticipates lower attendance for at least the next year due to reduced
global and domestic tourism and spending.”
546
Whether as a condition occasioned involuntarily
from without, a response formulated from within, or a dialectical condition of both realities
meeting, implicit in this was a turn from a global to a local audience, an expectation and
solicitation not of foreigners (to echo the diction of Toni Morrison I introduced at the start) but
of nearby neighbors instead.
To my ear, this rubbed against the promise of “One Met. Many Worlds.,” or its implied
inversion: Many Worlds One Met, which invokes a certain ideal of the universal, encyclopedic
museum as an insatiable magnet for the attraction and collection of people, things, and cultural
significance writ large. A slogan of the Museum’s proceeding decade (featured on flags, subway,
and bus advertising) developed under the leadership of tapestries scholar Thomas Campbell,
“One Met. Many Worlds.” was already an artifact of the past.
547
In the new reality wrought by
the pandemic, it seemed there would be one Met (if that), and one, smaller, world. Newly limited
to primarily regional or national consumers, the Museum’s visitor-dependent business model was
left with a more medieval model of the world, one whose limits, on the island of Manhattan,
begin to emerge at the literal water’s edge or the suddenly real border of the state and nation.
Meanwhile, experience economies that abandoned the aura of site-specific experience long ago
(the most obvious being the inverse fates of Netflix and movie theaters) became all the more

546
Pogrebin.
547
Rachel High, “One Met. Many Worlds. and The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide,” July 1, 2014,
https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2014/one-met-many-worlds-and-the-met-guide

304
profitable in the face of pandemic. If globalization at large was newly under fire, within the
smaller world of museums and art, long-standing skepticisms of the digital and stubborn
resistance to modes of access and engagement beyond the limited geography of any one building
were coming home to roost. Stretching beyond July and well into August, the Museum’s closure
also coincided with the Met’s scheduled abandonment of the Marcel Breuer building at Madison
and 75
th
street, a space taken on particularly to host the Museum’s ambitious expansion into the
crowded field of contemporary art and particularly its unique commitment (especially within
New York City) to depicting a more global definition of its contours.
548
More recently, the
Museum’s high profile Costume Institute has announced that its next two exhibitions will be
dedicated exclusively to American fashion, shows of support for New York’s luxury fashion
industry thrown into crisis by the pandemic and the attendant drop-off in demand for ball gowns
and “hard pants.”
549
Though obviously well-intentioned and logically motivated, these high-
profile shows reinscribe what we might call crisis localism (in lieu of Caroline Jones’s “critical

548
“Long eclipsed by the Museum of Modern Art on the Modern and contemporary front, the Met has been
remedying gaps in its collection since Wagstaff came on board in 2012, adding dedicated curators for contemporary
Latin American, Middle Eastern and South and Southeast Asian art and acquiring new works from these areas. ‘One
of the things we have demonstrated through the Met Breuer’s programme is that we are truly committed to these
regions,’” Sheena Wagstaff, as quoted in Nancy Kenney, “What’s Next for the Met after its 2020 Breuer Exit,” The
Art Newspaper, October 29, 2018, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/what-now-for-the-met-after-its-breuer-
exit; “Only the Met, she emphasizes, can put new work in its proper timescale and geographical context. Instead of
ripping the latest thing out of context and displaying it in a chic vacuum, she and her team have the erudition to trace
themes across continents and millennia,” Ariella Budick, “Curator Sheena Wagstaff on the New Met Breuer
Museum,” Financial Times, February 25, 2016,
https://www.ft.com/content/3dcef02c-ce53-11e5-831d-09f7778e7377; “The Met’s Modern department might turn
into the Tate of Fifth Avenue, with all that that implies about the British fascination with post-colonial cultures and a
desire to dismantle Western-centric versions of art history,” Deborah Solomon, “Becoming Modern: The Met’s
Mission at the Breuer Building,” The New York Times, Nov 15, 2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/arts/design/becoming-modern-the-mets-mission-at-the-breuer-building.html;
“Sheena Wagstaff to Head Metropolitan Museum’s New Modern and Contemporary Art Department,” January 10,
2012, https://www.metmuseum.org/press/news/2012/sheena-wagstaff.
549
Emilia Petrarca, “Will I Ever Wear Pants Again?,” The Cut, April 1, 2020, https://www.thecut.com/2020/04/self-
isolation-sweatpants-future-of-fashion.html.

