bookofjoe

'Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor'

That's the title of a show currently up at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.

Kathryn Shattuck's rave review and interview with the artist (above, in her studio in the Latin Quarter of Paris) appeared in the September 4 New York Times.

Though she works on a monumental scale, the 72-year-old artist for 50 years has carried a handmade wooden frame in her bag as she's traveled the world, creating hundreds of miniatures the size and shape of a piece of notebook paper.

Some 200 of these comprise the current exhibition.

More about the artist and show here.

Even better: the artist's website.

Here's the Times piece.

In the Woof and Warp of Miniatures, Interlocking Metaphors and Journeys

In a courtyard studio in the Latin Quarter of Paris, lined with skeins and spools in brilliant colors, Sheila Hicks has created monumental textile art like “May I Have This Dance?,” a 20-by-60-foot spiraling linen-and-cork fantasy, and “Four Seasons of Mount Fuji,” a rainbow-ribbon tapestry the length of a football field.

But for 50 years, on a handmade wooden frame that she carries around the world in her bag, Ms. Hicks has also devised art of a more intimate sort: weavings the size and shape of a piece of notebook paper, give or take a couple of inches and a straight line here and there.

Some 200 of these miniatures are displayed in “Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor” at the Bard Graduate Center on West 86th Street in Manhattan (through Oct. 15). The center’s first solo exhibition devoted to a contemporary artist, the show also brings together Ms. Hicks’s small works for the first time. (She will discuss her collaboration with the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta on Sept. 14 at the Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue, at 68th Street.)

“I found my voice and my footing in my small work,” Ms. Hicks told Monique Lévi-Strauss in 2004, in an interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. “It enabled me to build bridges between art, design, architecture and decorative arts.”

That thought serves as a sort of mission statement for “Weaving as Metaphor,” in which variations on a fiber theme — anything from wool and silk to cellophane noodles, paper yarn and rubber bands — line the third-floor gallery walls. Some, like the monochromatic “Muro Blanco” (1960), from her early years in Mexico, are deceptively simple, suggestive of Braille manuscripts written in handspun wool. Others, like “Tibidabo Daydream” (1973), produced in Europe and India in the 60’s and 70’s, pulse with color and movement.

“Papillon,” begun in 1997 on an excursion to Japan and finished two years ago in France, is a delicate assemblage of color transfer paper and synthetic warp, giving an effect of wings captured between piano strings.

And then there are her most recent creations: froths of midnight-blue milliner’s netting, tangles of shimmering threads, delicate beads of pearly cotton and silk, strung on barely perceptible filament, that hang in the air like the northern lights.

“Sheila was part of the textile revolution of the 1960’s,” said Nina Stritzler-Levine, the center’s director of exhibitions and the show’s curator. “She, along with other fiber artists, is really responsible for taking textiles off the wall and giving them a sculptural dimension. I was very interested in the way in which the hand and craft informs the design process in her smaller works. I think they illuminate her desire for the superb skill she has as a weaver but also highlight this subversion in her technique.”

“When I started to go though my own archives and the Knoll archives,” Ms. Stritzler-Levine continued, referring to the furniture company where Ms. Hicks once worked, “I realized that on this small loom she worked out these very large design ideas.”



In a phone interview from Paris, her home along with New York for the last 40 years, Ms. Hicks, 72, said, “I’ve always done the small ones as a way of talking to myself and exploring, of entertaining myself in a way.”

Her voice, with a faint Parisian lilt, belies her Midwestern childhood: first on the Nebraska prairie, where she learned needlework from her spinster great-aunts, and then in cities like Detroit, where as an 8-year-old she ran with a gang of Yugoslav children before being rescued by classes at the Art Institute of Detroit. Later in Chicago she decided that art might become her calling.

After two years at Syracuse University, which she says she chose for its Greek name and what she believed was its proximity to Manhattan, Ms. Hicks and a fellow art student applied to Yale. Both were accepted, but then her friend committed suicide. Ms. Hicks decided to attend on her own. Her first stop, she recalled, was an Army surplus store, where she bought men’s clothing so as not to stand out from the male students.

She studied painting under the Bauhaus professor Josef Albers, but when a pre-Columbian textile course captured her attention, he took her home to meet his wife, Anni, a noted weaver. At his suggestion, she applied for a Fulbright scholarship to South America and spent the first few years of her weaving life journeying through Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru and Chile, and back north to Mexico.

