the subject of a superb 50-year retrospective
Sheila Hicks is soft. She works with fabric. She weaves with wool and cotton. She lets looping skeins of linen and wool droop from hooks. She piles ponytails of colored cotton on plinths. She lets things fall, spill, pile up, and generally relax.
And yet Hicks, the subject of a superb 50-year retrospective at the Addison Gallery of American Art, is in many ways a classically modern artist. Her work just happens to represent a strain of the movement we tend to forget about.
Most of Hicks’s career has unfolded during modernism’s aftermath. But she came to prominence in the 1950s, the heyday of modernist design. And as a student at Yale, she was taught by one of modernism’s foundational figures, Josef Albers, who came to this country with his wife, Anni, when the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis.
