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.