305
globalism”), framed as it is by both the apparent necessities of emergency and a precarious return
to the misleading comforts of American nationalism.
550

If it was not already true “that the problem of globalization and contemporary art is
already historical,” the last year has delivered what feels very much like an undeniable bookend,
a cataclysmic pile-up of an ending for the many interwoven stories of the long, complicated
world history of cultural globalism and globalization.
551
While globalization may well be “far
from over,” hopefully a too easy, uncritical regard for its power has met its maker.
552
Early in
2021 a memo from “an under-the-radar group of global boldfaced names that act as a private
advisory committee to JP Morgan Chase” (including Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, Henry
Kissinger, Robert Gates, Alex Gorsky, and Bernard Arnault) declared that “Business leaders
must realize that they not only have a moral obligation but also a commercial stake in advocating
for a fairer more equitable system. Unless and until the core problem of inequality is addressed,
all other overarching objectives and desires will remain elusive.” As described by The New York
Times, “the group, whose members could be considered part of the globalist
establishment…seeks to turn back the clock to a time when being called a globalist wasn’t an
epithet, but acknowledge the failures of globalism and seeks to correct them.”
553

Still waiting for the return of international travel; public, in-person programming as we
once knew it (including the security of, demand, and possibility for museum and university
education which secured my livelihood and well-being in the deeply stratified ecologies of New
York City and Los Angeles, and supported the research of this project, including much

550
Vanessa Friedman, “The Met Plans an American Fashion Extravaganza,” April 12, 2021,
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/style/met-gala-metropolitan-museum-costume-institute.html.
551
Pamela Lee, Forgetting the Art World (MIT Press, 2012), xi.
552
Goodman, “Global Outbreak is Fueling the Backlash to Globalization.”
553
Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Business Makes the Case for a Post-Trump Reset,” The New York Times, Jan. 19, 2021.

306
international travel across the last decade); and (among other symptoms) the field-defining,
confident churn of biennials in particular (with which I began my story) to all return as they once
were, it seems likely that the confident and utopian enthusiasm about the circulation of people
and objects this study has traced has not only been paused but will forever be scrutinized by the
general call to question of the past year. Fewer of us will cross an ocean solely to give a lecture,
see, or even install an exhibition. Indeed, slated to present at least two solo exhibitions of her
work in 2020, at England’s Hepworth Wakefield (delayed until 2022), and at the MAK Vienna
(installed entirely in her absence), Hicks has remained at home in Paris throughout the crisis of
the past year, underscoring how the virus has limited the mobility of even the most dedicatedly
jet-set among us. Weaving to the world, indeed.
As many have already underscored, “we need to resist the idea that there is such a thing
as a return to normal, or even an ‘after’ to the COVID-19 pandemic…it is not we who are
returning to a life before catastrophe, but catastrophe itself that will return unwittingly to our
lives as traumatic repetition should we press forward unreflectively into the future.”
554
The last
year has revealed not only the deep fissures alive in an ideal of globalism but also all the work
yet to be done domestically to decolonize our museums, the contemporary art world, and the
culture at large from a systemic logic of white supremacy.
555

