ART: Sheila Hicks, Fiber Artist

I've always loved fiber art and weaving, textiles, and texture.  Like Ms. Hicks, I grew up with rag rugs, embroidery, and decorative applications to and on fabric. Fiber is erotic colorful joy ,immediate enrichment of place, and a rich metaphoric resonant carrier for time and memory.

A Career Woven From Life  NYTimes Excerpt

By LESLIE CAMHI  4.3.11

...permutation of string and thread, woven into their potent and intimately beautiful geometries…

minime  (small study) was taking shape, verdant and delicate as a jewel...

The visit’s spirit of open-ended discovery was very much in keeping with the work that Ms. Hicks, 76, has been making for nearly half a century at the intersection of art, design, crafts and architecture. Her resistance to being slotted into any one of these categories has been the natural outgrowth, it seems, of an omnivorous curiosity and a profound allergy to academic distinctions. It may also go some way toward explaining how her work, which ranges in scale from near-miniature to monumental, and at times has anticipated contemporary art practices by decades, has long slipped through the art world’s cracks.

All that is changing now. “Sheila Hicks: 50 Years,” a show organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass., and on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, highlights the work of this classically trained modernist — a global artist before the term was fashionable — who adopted the language of textiles as her primary medium and expanded it exponentially. Not that her new visibility is making her any easier to pin down.

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“I have no interest in classifying Sheila as a contemporary artist whom we just ‘missed,’ ” said Jenelle Porter, who organized the Philadelphia show (and is a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston). Ms. Hicks, she explained, has always been “very aware of what’s been going on in contemporary art, but she’s also worked with artisans and craftspeople all over the world, and she’s invented new techniques and materials.”

“She goes so much farther than anyone in the design world or the craft world or the art world,” Ms. Porter said. “She crisscrosses back and forth with so much ease.”

Ms. Hicks’s life has been “a tissue of threads woven together on purpose or through chance, fertile encounters,” wrote Monique Lévi-Strauss, a scholar of textiles, in a 1972 catalog. She was born in the small town of Hastings, Neb., in 1934,.. their great-aunts instructed them in music, art and reading, as well as pioneer skills like spinning, sewing and weaving.

She majored in art at Syracuse University, then transferred to the Yale School of Art (then one of the few co-ed divisions at the college), where she studied with Josef Albers, the German-born head of the art department, who had transplanted Bauhaus ideals to New Haven, and with George Kubler, the influential historian of Latin American art. (Ms. Hicks’s fellow students included Eva Hesse, who would also go on to explore unconventional, “soft” materials like latex in her post-minimalist sculpture.) A picture of Peruvian mummy bundles, shown in Dr. Kubler’s class, sparked Ms. Hicks’s interest in textiles, which was further galvanized when Albers took her home to meet his wife, Anni, the celebrated Bauhaus weaver.

A defining moment in Ms. Hicks’ career came with her invitation to exhibit at the Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne in 1967. 

“I showed something I had just made in Chile, out of linen, with clusters of long, free-hanging cords suspended from the ceiling,” Ms. Hicks recalled. “At the opening a television crew arrived, led by a certain Madame Cuttoli, a patron of tapestry and a fabulous character. She walked up to me and said in French, ‘Mademoiselle, I hear you are exhibiting a tapestry.’ I replied, ‘Yes, Madame, here it is.’ And she said, ‘I do not see a tapestry.’ ”

“It became a running joke,” …“What is tapestry and what is not? And what should we squelch before it goes too far? I was moving around between different techniques — of stitching, wrapping, braiding, weaving, twining — exploring all these different thread languages. And tapestry was one of them, but traditionally the prestigious one. So my work was equated with a kind of graffiti.”

“For some,” Ms. Hicks continued, “I was persona non grata, and for others I was the heroic pirate. But the architects were coming. I was getting the work.”

FILM: Lincoln Lawyer

Playing with innocent/guilty - who is, who isn’t reverses itself somewhat surprisingly, while Mickey Haller’s (some pronounce it “Holler”) amoral, yet loyal criminal defense attorney shrewdly returns the compliment when he’s set up by a squeaky clean white guy who really did do it - not just it, them.  Mickey also delivers some satisfying “punishment” to the arrogant murderer who-almost-got-away-with it, with the assistance of two other sympathetic but unsavory clients.  

It’s fun to see a rather flat novel so satisfyingly filled in with characters and the visual grit of LA’s urban freeway-knitted setting.  (Was that a Catherine Opie freeway image on Haller’s wall?)  I had imagined Maggie with reddish hair, while Marisa Tomei, though Italian, conveys a Latino quality -  maybe I’m imagining this.

Now, Hollywood, can you tell me why you can’t manage to bring a Harry Bosch novel to the screen?

REVIEW:  Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, March 8,, 2011:

Confession: I'm addicted to the crime fiction of Michael Connelly, with a bullet next to the page-turners featuring attorney Mickey Haller, defender of desperate scumbags and the occasional lost cause. So why was I hesitant about seeing the movie version of The Lincoln Lawyer, the first of the four Haller novels Connelly has written so far? (The Fifth Witness will be published in April, and it's a corker.) Because Hollywood is infamous for screwing up sure things. Look what they did to James Patterson's Alex Cross mysteries.