While learning her art alongside local craftspeople and improvising on their techniques to suit her purpose, she painted and took photographs to support herself and became mesmerized by architecture and how her soft art could complement it. She married in Mexico and had a daughter; in the 1960’s she moved to France, where she remarried and had a son.

In 1964, with young children and her art to support, Ms. Hicks immersed herself in corporate work. At Knoll she designed upholstery fabrics inspired by her work in Mexico and the Andes. She also worked for Commonwealth Trust, a weaving company in Kozhikode, India. In the meantime she established her own studio in Paris, where she did commissioned work and her personal projects.

“Early in the morning I look at materials; that’s how I start my day,” Ms. Hicks said, as her grandchildren’s pet birds chattered in the background. “When light appears, I start thinking as I’m about to open my eyes. I have visions based on any one of a number of inexplicable phenomena. I have these soaring visions, too, which is why I make such big things.”

And always she is looking, analyzing, searching.

“The thing that really draws me to Sheila is her inexhaustible creativity within a creative medium: thread and fiber,” said Mildred Constantine, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who added Ms. Hicks’s “White Letter” to the permanent collection in 1963. “She’s one of the most well-traveled artists I’ve ever met, and one of the most innovative.”

Most recently Ms. Hicks has been inspired by Ouessant, an island off the Breton coast of France, where she had spied treacherous rock outcroppings from the window of the tiny plane that took her there and back. She had just returned with bags full of mouse-gnawed linen thread, retrieved from some local weavers, and was now pondering how to use it.

If her plan didn’t work out, she noted, she could always unravel it, something she has done to her creations time and again.

“The act of creating is much more exciting for me than leaving a monument to myself,” she said, explaining how she would deconstruct her fiber twists and spirals and ponytails and tapestries into piles of yarn. “It felt great. It meant that my imagination could run free.”

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The Bard Graduate Center is at 18 West 86th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue; Tel: 212-501-3000 ; Email: generalinfo@bgc.bard.edu; Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

World's First DVD Player With GPS

From Polaroid.

It's got a 5.6" screen and built-in stereo speakers and costs $800 (list).

Adds a whole new layer of meaning to Alfred Korzybski's penetrating observation, "The map is not the territory."

Polaroid's "Where To Buy" link says it's available at Target but there's no direct link to the product nor is it findable on the Target website.

Just another sad example of why Polaroid failed as a company: great products but absolutely clueless when it comes to marketing them.

Ah, well.

Scrolling LED Pen

From the website:

Scrolling LED Messenger Pen

The pen is truly mightier than the LED Billboard.

Express yourself like no other writing utensil allows you to.

Your writing will take on a whole new meaning and you will enjoy greater creativity in your writing with the LED Pen.

Scroll a message as long as 118 characters and let those around you become mesmerized by your penmanship as they can’t take their eyes off your Scrolling LED Pen.

People will be hanging on every word you write because your pen will draw their attention.

Plus, the LED Pen allows you to make the message as bright or dimmed as you’d like and even scroll at an ultra-fast or a slow pace.

Either way you look at it, the Scrolling LED pen will provide you with access to greater expression and communication.

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I have absolutely nothing to add to the above description.

$29.95.

World map of growth in wealth 1975-2002

Sobering.

Richard Morin wrote, in the August 24 Washington Post:

Another View of the Globe

Our favorite mapmakers have done it again. University of Michigan physicist Mark Newman and his colleagues at the University of Sheffield in Britain have just released their latest cartographic creation: a world map made so that the size of each country and territory is proportional to the growth in wealth that occurred there between 1975 and 2002.

This striking cartogram visually tells an important story. The rich got really richer: The United States and much of Asia look about ready to burst. At the same time, the African continent virtually vanishes, reflecting the region's economic stagnation. So does most of South America.

Overall, two-thirds of the world's countries experienced an increase in gross domestic product, led by China, the United States, Japan, India and Germany. The biggest losers: Ukraine, Russia, Poland and Saudi Arabia (though $3-a-gallon gas will fix that, pronto).

RSVP Onion Goggles

You might want to put these on before viewing the scorchingly hot people on your new favorite internet hangout, bakespace.

From websites:

RSVP Onion Goggles

Never cry over chopped onions again!

Our Onion Goggles assure tear-free chopping, mincing, dicing and slicing.