554
Bojan Srvinovski, “Against the Return to Normal: Trauma and Human Sociality,” Synapsis, March 20, 21,
https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2021/03/20/against-the-return-to-normal-trauma-and-human-sociality/
555
Janeen Bryant, Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, Stacey Mann, and Levon Williams, “The White Supremacy Elephant in
the Room,” Museum, January/February 2021, https://www.aam-us.org/2021/01/01/the-white-supremacy-elephant-
in-the-room/; “Talking About Race: Whiteness,” National Museum of African American History and Culture,
https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness; Peggy McGlone and Sebastian Smee, “Coronavirus
shutdowns and charges of white supremacy: American art museums are in crisis,” The Washington Post, October 12,
2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/american-art-museums-covid-white-
supremacy/2020/10/11/61094f1c-fe94-11ea-8d05-9beaaa91c71f_story.html; “Power 100: Felwine Sarr and
Bénédicte Savoy,” ArtReview, 2020, https://artreview.com/artist/felwine-sarr-and-benedicte-savoy/?year=2020

307
“‘The abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all,’” wrote author Pankaj Mishra last
July, quoting Paul Valéry in the wake of World War I. At the center of the storm, Mishra
described how, “the coronavirus blows the roof off the world, most brutally exposing Britain and
the United States, these prime movers of modern civilisation, which proudly claimed victory in
two world wars, and in the Cold War, and which until recently held themselves up as exemplars
of enlightened progress, economic and cultural models to be imitated across the globe.” In his
devastating account, Mishra described how:
The early winners of modern history now seem to be its biggest losers, with their
delegitimised political systems, grotesquely distorted economies and shattered
social contracts. The escalating warning signs – that absolute cultural power
provincialises, if not corrupts, by deepening ignorance about both foreign
countries and political and economic realities at home – can no longer be avoided
as the US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods.
556

Faced with the massive disappointment of the United States as a social fabric, at many points in
the last year I have wished I could say an easy “goodbye” to it as well, to all its broken promises
and hollow ideals. Goodbye to all that (we hope). Finding much truth in Mishra’s devastating
appraisal, I introduce his words as part of my ending to return some eleventh-hour scrutiny to the
persistently transnational and postcolonial logics of my subject and my project, to acknowledge
their irresolution as some part of its (perhaps necessarily) unfinished business.
I remain convinced that Hicks’s work and career could never be adequately thought
through only one lens or mode of cultural appraisal. In response to my chosen subject but also
admittedly informed my own particular, limited vantage point, this project has been narrated
from and motivated by what Edward Said called “a revolution in the consciousness of women,
minorities, and marginals,” the powerful critique afforded by the experience and discursive

556
Pankaj Mishra, “Flailing States,” London Review of Books, 16 July 2020, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-
paper/v42/n14/pankaj-mishra/flailing-states.

308
frames of various intersecting alterities—including postcolonial and feminist critiques among
them.
557
That said, like much of postcolonial criticism (which has occasioned similar auto-
critiques upon itself), by troubling the hegemony of the West while admittedly situated both
intellectually and geographically within its borders, this project has yet to fully escape many of
its own terms and as such risked reinscribing a North Atlantic logos while simultaneously
seeking to unravel it.
558
What would this project have looked like if I started not with Hicks, but
with the ancient unnamed weavers of the Andes that so fascinated her, Anni Albers, Lenore
Tawney, and others who contributed to modern and contemporary art’s nomination of fiber as
art? Hopefully what Mishra rightly calls the provincialism of “absolute cultural power” may in
many ways finally be dissolving. I look forward to picking at the frayed edges, and weaving
something new from whatever is left behind.
Arriving now at the end, I am ever more aware of the limitations of my own critical
method, scholarly awareness, and subject position, particularly its inability to fully step beyond
the imaginary of “the West.” Recognizing that in many instances much of what we know of
Hicks’s “great teachers” has been recorded solely by the objects they left behind, this alternative
proposal would have encouraged a revision of many methodological expectations and discursive
habits. If this is a goodbye, maybe it is also a flirtation with a farewell to certain historical
obsessions with particular forms of proof and ways of knowing, including the privileges of
archives and empirical systems of accountings for and claiming knowledge.
559

557
Said, as quoted by Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What Was Postcolonialism?*,” New Literary History 36
(2005), 375.
558
Take for example, the third Guangzhou Triennial, entitled “Farewell to Post-Colonialism,” 2008, https://www.e-
flux.com/announcements/39014/farewell-to-post-colonialism/: “While affirming Post-colonialism’s achievements in
exposing hidden ideological agenda in society and inspiring new art, this Triennial also critically examines its
limitations for creativity, and calls for a fresh start.”
559
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provicializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton
University Press, 2007).

