Free Threads, The Textile and its Prehispanic Roots 1954 – 2017 & Lifelines
Grant Klarich Johnson, Brooklyn Rail
April 2018
Today, as a rising tide of isolationist nationalism challenges globalism’s utopian promise, Lifelines, a concise retrospective of greatest hits at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Free Threads, a quixotic excavation of more obscure works, at Mexico’s Museo Amparo, surveyed Sheila Hicks’s cross-cultural ambitions. Hicks is renowned for her sculptural fibre works, which triumphantly fill both exhibitions, as well as for her work as a consultant and designer of mass-manufactured textiles, only briefly represented in both. Unique among her American peers, Hicks produced both exhibitions and objects in Latin America, Africa, India, and the Middle East, all before 1980, arguably a pioneer of global contemporary art. ‘Textile is a universal language,’ she has said. ‘In all of the cultures of the world, textile is a crucial and essential component…There’s a level of familiarity that immediately breaks down any prejudice.’ Following Hicks’s cue, this coincidence of curatorial attention reminds us how to recognise difference with dialogue and connection, rather than division and isolation. […]