Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor (Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design & Culture) (Chicago History of Science and Medicine)

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This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living people that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately. IB Yeah, it’s what I like about making books, it’s a democratic medium. Whatever I make, even if the print run is only 1,000 like Chanel: Livre D’Artistes, what you produce is a democratic object. Sometimes they’re 100 euros, sometimes they’re 10 euros or 20 euros, but the bigger the print run, the better. It’s about sharing this edited information bound and printed to as many people as possible so that everybody can enjoy it. INT It also seems like your time at the Printing Office, where you were designing for lots of people, for the masses, had an impact on how you think about design today – how it should be democratic.

Designer Irma Boom won the Gold Medal for the"Most Beautiful Book in the World" Prize givenat the Leipzig Book Fair IB Yeah, people from all over the world starting coming to the Government Printing and Publishing Office to meet the designer who made those books and where they made them. I would just show them my table downstairs. Actually, when I left the job, they asked me what I wanted to have and I said the table where I made the stamp books. INT You’re an avid collector of books and have a library upstairs, how long have you been collecting?architects she befriended during that trip gave her names of people in Paris, where she went afterward on a Fribourg scholarship and lived as an artist among South American expatriates. During a brief interlude, she settled in Mexico, where she gave birth to her daughter Itaka. This nomadic existence—and the encounters it provided—were as formative as her sedentary years at Yale, where, in 1959, she had earned a master of fine arts under the supervision of Josef Albers, the renowned Bauhaus painter and color theorist. Cordes Sauvages/Hidden Blue (2014). Photograph: Michael Brzezinski/The Deighton Collection. Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London Rawsthorn, Alice (March 18, 2007). "Reinventing the look (even smell) of a book". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved March 4, 2018.

IB No, no! Actually, when I was applying to art school, I wanted to become a painter. Books were not the first love at all. My parents weren’t really keen on me becoming a painter though and so my mother directed me towards the applied arts and I applied to Arnhem School of Art, a random art school, where actually Julius’ [Vermeulen, Irma’s partner] father Jan Vermeulen was working. And he was the one to interview me! It’s the only time I ever met him in my life because he died.IBWell, when he saw my work, he said: “You belong to the fine art department.” So I didn’t go to the Arnhem Art School, I went to the AKI Academy of Art and Design which was a totally radical and crazy school, famous for art but also applied arts. Danto, Joan Simon, and Nina Stritzler-Levine as well as illustrations of the artist's working tools, related drawings, photographs, and chronology. Published in association with the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture IB Well, after art school I started to work in The Hague at the Government Publishing and Printing Office, in the design department, and in one of the last years I was there, Julius was too. I immediately fell in love with him – he was this very cute, nice boy. His surname is Vermeulen, which is sort of a common name, so I didn’t think anything of it. At some point, I asked, after I’d already fallen in love with him, “Are you related to Jan Vermeulen?” And he said, “That’s my father!” From that moment on, I thought, “OK, I have to keep this guy!” INT Famously, you work on projects for years, so what’s next for you? Is there anything on the horizon? So I was conflicted about what to do next. I asked a lot of people for advice and everybody told me I had to go to the Publishing Office because it’s big and I would learn a lot – and I did learn a lot.

Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column". Whitney Museum of American Art. Archived from the original on April 16, 2017 . Retrieved June 26, 2017. INT You couldn’t make it up – that you ended up with the son of the person who inspired your career! Where did you finally meet? Alison Jacques to expand with new gallery space on Cork Street, Mayfair". Alison Jacques . Retrieved April 17, 2023. INT Materiality is a massive part of what you do – scale, weight, paper choices. How do these things help you communicate concepts, and why is this important to you?IB While I was at the Printing and Publishing Office, I was mainly doing work for the Ministry of Culture. And as I mentioned before, I always took on the books nobody wanted to do. It meant I was slightly under the radar – nobody looked at what I was making and I did some crazy things – there was one series of adverts I made where things were upside down and all over the place. And then Ootje Oxenaar [a designer of Dutch banknotes], actually Julius’ former boss, who published, together with the Government Printing and Publishing Office, the stamp annuals, saw these ads and he loved them. He said, “I don’t know who made these, but whoever did should get to do the next stamp annual.” INT But the response wasn’t necessarily all positive, was it? There was quite a lot of controversy at the time!

IB What I’ve found is really important is the structure of the content, because everything I do comes from content. I still feel I’m a bad designer but I think about the content and think what concepts come up, I can make a book. I’m not somebody who says, “oh this seems like a very nice composition,” I have never worked in that way. I think, what should a book be as a whole? What am I making for this artist or for these architects? What should it convey? And then in that way, I can think about a form, a scale, paper and all these things, but basically, I have to be able to say, what it is, what I’m doing.

IB Yeah. I thought it was so horrible! I told my teacher, and the teacher said, “They didn’t hire you? Unbelievable! Come to the place where I work instead.” So I became an intern at the Printing and Publishing Office, before interning at Studio Dumbar. In those days, it was incredibly famous but it was also tiny, and very artistic. And I loved the way they worked. Since 1964, she has lived and worked in Paris, France. [3] Prior to that, she lived and worked in Guerrero, Mexico from 1959 to 1963. Gaze, Delia; Mihajlovic, Maja; Shrimpton, Leanda (1997). Dictionary of Women Artists: Introductory surveys; Artists, A-I. Taylor & Francis. p.683. ISBN 978-1-884964-21-3. IB I do if people come to me with certain expectations, that’s really difficult. I can never meet that expectation, it's always wrong. If people already think that I can make a prize-winning book, I can tell you it will never happen, it will always be a disappointment.