309
Acknowledging such persistent impasses in a review of new work by Walter D. Mignolo,
Catherine E. Walsh, and Achille Mbembe, Arjun Appadurai has recently returned to the question
of “the future of postcolonial thought,” including the impossibility of recovering a “precolonial
period.”
560
Drawing on their experience in Latin America, Mignolo and Walsh, writes
Appadurai, “make the case for decoloniality, the idea that a different form of decolonization or
anti-colonialism was and continues to be possible in the Global South—one that does not rest on
Western forms of knowledge but instead on Indigenous epistemological styles and claims.”
While certainly alive and valuable in the present, Indigenous epistemologies (like anything) are
historically contingent. As such the epistemologies at play in the deep, precolonial past may
continue to elude us, except for those we might potentially recover through study of the extant
objects that survive and meet us in the present. “I prefer to remember and revisit the colony,”
resolved Appadurai, “both because we cannot escape its persistence and because it contains the
seeds of its own defeat.”
By questioning what the Met’s current director Max Hollein (addressing accusations of
white supremacy) called, “the logic of selection of the institution,” I hope I have produced a
worthy postcolonial story that grapples with this dialectic of “persistence” Appadurai invoked
coupled with the “seeds of…defeat” he simultaneously announces.
561
By asking (and answering)
questions of not only the who but the what of museums and contemporary art present and past, I
have underscored the inherent inequality at play in their founding and persistent logics, often still
predicated explicitly not only on distinctions and inequalities of geography and time but also
medium and material. Rejecting “the centuries-long support for the idea of the excellence of a

560
Arjun Appadurai, “Beyond Domination: The Future and past of decolonization,” The Nation, March 9, 2021,
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/achille-mbembe-walter-mignolo-catherine-walsh-decolonization/.
561
Hollein, as quoted by Smee and McGlone, “Coronavirus shutdowns…,” The Washington Post.

310
certain culture,” is just the beginning (and hopefully another ending as well).
562
I have found
deep complexity in these questions, for which I see no immediate end (nor need for one) in sight.
They will not be easily answered theoretically or solved practically. Many potential responses
may beget as much harm as positive change. The promise (and proposal) of both globalization
and contemporary art is the simultaneous presence, the intersection of apparently otherwise
culturally, temporally, or geographically distinct actors. How do we tell stories of cross-cultural
exchange, global interconnection and creative hybridity that honor the real differences and
disjunctures inherent in these meetings? The answer matters, as I doubt such distinctions will
ever disappear completely. We must mind, and respect, the gaps to reckon with and avoid
reinscribing historic or even new inequalities. That said, our attention to difference must also not
make the gaps into gulfs, that deny the inherent permeability of ideas, images, and culture as
well as the often net good of shared experiences of making and seeing the world together. Not
unlike the virus, culture is inherently on the move and will continue to defy whatever walls we
may build or abandon.

562
Hollein, ibid.

311
Figures

Fig. 56: Sheila Hicks, Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands, 2017, Venice Biennale.

312

Fig. 20: Sheila Hicks, Taxco-Iquala, 1954. As pictured in Sheila Hicks: Free Threads, 53.

313

Fig. 21: Alexander von Humboldt, Chimborazo seen from the Tapia Plateau, Voyage of
Humboldt and Bonpland, 1810.
British Library, London, UK.

314

Fig. 22: Sheila Hicks, Parque Forestal, 1957. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 89.

315

Fig. 23: Sheila Hicks, Zapallar, 1957. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 85.

316

Fig. 24: Sheila Hicks, Snow Garden, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks: Free Threads, 39.

317

Fig. 25: Sheila Hicks, Rallo, 1957. As pictured in Rallo, 1957.

