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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There are few designers working today who can claim to have the legacy that Irma Boom has. Born in the Netherlands, and still based in Amsterdam today, Boom has practiced for over 30 years under the moniker Irma Boom Office, producing hundreds of books – over 300, in fact. She attended the Yale School of Art in Connecticut from 1954 to 1959, where she studied with Josef Albers, [4] Rico Lebrun, Bernard Chaet, George Kubler, George Heard Hamilton, Vincent Scully, Jose de Riviera, Herbert Matter, Norman Ives, and Gabor Peterdi. Her thesis on pre-Incaic textiles [1] was supervised by archaeologist Junius Bird of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She received her BFA in 1957 . [5] 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. INT But the response wasn’t necessarily all positive, was it? There was quite a lot of controversy at the time! INT Things didn’t get much better after the book was released, though. Was the criticism coming from the design community?

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. 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 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 In the beginning, I thought people were right and it was a mistake, but now it’s considered my first best-designed book. A colleague of mine at the time described it as a giant, gigantic mistake. But a brilliant mistake. Rawsthorn, Alice (March 18, 2007). "Reinventing the look (even smell) of a book". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved March 4, 2018. 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? If I were to compare myself to an architect, I make social housing. Sometimes I’ll make a villa but that's really rare. La Biennale di Venezia - Artists". www.LaBiennale.org. Archived from the original on June 29, 2017 . Retrieved February 22, 2017.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. 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.

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 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. IB Well I got a state prize in 2014 and I had to spend the money in my field somehow. At first, I thought “let’s make a book”, but then I thought, “no, that’s what I do all day every day, let’s continue what I am already doing,” which was collecting books from the 1500s and 1600s and the 1960s. INT As a designer, you’ve built up a reputation for creating beautifully tactile books. Have you always been interested in objects?Muzeja savremene umetnosti, Belgrade; Museum of Art, Skopje, Macedonia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Dubrovnic, Yugoslavia; Biblioteca Americana, Bucharest, Romania IB I was one of the youngest people to ever design these books so there was a lot of envy in the group because everybody wanted to do it. This was the job. Nobody in that design department ever got it, it would always go to famous designers and suddenly I got the job! There were four people including me at the Government Printing Office who sat at the same table and people actually left, they were so jealous. They really couldn't handle the fact that the youngest had come in and suddenly got this job everybody wanted. 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. IB We were given great jobs there. But because I didn’t know that much I took on the jobs nobody else wanted. I realised if I did those jobs, nobody was going to be looking at me and realising I didn’t know anything! Intuitively or instinctively, that was a good decision because I could experiment. I could do what I wanted because really no one looked at anything I did. It was like, “Oh, you've done it? OK, it’s fine.” 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.

It was crazy. That’s basically how I got my job doing what I do today. In the beginning, people only knew me because of those books.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. What she does not, for instance, want to discuss is the fundamental and ancient role of weaving in human society, its function as a metaphor, its place in myth. She thought about all that many years ago when she was travelling round Latin America on a Fulbright scholarship in the late 1950s, studying pre-Columbian textiles. She had been inspired in that line of study by her Yale art history professor, the hugely influential George Kubler, author of The Shape of Time, who not only showed his students a lot of slides of Andean mummy bundles but “looked like a walking mummy bundle … a fascinating man, he presided over his classes in such a powerful way”.