ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the reception of fiber in the art world through a case study of the weavings and three-dimensional fiber sculpture of Sheila Hicks, Fig. 3.1. In the late 1960s and 1970s, an extraordinary number of artists working in the U.S. – including post-minimalists such as Eva Hesse and Robert Morris, fiber artists such as Sheila Hicks and the Swiss-born but New York-based Françoise Grossen, and feminists like Judy Chicago and Faith Ringgold – experimented with or adopted fiber as a primary medium. Such work demonstrated a profound shift in artists’ interest in and approach to fiber, which previously had been dismissed for its historical associations to “the decorative,” “craft,” or “women’s work.” However, the use of fiber in each of these spheres of practice – whether post-minimalist, fiberbased, or feminist – was received in dramatically different ways, variously shaped by institutional, curatorial, and other local, social forces tied to the longstanding art/craft divide. For artists self-identifying or labeled as “fiber artists,” whose backgrounds in textiles and weaving positioned them outside the mainstream art world in this period, the art/craft divide – that is, the subordination of craft to art or its outright dismissal as “non-art” – was an obstacle to professional recognition. The primary strategy adopted by fiber artists and curators of the period to negotiate this situation involved redefining fiber as a medium of “high art” rather than craft. Although this strategy met with limited success from the 1960s through the 1980s, artists such as Sheila Hicks still helped set the stage for the art world we inhabit today in which the medium of fiber is used much more freely by artists, often without regard to the debates surrounding the hierarchy of art and craft that stymied the careers of an older generation. And some artists of this older generation, like Hicks, have experienced a new surge of interest in their work within this changed context, highlighting in the process a set of factors important to artistic consecration and canonization.