318

Fig. 26: Albers and Hicks in Yale classroom, mid 1950s. As pictured in Sheila Hicks 50 Years,
228.

319

Fig. 27: Look 14, no. 9, April 25, 1950. As pictured in Yale University, Memorabilia: Scrapbook
Documenting the School of Fine Arts and the School of Art. Yale University Archives,
New Haven, Connecticut.

320

Fig. 28: Look 14, no. 9, April 25, 1950. As pictured in Yale University, Memorabilia: Scrapbook
Documenting the School of Fine Arts and the School of Art. Yale University Archives, New
Haven, Connecticut.

321

Fig. 29: Look 14, no. 9, April 25, 1950. As pictured in Yale University, Memorabilia: Scrapbook
Documenting the School of Fine Arts and the School of Art. Yale University Archives, New
Haven, Connecticut.

322

Fig. 30: Look 14, no. 9, April 25, 1950. As pictured in Yale University, Memorabilia: Scrapbook
Documenting the School of Fine Arts and the School of Art. Yale University Archives, New
Haven, Connecticut.

323

Fig. 31: Look 14, no. 9, April 25, 1950. As pictured in Yale University, Memorabilia: Scrapbook
Documenting the School of Fine Arts and the School of Art. Yale University Archives, New
Haven, Connecticut.

324

Fig. 32: Sheila Hicks, Andean Textile Art, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks 50 Years, 49.

325

Fig. 32b: Andean Textile Art, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks 50 Years, 48.

326

Fig. 33a: Sheila Hicks, Andean Textile Art, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks Free Threads, 135.

327

Fig 33b: Sheila Hicks, Andean Textile Art, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks Free Threads, 135.

328

Fig 34: Sheila Hicks, Andean Textile Art, 1957. As pictured in Sheila Hicks Free Threads, 135.

329

Fig. 53: Ernest Boyer, Sheila Hicks in her studio at Yale, 1958. As pictured in Sheila Hicks Free
Threads, 29.

330

Fig. 52: Sheila Hicks, Chonchi, Chiloe, 1958. As pictured in Sheila Hicks Weaving as Metaphor,
91.

331

Fig. 53: Sheila Hicks. Chonchi, Chiloe, 1957. Sheila Hicks 50 Years, 154.

332

Fig. 37: Sergio Larrain, Sheila Hicks in Chonchi, Chiloe, 1958. As pictured in Free Threads,
168.

333

Fig. 38: Sheila Hicks, Sergio Larrain in Chonchi, Chiloé, Chile, 1958. As pictured in Free
Threads, 169.

334

Fig. 54: Ernest Boyer, photograph of Sheila Hicks with her MFA show, 1959. As pictured in
Sheila Hicks 50 Years, 53.

335

Fig. 40: Sheila Hicks, Muñeca, 1957. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 81.

336

Fig. 41: Sheila Hicks. Bonsai Tapestry, ca. 1986. Cotton, rayon, 9 1/2 × 5 1/8 in. (24.1 × 13 cm).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Edward Merrin, 1990 (1990.271).

337

Fig. 42: Sheila Hicks. Écailles, 1976. Silk, wool, razor clam shells, 26 1/2 × 8 1/4 in. (67.3 × 21
cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Melvin L. Bedrick Gift, 1989 (1989.29).

338

Fig. 43: Krishna and the Gopis on the Bank of the Yamuna River, ca. 1775-80. Opaque
watercolor and gold on paper; dark blue border with red inner rules, 6 3/8 × 10 1/8 in. (16.2 ×
25.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Steven Kossak, The Kronos Collections,
2017 (2017.736).

339

Fig. 44: Bichtir. Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings from the St. Petersburg Album, ca.
1615-1618. Opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper, 9 15/16 x 7 1/16 in (25.3 x 18 cm).
National Museum of Asian Art, Purchase — Charles Lang Freer Endowment (F1942.15a).