Sturdy and light-weight, the goggles shield eyes from burning and irritating onion vapors with a foam seal around the frame, while the anti-fog lense offers clarity and protection.

The Onion Goggles wear like glasses and will fit most face shapes, but will not work over eyeglasses.

And unlike true goggles, they slip on and off easily without disturbing a hair on your head.

To clean, simply wipe the goggles with a lint-free or water-dampened cloth.

A protective storage case is included.

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Who's afraid of thiopropanal sulfoxide?

Not you.

White or

Black frames.

$19.99.

If you prefer Amazon, they're $17.95 in Home & Garden.

But maybe you think this whole thing is one big joke.

Well, guess what?

Me too.

So how about I unveil, right now, without further ado, my new line of bookofjoe Quick 'n' Dirty No More Teerz Anti-Cry Onion Chopping Eyewear™?

Exciting, what?

I can hardly feel my pulse, I'm fibrillating so.

But I digress as I palpitate.

Back when I was in college at UCLA and actually entered the kitchen space to prepare food as opposed to nuking it (way, way back — before fire was invented) I occasionally would chop onions.

I didn't like the eye burn any more than you do.

But I was then as I am now and will be forever (for better or worse): simply unwilling to accept the status quo.

And even though I'd not yet encountered Edwin S. Land's powerful thought-focusing epigram — "Solve the problem with what's in the room" — that was pretty much the way I approached most problems.

So one day I brought home my lab goggles from Chemistry 1A or whatever, put them on, and began slicing, dicing and chopping onions.

No tears, no burn.

As Brother Dominic said in the classic Xerox commercial, "It's a miracle."

You can buy goggles just like the ones I used (below)

for $4.30 right here.

They'll work every bit as well as the fancypants version up top — and they're bookofjoe–Approved™.

With a recommendation like that you know they've got to be messed up.

Wait a minute, that can't be right....

bakespace.com

MySpace for the kitchen set.

Launched a few weeks ago by Babette Pepaj, a Los Angeles television producer who told the Washington Post's Bonnie S. Benwick, in an item that appeared in yesterday's Food section, "I was looking for a social networking space, but something that was real grass roots about food."

I like 2006 a lot.

In the past five years things have gotten to be a whole lot more fun.

Back then, you'd have been consigned to look for what you wanted online.

Nowadays, if you don't find something to your liking, hey, no problema: you just start it up yourself.

It took Ms. Pepaj six months to get bakespace (which is free but requires users to join and then log in) up and running.

The Post article said that "an average of 150 users have logged on each day since August 22."

[Babette emailed me shortly after this post went up to inform me that in fact the site is adding 150 new members every day.]

Yo, Babette: look for an inflection point right about now.

w00t!

Tune in to bakespace here and remember to tell Babette I sent you in order to qualify for some special perks available only to bookofjoe readers.

Use this super-secret password: bizarro

Cutting Board Scale — Simply Sensational

Designed by Jim TerMeer.

From the website:

Cutting Scale

Here is a concept for a cutting board that has an integrated scale within a defined area on its surface.

Ingredients can be cut and measured on the same surface with very little extra effort.

There has been a tranformative trend in cooking based around the science of food.

Central to this is the idea that precise measument leads to more possibilities for new flavors.

Recipes will become more demanding, requiring simple ways to be precise in the kitchen.

Measures 10" x 15".
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Not yet in production; I'll keep you posted.

[via Brian Nelson]

Stuff left over™

A new feature, making its debut with this post.

• Peyton Manning is the new Catherine Zeta-Jones — everywhere you look, there they are. In magazines, newspapers, on TV, they're the sock puppets of today's advertising. What's that mean? I dunno — you tell me. That's why I pay you the big bucks.

• You know you're out of it when you don't laugh at the enormous amount of news coverage given the past couple days to the latest rearrangement of the deck chairs on the good ship U.S.S. Ford, moving at flank speed in heavy fog directly towards an iceberg. In fact, they might already have hit, but what with all the fluff and chaff they're throwing out perhaps they haven't felt the shock yet up on the bridge. Goodness knows the hapless common stockholders in steerage are bailing plenty fast.

• Speaking of funny, can you believe the equally large amount of space and wind given over to Katie Couric's anointment as Queen of the News at CBS? You'd think it mattered who read what we already know. TV's another business that's not yet cognizant it's already dead and simply walking off its zombie spell until it collapses.

That'll do for now.