OK. Pause. Deep breath. The Lincoln Lawyer onscreen is a slam-bang twister of a legal thriller, full of whiplash energy, tasty acting and — huge credit to director Brad Furman (The Take) and cinematographer Lukas Ettlin — a decadent, scuzzy sense of Los Angeles as a perfect hell for the beautiful and the damned.

Best of all, a dynamite Matthew McConaughey gives his best performance in years as Mick, wearing the character like a second skin. To save money on an office, Mick works out of the back seat of his Lincoln Continental, chauffeured Miss Daisy-style by Earl (Laurence Mason), in lieu of legal fees. Mick has an ex-wife, Maggie (a memorably fierce Marisa Tomei), who works for the DA (Josh Lucas); an eight-year-old daughter he barely sees; and something he tries to hide: a working conscience.

Guilt eats at Mick over a former client (Michael Peña) doing time for a crime that might have involved Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe), the realtor stud he is currently defending for attempted rape and murder. Phillippe excels at suggesting the sins that pretty can conceal. There are also juicy turns from the great William H. Macy as Mick's investigator, John Leguizamo as a hustling bail bondsman and Bryan Cranston as a detective who enjoys riding Mick. The Lincoln Lawyer keeps springing surprises. Maybe too many. Screenwriter John Romano (TV's Monk) has the unenviable task of packing Connelly's dense novel into a two-hour movie. Potholes? Yes. Dead ends? No. This is rock-solid entertainment. McConaughey, a cunning mesmerizer in the courtroom, steers this Lincoln into what could be a hell-raising franchise. More, please. Soon.

ESSAY: Tulip Mania Again

VACATION: San Francisco, N CA Wildlife Refuges

Magnificent Golden Gate view from Sausalito - this is from Cavallo Point Resort,  housed in the renovated army barracks of Fort Baker, part of coastal fortification installations built up and down the Pacific Coast between 1902-1912. .

Van Gogh, 1886 - Imperial Fritillaries in a Copper Vase

We drove into San Francisco and had a wonderful afternoon at the De Young Museum seeing the Post-Impressionist exhibit of Musée D’Orsay paintings, including this magnificent Van Gogh still life.

On one of those January days of warm sun, my husband and I drove north up the I-5, losing the comfortable weather as the miles whizzed by.  It’s only a trip that can be made in winter:  to see migratory birds stopping over in the California wetlands as they move North to their summer places.  Over 44% of the Pacific Flyway’s bird population overwinters in the Sacramento and Central Valleys.

These wetlands are fascinating conservation-dream hybrids, operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  Only about 10% of the original wetlands remain after the region’s water supply was dammed and controlled for crop irrigation. To resolve the conflict between rice-growing farmers and hungry migrating birds, the dry fields are flooded in the fall and winter using a network of dykes, dams, and pumps. Over 35,000 acres of marsh, ponds, grasslands, and seasonal wetlands offer nurture and cover for the millions of birds in traverse.

PHOTO ESSAY: Bird Marsh, Kern & Pixley Wildlife Refuges Each winter a 2000-5000 acre area of the Northern San Joaquin Basin is flooded to provide a temporary stop-over for migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway. A system of levees and dikes permits a seasonal wetlands environment to be created. A 6-mile auto tour route permits viewing without leaving the car, making it comfortable and providing excellent conditions because the birds don’t fly away. All that’s needed is a bird book and a good binoculars. Hunting is even permitted 2 days a week in winter, but the experience is one of open translucent space, traversed by birds who so willingly offer their innocent private lives for viewing. Each winter a 2000-5000 acre area of the Northern San Joaquin Basin is flooded to provide a temporary stop-over for migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway. A system of levees and dikes permits a seasonal wetlands environment to be created. A 6-mile auto tour route permits viewing without leaving the car, making it comfortable and providing excellent conditions because the birds don’t fly away. All that’s needed is a bird book and a good binoculars. Hunting is even permitted 2 days a week in winter, but the experience is one of open translucent space, traversed by birds who so willingly offer their innocent private lives for viewing. PIXLEY NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE Nearby, the dry lakebed of Tulare Lake is now a bosom for agri-business. Still, migrating sandhill cranes come into rest after having flown all day, eating their fill, then returning to the Refuge to sleep, rising in the sky at dawn to feast again.

 Each winter a 2000-5000 acre area of the Northern San Joaquin Basin is flooded to provide a temporary stop-over for migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway. A system of levees and dikes permits a seasonal wetlands environment to be created.  A 6-mile auto tour route permits viewing without leaving the car, making it comfortable and providing excellent conditions because the birds don’t fly away.  All that’s needed is a bird book and a good binoculars.

Hunting is even permitted 2 days a week in winter, but the experience is one of open translucent space, traversed by birds who so willingly offer their innocent private lives for viewing. 