340

Fig. 45: False Face for Funerary Bundle, 3rd century B.C.–A.D. 1st century. Cotton, paint, 15
1/2 x 9 in. (39.37 x 22.86 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Lee F. Barash, 2016
(2016.703).

341

Fig. 46: Sergio Larrain and Sheila Hicks with her painting at Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago de
Chile, 1958. As pictured in Free Threads, 175.

342

Fig. 47: Sheila Hicks. Rallo, 1957. Wool, 9 1/2 × 5 1/8 in. (24.1 × 13 cm). Cooper-Hewitt,
National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York, Museum purchase from the
General Acquisitions Endowment Fund. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 87.

343

Fig. 48: Sheila Hicks. Parque Forestal, ca. 1957. Wool, 9 5/8 × 6 3/4 in. (24.5 × 17 cm). Itaka
M. Schlubach. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 89.

344

Fig. 49: Sheila Hicks. An Acre of Rainforest, 1989. Silk, handspun wool, cotton, 8 1/4 × 6 1/4 in.
(21 × 16 cm. Collection of the artist.

345

Fig. 50: Sheila Hicks. Dégringolade, 1971. Cotton, wool, silk. 8 5/8 × 6 3/4 in. (22 × 17 cm).
Collection of the artist. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 169.

346

Fig. 51: Sheila Hicks. Mogador, ca. 1966. Cotton, silk. 9 1/2 × 5 1/2 in. (24 × 14 cm). Suzy
Langlois. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 153.

347

Fig 55: Sheila Hicks, Faja II, Faja III (belts), 1956. As pictured in 50 Years, 52.

348

Fig. 55a: Contemporary Sara belt and historic Incan comparison, as pictured in Lynn A. Meish,
“The Murúa Code,” Natural History magazine,
https://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/112333/the-mur-a-code, accessed June 8, 2021.

349

Fig. 1: Faith Stern, Sheila Hicks Weaving with a backstrap loom, Mitla, 1961. As pictured in
Free Threads, 173.

350

Fig. 2: Faith Stern, Sheila Hicks weaving on a backstrap loom in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1960. As
pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 53.

351

Fig 3: Weaver with Back-Strap Loom and Birds, A.D. 600–900, Mexico, probably Campeche,
Jaina Island, Maya. Yale University Art Museum.

352

Fig 4: Faith Stern, Learning to Knot with Rufino Reyes, Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1961. As
pictured in Free Threads, 192.

353

Fig 5: “A Weaver of Santa Cruz…” from “Weavers of the World,” National Geographic, 1919.

354

Fig 6: “Outdoor Weaving in Sunny Mexico,” from “Weavers of the World,” National
Geographic, 1919.

355

Fig 7: “Weaving a Burnoose,” from “Neolithic Folk Today,” Life, 1956.

356

Fig 8: “A Chichicastenango Weaver…,” National Geographic, 1947.

357

Fig. 9: “A Chakma’s Featherweight Loom…,” from National Geographic, 1955.

358

Fig. 10: “Ignoring passers-by,” from National Geographic, 1961

359

Fig. 11: Tenancingo, 1960 as displayed as part of Weavings by Sheila Hicks, Art Institute of
Chicago, 1963. As pictured in Lifelines, 127.

360

Fig. 12: Richard Serra, Photograph in Life, Feb. 27, 1970: "Fling, Dribble and Dip"

361

Fig. 13: Sheila Hicks, Solferino Tacubayo, 1963. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 103.

362

Fig. 14: Sheila Hicks, Catholic nuns walking in front of the San Vicente de Paul chapel
(designed by architect Félix Candela), under construction in Colonia Coyoscán, Mexico City,
1959. As pictured in Weaving as Metaphor, 355.

363

Fig. 15: Sheila Hicks, Weaver Rufino Reyes, 1961. As pictured in Free Threads, 20-21

364

Fig. 16: Marc Riboud, Hicks in the Weaving Workshop, 1961. As pictured in Free Threads, 6-7.

