Made of more than 3,000 “ponytails” of linen thread, as the artist called them, stitched together and piled atop one another, it looked at first glance like something one might encounter in a commercial fabric store. Neither traditional sculpture nor painting, it conjured both, a monumental object made from the humblest materials. The show that featured Hicks’s work, “Wall Hangings,” was a rare American institutional endorsement of artists who make ambitious work out of fiber and broadened the idea of what art could be. But the exhibition received only one major review, in the niche publication Craft Horizons, by the sculptor Louise Bourgeois. If they must be classified, they would fall somewhere between fine and applied art.” They “rarely liberate themselves from decoration,” she concluded, deploying what might be art’s most insulting critical term.

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Persons: Sheila Hicks, ”, Louise Bourgeois, Bourgeois, she’d, “ Organizations: Museum of Modern Art Locations: New York, Paris