Monday, July 14, 2014

Fiber Art in High Fashion

On the cover of Glamour Magazine's July edition, spectacularly attractive Keira Knightley is sporting a bright fuchsia, woven dress. The photographer or editor cropped it at about her waist.

As a fiber artist, that caught my eye - high fashion with weaving. Oh, our lucky day. The dress designer, Altuzarra, was inspired by fiber artist Sheila Hicks.

BUT - WTF? This dress is awful. It looks in the same vein as Carol Burnett taking the curtains to make a dress à la Gone with the Wind. Did Altuzarra take a wall hanging down and wrap the runway model with it? As a top on Keira it looks splendid and enticing, here on the runway it seems a bit of a joke. How disappointing.


Though Altuzarra's execution was unfortunate in my opinion, it afforded us an opportunity to learn about Sheila Hicks, who
was born in Hastings, Nebraska and received her BFA and MFA degrees from Yale University. Upon completing her studies at Yale Hicks received a Fulbright scholarship in 1957 to paint in Chile. While in South America she developed her interest in working with fibers. After founding workshops in Mexico, Chile, and South Africa, and working in Morocco and India, she now divides her time between her Paris studio and New York.

Hicks has been widely exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions. A major retrospective Sheila Hicks: 50 Years debuted at the Addison Gallery of American Art and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. Hicks‘ work is also included in such collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; and the Museums of Modern Art, Tokyo and Kyoto. One-person exhibitions include those at the Seoul Art Center, Korea; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Here is a tiny little sample of her work, called Escape to the North, which I found the same place I pulled her biography:

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