365

Fig. 17: Sheila Hicks, Taxco El Viejo, 1960. As pictured in Lifelines, 48.

366

Fig. 18: Sheila Hicks, Amarillo, 1960. As pictured in Lifelines, 47.

367

Fig. 17: Sheila Hicks, Luis Barragan and Mathias Goeritz, Casa Barragan, 1962-3. As pictured
in 50 years, 163.

368

Fig. 18: Sheila Hicks, Blue Letter, 1959. As pictured in 50 Years, 13.

369

Fig. 17: Ferdinand Bosch, photograph of Sheila Hicks working on Solferino Tacubayo at home
in Taxco El Viejo, Mexico, 1960-61. As pictured in 50 Years, 159.

370

Fig 57: Sheila Hicks, Tenancingo, 1960. Yale University Art Gallery.

371

Fig. 64: Funereal hair wreath, ca. 1860, Presque Isle Historical Society,
https://www.mainememory.net/artifact/98916.

372

Fig. 59: Sheila Hicks, The Evolving Tapestry: He/She, 1967-8. The Museum of Modern Art,
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/3819.

373

Fig. 61: Sheila Hicks, The Evolving Tapestry, 1968, linen and silk. As pictured in Wall
Hangings, Museum of Modern Art, n.p.

374

Fig. 60: “Wall Hangings” [installation view], 1969, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Pictured from far left to center right are, White Letter, Prayer Rug, The Principal Wife, and The
Evolving Tapestry: He/She. The Museum of Modern Art exhibitions archive,
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1800?locale=en.

375

Fig. 62: Sheila Hicks, Bamian (Banyan), 1968-2002, wool and acrylic 102 3/8 x 102 3/8". As
pictured in 50 Years, 69.

376

Fig. 74: Beatrice Garvan with The Principal Wife, 1971, Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection
Files.

377

Fig. 63: Mantle ( “The Paracas Textile” ), 100-300 C.E. The Brooklyn Museum,
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/48296.

378

Fig. 65: Sheila Hicks, The Principal Wife, 1968. Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

379

Fig. 67: “Hicks’s son Cristobal Zañartu and daughter Itaka Schlubach in their grandparents’
garden in Northfield, Illinois with elasticized cords that were the model of Hicks’s commission
for the Hyatt Hotel, O’Hare Airport, 1969.” As pictured in Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, 231.

380

Fig. 66: Sheila Hicks, Huaquen, 1967. As pictured in Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, 177.

381

Fig. 68: Willoughby Wallace Hooper (English, 1837 - 1912),
Banyan Tree Moul Ally, about 1870, Albumen silver print. J. Paul Getty Museum.

382

Fig. 69: Detail of The Principal Wife captured by Beatrice Garvan. Philadelphia Museum of Art
Collection Files.

383

Fig. 70: Eliot Porter, Strangler Fig Roots, Everglades National Park, Florida, 1954. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

384

Fig. 71: Installation diagram for The Evolving Tapestry: He/She. Department of Architecture and
Design Collections Files, The Museum of Modern Art.

385

Fig. 72: Sheila Hicks, Banisteriopsis II, 1965-66/2010. The Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston.

386

Fig. 75: Jean and Franc Shor. “From Sea to Sahara in French Morocco: Jet Planes Lace Vapor
Trails over Modern Farms, but in the Markets of Marrakech You Can Buy an Evil Eye
for Three Centes.” National Geographic, February 1955.

387

Fig. 78: Sheila Hicks, Sorting Wool, Rabat, Morocco, c. 1970-71. As pictured in Lifelines, 131.

388

Fig. 76: Sheila Hicks, Sorting Coconut Fiber, Calicut, India, 1966. As pictured in Lifelines, 128.

389

Fig 76a: "Ethiopia's Artful Weavers," National Geographic Magazine,
January 1973.

390

Fig. 77: Sheila Hicks, Arterior Workshop, Wuppertal, Germany, 1967. As pictured in Lifelines,
129

391

Fig 76a: Sheila Hicks, Commonwealth Trust, Kozhikode, Kerala, India, 1966. As pictured in
Weaving as Metaphor, 367.

