\n
\n\t\t\tArt, Georgia O\u2019Keeffe believed, springs from \u201cthe desire to make the unknown known\u2026 and keeping the unknown always beyond you.\u201d We seem to have drifted lightyears away from that motive force, the majority of our epoch\u2019s cultural production aiming to render the market maximally known \u2014 its profitably proven preferences, its self-interests, its moral fashions \u2014 in order to cater the creation to it, to virtue-signal enough to go viral.
\nIn every era, there are those who do what they do from a place of exuberant creative vitality unconcerned with validation, those who refuse to mistake the conditions of their culture for givens and choose to make what they want to see exist \u2014 the singular, the untested, the unexampled \u2014 for the world to take or leave. The price is often profound loneliness, the reward profound peace.
\nArt from Sheila Hicks: Seize, Weave Space, Nasher Sculpture Center.
\nSheila Hicks is a living emblem of that defiant, wildly countercultural courage to create rather than cater.
\nFor the better part of a century \u2014 since before the splitting of the atom, before the signing of the Civil Rights Act, before the invention of laser and duct-tape and the Internet \u2014 she has been making koans out of fiber, material poems that reach something beyond meaning, something that, like nature\u2019s needless beauty, simply is. Although her work has been exhibited in every major museum and she has been profiled by every major magazine, the recognition hover like an afterthought, agreeable and irrelevant as a stranger\u2019s perfume, over her tactile universe of feeling.
\nSheila Hicks: Fugue, 1969-1970 (silk, flax, cotton)
\nAt ninety-two, Hicks opens the door to her life and work \u2014 which are so clearly one \u2014 in a feisty Time Sensitive conversation, in which she keeps pushing back against being classified as an artist. With an eye to how labels and categories invariably commodify what they contain, reducing process to product, she reflects:
\nI don\u2019t even think about art. People want to pull me into the art thing all the time\u2026 Is this art or isn\u2019t this art\u2026 What is art? I think people do what they feel like doing, and not authenticating things. These podcasts and these interviews and this reportage and these exhibitions, a lot of it has to do with trying to authenticate things, validate things. Here in Paris, we have a hundred exhibitions opening every week. What are we validating? And if you\u2019re not validated and if you\u2019re not being exhibited, what are you doing? Are you wasting your time or are you just simply doing what you feel like doing and that you like doing?
\nIt is a sentiment not dissimilar to what legendary cellist Pablo Casals, at ninety-three, articulated about the secret of creative vitality and what Rachel Carson advised an spiring writer: \u201cIf you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.\u201d
\nHolding up a large baton completely covered in an intricate pattern of colorful fabric and thread, Hicks adds:
\nWhen I made this, I didn\u2019t make it with any intention that it\u2019s supposed to be craft or art or design or decoration. Or what is it? It just is. Take it or leave it.
\nSheila Hicks at her home in Paris. (Photograph: Agathe Karsenti for The Slowdown.)
\nComplement with some abiding advice on being an artist from Bowie, Beethoven, and M.C. Richards, then revisit Virginia Woolf\u2019s classic existential epiphany about what it means to create.
\nFor of Hicks, watch her singular spirit come abloom in this tender short film: <\/p>\n