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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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? INT Things didn’t get much better after the book was released, though. Was the criticism coming from the design community? So I don’t think about it. I only do the projects I think I should do and I can really work on and people should give me freedom. I always do my best to make something good but you never know. There are so many reasons why things come together to make a project work and there are even more reasons why something becomes a failure. It's difficult. 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. IB You should never make a book for now. You should make a book with knowledge and as a reference for the future. The value of the book only rises because it’s this container of thoughts bound together in this is unchangeable entity. I think it’s super important that it’s unchangeable. It’s a thought. It’s a moment in time captured, like taking a photo, or making a painting, but with so much more information. It’s so valuable to humankind, for being alive and to reflect on what we are doing.

Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column". Whitney Museum of American Art. Archived from the original on April 16, 2017 . Retrieved June 26, 2017. 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 La Biennale di Venezia - Artists". www.LaBiennale.org. Archived from the original on June 29, 2017 . Retrieved February 22, 2017. 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.IB The boss at the design department of the Printing Office was my teacher. And I was always a hard worker, both as a painter and as a designer, and I discovered the work of Wim Crouwel and Total Design. I was so into his whole system of typography, I loved it. So when I had to do an internship as part of my undergraduate, I applied to Total Design – and they rejected me. 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? 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. Alison Jacques to expand with new gallery space on Cork Street, Mayfair". Alison Jacques . Retrieved April 17, 2023.

INT A big moment for you was when you got to design the annual Dutch postage stamp book in 1987. Previously it had been designed by Wim Crouwel, Karl Maartens and Gert Dumbar. How did you manage to land that job at such a young age? IB It’s what, for me, is really important. To be able look at these books and try to understand why people did things, it's interesting to see what happened to the book through these times and how the book got commercialised. Because it wasn’t initially a commodity, it was for sharing information. And the book became something way more democratic. That’s absolutely for sure. It’s very exciting to realise. IB There needs to be some challenge in it. For example, last year I spent five months in Rome as a resident at the Vatican Library – it’s something I’ll continue next year. When I was invited it seemed like such a good moment to be able to study books, to look at what happened to the book. For me, there were two things going on. I’m the producer, the maker of the book but I’m also the researcher of the book so that's a parallel path. I will also make a publication at some point on my Vatican studies. It’s such a good source also to be able to see where I am as a book designer. 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. In retrospect, it was the best thing for me that I was put in this whole group of people but I could work there and be almost totally invisible. I was so shy, I also had long hair and I was always lurking behind it.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 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!” a b c Gipson, Ferren (2022). Women's work: from feminine arts to feminist art. London: Frances Lincoln. ISBN 978-0-7112-6465-6. IB I had come from an art school which was totally crazy so it was good for me to see another world. I was given loads of freedom there, I immediately became a designer – not a junior designer – I was a designer. She photographed extensively with her Rolleiflex. [9] Her subjects included the architecture of Felix Candela and artists active in Mexico. The Pérez Art Museum Miami holds the artwork Tapestry (1977), an example of her cultural textitle explorations. [10]