SHEILA HICKS IN CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT STORR

The US-American artist Sheila Hicks (*1934 in Hastings, Nebraska) lives and works in Paris. She studied at Yale University under Josef Albers and worked for several years in Guerrero, Mexico. During her time in South America, she immersed herself in traditional weaving techniques. Hicks is best known for her space-consuming textile works, which reflect a connection between art, architecture, body and material and have been represented in numerous international exhibitions. With Sheila Hicks. a little bit of a lot of things, she celebrated her first institutional solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland in 2023.

In conversation with the US-American art critic, curator and painter Robert Storr (*1949 in Portland, Maine), she talks about how her childhood shaped her artistic practice and how she enters into dialog with different places and cultures through her art.

Robert Storr: In all kinds of ways, Sheila is the exception to what is going on currently. She is a true cosmopolitan. She is somebody who absorbs cultures, then contributes to them, and alters them in the process. And she has worked in about every imaginable context and in almost every imaginable medium. It was not driven by the desire to meet certain specific positions of renown. She just works and continues to work and continues to produce surprising, richly formal, and richly poetic things. It was ambition for the work and for her own capacity to master media. So, with that, I’d like to start a conversation with her. I was reminded of what Gertrude Stein said, “America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” For Sheila, her hometown has been Santiago, it has been Mexico, it has been a number of other places. But Paris is really the center of gravity for her world. So, let’s start where she started and ask, how did you get from Nebraska to all these places? […]
Where did your sense of yourself as an artist originate? Was it in your family environment? Was it working with traditional crafts, traditional ways? What was it?

Sheila Hicks: It’s a good question. It’s going to get a stupid answer, I’m afraid. I was born in the 1930s. During the Depression in the thirties, my father was looking for a job. He piled his two children into the back seat of the car and he and my mother drove around the United States. He worked in multiple places and my brother and I lived in the backseat. We entertained ourselves by looking out the window, by playing games, by picking up things everywhere we stopped and made things together. So it was improvisation and bricolage, going from city to city. We even heard Louis Armstrong once in New Orleans, playing as he paraded down the street during Mardi Gras. I sat on my father’s shoulders. I have great memories of the United States. And I’m still from the same kind of tangent. As I was growing up, my way of puzzling things out was to continually observe, and when seeing something trying to understand and imagine how could it also be otherwise — version one, version two, version three. During the opening of my exhibition in the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, I asked the people who were dressed in black to stand on one side of the room, and everyone else to stand on the other side. It altered the environment of the former train station. And it changed the look of all the works I was showing causing all of us, including those who had come to see the show, to look at it in a curious new way.
[…]

RS: You seem to eschew the political overtly. And that’s not in keeping with the times now. Are you resisting the political discourse? In the art world there are styles and discourses, and particularly in France there are discourses. You don’t seem to have a discourse per se, although you’ve had a long creative life and are very articulate, and you know what the issues are. Could you talk about how you juggle and navigate or move through this maze.

SH: I don’t assert my issues, my personal issues or my personal concerns onto other people because they’re going to have to look at them. When I walk out of the room and leave them with something I made that they may have in their house, or in their workplace, I hope I’m leaving something behind that is going to help them live in a harmonious, optimistic, and even touch of joy way. I’m not going to bounce on them all the problems that I probably have in my knapsack.
[…]

RS […] When you were a student of Josef Albers he was one of the survivors of the original Bauhaus. How much of this comes from him, or was this what you already thought?

SH: It’s worthwhile to go to school, of course. I remember sitting in George Kubler’s art history course at Yale. He was showing things from the pre- Incaic civilization when very small communities were spread throughout the Andes, each inventing their individual lives and rituals. Kubler projected images of mummy bundles to illustrate the way these groups preserved their deceased. They wrapped them and their possessions in beautiful materials that they made from llamas, guanacos, vicuñas, and alpacas, with strings that were crossed and woven, and interlaced to become cloth, or ribbons, or bands. Kubler’s slides showed what were meaningful to these people that they took with them to the next world. This fascinated me and I started distinguishing why certain areas and altitudes in the Andes influence how people live and dress, and how they protected themselves. Then, as I traveled, I observed each community to see how those people living in very high temperature zones wear practically no clothes, but just ceremonial or ritual kinds of wrappings, and how we wrap ourselves and why we do it in certain ways. I became intrigued with religious rituals as well. Each religion has its own way of ceremoniously wrapping and presenting in certain patterns, particular colors that are shocking or very mild and very peaceful, or plaids or crossings. All this became like an international language. I realized that if you could read threads, you can read whole histories and civilizations. Kubler’s class opened that up to me. Albers had a very practical mind and way, and barely spoke English. I would be working on a serious painting knowing he was going to come in and comment on it, but on the worktable I was also experimenting, making things like in the back seat of the car. He would look at the painting and say, “aso, aso,” okay, keep going, keep going. And then he’d say, “was ist das, girl?” He saw what I was playing with and trying to make. One day he walked in and said go down to the office and tell Clancy to give you some papers I left for you to sign. Among the documents was a Fulbright scholarship to go to Chile. I then went to the library and pulled out an atlas to figure out where Chile was.

RS: In France, have you ever been called upon to teach? Have you ever thought of going back into the world whence you came and where all these things happened for you? Or did you just proceed with your work?

SH: I teach everyday in my studio. I’m not teaching consciously thinking I’m teaching, I’m just sharing. It’s the apprenticeship system. We make something, we look at it, four eyes are better than two, six eyes are better, eight eyes are even better. And now we have the courage to say what our eyes are seeing, and what our eyes think, and what our eyes are telling us. Let’s share what we’re looking at and thinking about, and how can we do it better, or differently. It’s a teaching situation whenever you work collaboratively with anybody.

You can find the conversation between Adrian Ghenie and Klaus Speidel in full length in our publication Sheila Hicks. a little bit of a lot of things.

Veröffentlicht am: 07.05.2025

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