392

Fig. 79: Beliko Oksana, El Molo huts, Lake Turkana, Kenya. Viewed July 2017,
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/el-molo-huts-lake-turkana-kenya-127474349.

393

Fig 79a: Pyramid of the Magician, Uxmal, 560.

394

Fig. 72: Sheila Hicks, Banisteriopsis II, 1965-66/2010.
Photo: https://www.galeriefrankelbaz.com/328/news-hicks-revolution-in-the-making-abstract-
sculpture-by-women-1947-2016.

395

Fig. 19: Sheila Hicks, Inca suit, 1964. As pictured in 50 Years, 101.

396

Fig. 20: Sheila Hicks, Inca samples, 1966. Art Institute of Chicago.

397

Fig. 21: Sheila Hicks, Prayer Rug, 1966 as installed at Blackrock, CBS building. As pictured in
50 Years, 62.

398

Fig. 22: Marc Riboud, Le Tapis Mural de Sheila Hicks, National Gallery, Rabat, Morocco, 1971.
As pictured in 50 Years, 232.

399

Fig. 26: Sheila Hicks, The Silk Rainforest, 1972. The Smithsonian American Art Museum.

400

Fig. 23: Sheila Hicks, La Mémoire, IBM Paris, 1972. As pictured in Sheila Hicks, 50 Years, 87.

401

Fig 24: H.J. Sommer III, Magnetic core storage - detail.
Source: Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Magnetic-core storage." Encyclopedia Britannica,
June 28, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/technology/magnetic-core-storage.

402

Fig. 25: Sheila Hicks, Labryrinth of Communication, 1990-91. Minneapolis Institute of Art.

403

Fig. 27: Evelyn Beatrice Longman, The Spirit of Communication, 1914 (also known as “Golden
Boy.”). Image via: “Spirit of Electricity,” accessed February 2021,
https://glassian.org/Paper/spiritofcomm.html.

404

Fig. 18: Letter from Sheila Hicks on studio stationery, 1988. Art Institute of Chicago Textile
Collection Files.

405

Fig. 19: Detail from Palm Tree tapestry, 1984-5 (photograph by author). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.

406

Fig. 75: Sheila Hicks, Four Seasons of Mount. Fuji, 1992-3. As pictured in 50 Years, 143.

407

Fig. 76: Sheila Hicks, May I Have This Dance, 2002-3 (photograph by Cristobal Zañartu),
https://vimeo.com/133904753.

408

Fig. 77: Sheila Hicks, Ford Foundation auditorium, 1967. Photo by author.

409

Fig. 78: Robert Rauschenberg, Small Rebus, 1956. Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.

410
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http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/14/obituaries/anthony-garvan-80-architecture-
historian.html.
“Codex Mendoza (1592).” The Public Domain Review. Accessed 2020.
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1976: 34-36.
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Asset Metadata

Creator Johnson, Grant Klarich (author)

Core Title Sheila Hicks: weaving to the world

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Art History

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 07/30/2025

Defense Date 07/30/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Art,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Advisor Hudson, Suzanne (committee chair), Luke, Megan (committee member), Lutkehaus, Nancy (committee member), Ogata, Amy (committee member), Sorkin, Jenni (committee member)

Creator Email gkjohnso@usc.edu,grant_johnson@whitney.org

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15672378

Unique identifier UC15672378

Legacy Identifier etd-JohnsonGra-9971

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Johnson, Grant Klarich

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

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Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email uscdl@usc.edu

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Sheila Hicks: Weaving to the World presents the first monographic, critical history of Sheila Hicks, the prolific weaver and argues for her as a signal figure in the emergence of global contemporary art. By tracking Hicks’s textiles both in and well beyond the art world, I argue that shifting taxonomies of objects reflected, indexed, and contested related hierarchies of people and cultures, including shifting stratifications of gender, race, class, and geography.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses