Tag Archive "textiles"

The Divine Sheila Hicks at the ICA

Sheila Hicks; 50 Years at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania through August 7, 2011 is likely to knock you off your feet with its power and get you high on color; it will certainly expand your idea of what can be made out of  yarn and second-hand clothes.  The survey of more than ninety works ranges from the monumental May I have this Dance? (2002-03), whose cable-like forms burst out of the far corner of the ICA’s double-story space and fall in loops across twenty-five feet of floor, to the series of flat works, no more ... More » »

Books for Holiday Gifts

Here are a few books which might solve some of your holiday gift problems: Anton Radevsky and Emma Saunders Voyage to the Heart of Matter; the Atlas Experiment at CERN (Papadakis Publisher: Winterbourne, UK, 2009; 2nd ed. 2010; distributed by Antique Collectors Club, New York) ISBN-10: 190650606X, 13: 978-1906506063 Whether you think art and science are on parallel journeys, find beauty in industrial architecture or just love pop-up books, this is a treat. It’s hard to imagine who conceived the idea of doing a 3-d book on the Large Hadron Collider, the experimental equipment near Geneva constructed to explore the ... More » »

Kanthas at the PMA; women’s art of Bengal

Kanthas are delightful and appealing vernacular textiles, fashioned from of bits and pieces of worn clothing and embroidered with figurative designs by the women of Bengal (now divided between the Indian state of West Bengal and Bangladesh).  Some of their charms are akin to childrens’ book illustrations, others to comic books and vernacular art of various origins: lines of dancing girls as tightly coordinated as the Rockettes; plants, birds, beasts and humans interlocked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; elephants and horses carrying all sorts of riders and at least one horse sitting astride a man.