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Sheila Hicks

Mapped Satellite, 1990

Now On View

Description

Maker

Title

Mapped Satellite

Year

1990

Medium

Twined bundles of linen yarn

Materials/Techniques

Materials

Techniques

Dimensions

Diameter: 104.1 cm (41 inches)

Type

Credit

Helen M. Danforth Acquisition Fund

Object Number

1998.67

Exhibition History

Exhibition History

Recent Acquisitions

February 18 - April 16, 2000

Because RISD trains artists in textile and fiber art and design, the Museum tries to acquire recent and contemporary work for their inspiration. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and to generous gifts from artists, a small collection has been formed over the last 30 years. The Museum usually adds one or more significant examples each year.

Sheila Hicks is one of the most famous of American fiber artists, indeed one of the founders of the movement. This piece is the sole work by her in the collection to date, thus it fills an important gap. The artist made "ropes" of linen threads, then sewed or "couched" them to a linen backing, a time-honored technique. Hicks here shows how contemporary artists are inspired by historical practices to come up with new ways of making art for today.

European Galleries

Here Sheila Hicks juxtaposes varied-width large-scale yarns twisted in different directions to create a surface of subtle contrasts in color, balance, and scale. This technique quotes from and exponentially magnifies similar patterning methods used by Peruvian artists hundreds of years before. The brilliant red color suggests the hue of cochineal, a pink-red dye extracted from cactus-eating insects. During the colonial period, cochineal was one of the most valued and exported materials in South and Central America.

Hicks was introduced to pre-Hispanic Andean weaving as a student at Yale University under the guidance of her mentors Josef and Anni Albers, who collected ancient Central and South American textiles and were greatly influenced by their distinct colors and geometries.

Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in Copyright. This object is Mapped Satellite with the accession number of 1998.67. To request high-resolution files or new photography, please send an email to imagerequest@risd.edu and include your name and the object's accession number.