PIXLEY NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

Nearby, the dry lakebed of Tulare Lake is now a  bosom for agri-business. Still, migrating sandhill cranes come into rest after having flown all day, eating their fill, then returning to the Refuge to sleep, rising in the sky at dawn to feast again.   

ART: Maira Kalman - Illustrator of Wit and Joy Droll, whimsical, adroit perspectives on the macro and micro realities of contemporary living: the bounty of 25 years of Maira Kalman illustrations, designs, and textile work. Now delightfully, a frothy yet grave retrospective is given us at the “other museum” in the Sepulveda Pass, Skirball Cultural Center, West Los Angeles, CA.

Droll, whimsical, adroit perspectives on the macro and micro realities of contemporary living: the bounty of 25 years of Maira Kalman illustrations, designs, and textile work. Now delightfully, a frothy yet grave retrospective is given us at the “other museum” in the Sepulveda Pass, Skirball Cultural Center, West Los Angeles, CA.

 

We’ll all recognize her when we recall the singular covers for The New Yorker Ms. Kalman has illustrated over the years. Her style, though maybe we don’t know her name (yet) is one we rely on for those tickles and barbs that our reading may not otherwise provide.

 She combines a colorful graphic style that melds Matisse’s “decorative” sheen with the uplifting daily joy of Chagall.  Her preferred medium is gouache (those deadlines dictate fast-drying paint). Then a reminiscence of Saul Steinberg’s visual intelligence, and the comfy barbs of James Thurber (see dog-lover).  Pop-culture grazing and folk Americana add a post-modern New York polish.  A rapier text darts at us, but freed of any known type style.  It’s hand-written (usually on vellum overlaid onto the illustrations digitally) in a leisurely printed scroll, across, through and around the fresh, bright paintings.

Ms. Kalman declares herself in love with Abraham Lincoln, this squinting, unprepossessing woman, whose latest victory was a guest invitation to The Colbert Report (October 28).  Unfazed by media or an auditorium of fans, funny light takes come quickly, with incisive sincere affirmations of life’s astonishing experiences slipped deftly between, like an omelet being flipped.  She’s that transient – quick, you will miss something.  She slyly illustrates us back to daily awareness.  

She tried to wear shoes that were too big “…to slow down time”, she tells us.  (It didn’t work.) Reading the daily obituaries each morning “…sets the tone of her day”.  She’s Israeli-born, and has lived in the United States since she was 4, her immigrant parents escaping the Nazis.  It’s this experience, it seems, that offers a perspective on American values that enriches us, obliquely warning of the “fear of fear itself”.

A most singular book is Fireboat, a children’s book about 9-11.  It required Kalman to paint the planes approaching the Twin Towers and the explosion of the buildings.  After “Maus”, by Art Spiegelman, using one’s style in a one-size-fits-all manner can’t be discounted.  Nonetheless, it’s a difficult book and it’s a difficult book to choose to give a child.  But it teaches that we must not deny evil or give in to despair, but “keep calm and carry on” (a parody of an aggressive Barbara Kruger graphic).

The portraits of people and dogs both have a flattened Hockney neutrality, with memorable eyes gazing deeply out at us.  Surely the sitters must have said, like Gertrude Stein when she saw the portrait Picasso made of her, “It is I.”  Sitters have included Pina Bausch, Laurie Anderson and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Skirball’s gallery is “…a jewel box of an exhibition”, said her curator, Ingrid Schaffner, of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.  Deep cadmium red-orange walls background plaques and text, written in Kalman’s distinctive scroll, making the walls journal-pages to background an installation of glassed display tables, ladders, and memorabilia.  Kalman is a collector who permits herself to be edited, and the objects are funny and poignant:  odd onion rings (fast-food snowflakes?), stolen hand towels smeared with paint from her brushes. 

Hand-typed (old Courier-equipped typewriter) index cards affixed with thumbtacks identify many of the artworks, turning down the volume on serious, yet reversing it back up in a nod to memory and elegy.

A reading room, also painted that vibrant red-orange, invites further grazing among her children’s and adult’s books, along with some videos.

Ms. Kalman’s stitched textiles give her a medium and textural refreshment from paint and brushes.  Americana samplers, they needle us to strive for virtue and offer comfort. Ensconced in humor as she is, yet there’s a wee moralist in Ms. Kalman.  The textiles are also her most overtly feminist work, reminiscent of Orly Cogan, another New Yorker.

ART: Ynez Johnson, Ruth Asawa, Bettye Saar

 Now go figure - how did our little local junior college make this fine exhibit of great women’s art that isn’t to be classified as women’s art?

I loved Inyz Johnson, though the work I saw looked a bit dated, but it was 1950’s, after all.  

I love Johnson’s synergy - grazing on the iconography of many cultures and bringing them together in a lively, graphic, almost graffiti-like manner.

Bettye Saar is iconic Black Earth Mother, snycretizing black iconography and stereotypes to serve their dismantling.  She summons memory.

Ynez Johnson, Vessel