Sheila Hicks Mile High Club

a wide, flattened arch of tan silk embroidered in a checkerboard pattern with the thick strands discernible in each square, shifting to a field of smaller nubs at the curved edge hangs on a white wall. it was originally made to fit the curved walls and ceiling of the upper deck of a boeing 747, where it would be the back wall of a first class lounge area. air france commissioned the panels from sheila hicks, who kept this one until her husband donated it to moma in 2017
Sheila Hicks, Panel for the interior of Air France 747 upper deck lounge, 1969-77, silk on cotton, 51 3/4 × 157 × 2″, a 2017 gift to MoMA from Melvin Bedrick, the artist’s husband

Yesterday art historian Michael Lobel posted Sheila Hicks’ bas relief panel of embroidered silk, four meters wide, which MoMA says is the only survivor of the 19 panels Hicks made for Air France between 1969 and 1977. Lobel has jokingly assigned me the case for tracking down any other remaining panels. So instead of not finding one Jasper Johns Short Circuit flag, I can now not find eighteen back walls from the upper deck first class lounges of Air France’s first generation of Boeing 747s. I am ON it.

a 1970 air france brochure image of the upper deck lounge on the new 747, in which a white couple stand smoking and drinking in front of a white jacketed (and white) bartender on the right, a white lady with an orange scarf sits reading on the left foreground, and the back wall of the lounge is a cream colored silk bas relief panel by sheila hicks, which extends the full width of the curved and ribbed cabin ceiling and walls. three white guys are lounging while a pink clad blonde flight attendant takes their order. the point of all this at this moment is to document the hicks panel in situ. she made 18, or 19, and delivered 18, and kept one, i think
Air France upper deck lounge with Sheila Hicks bas relief wall panel, in a 1970 brochure at The Airchive

That Air France would turn to Hicks makes all the sense in the world: she was already deeply involved in building out the future the 747 was flying to. She’d just made works for the Ford Foundation’s headquarters, and Eero Saarinen’s CBS Building, and TWA Terminal. She’d already turned the Inca-inspired fabric she wove for the suit she wore to meet Florence Knoll into commercial upholstery. As Hicks told Danielle Mysliwiec in 2014, she likes to respond to the architecture, so adapting her Incan basketweave pattern for bespoke wall panels designed to be customized for each airline’s brand experience must have just made sense.

a basketweave arched form embroidered in silk on a similarly colored tan canvas, four and a half feet high and more than twelve feet wide, made to fit into an air france 747 lounge, but it seems like it never was, from a 2011 exhibit of sheila hicks at ica philadelphia
“Silk bas relief for interior of Boeing 747 aircraft, Air France, 1969-1977. Silk on cotton canvas, 53 1/8 in. x 157 1/2 in. Private collection” image and caption via ICAPhila.org

MoMA may have the last surviving Hicks Air France panel now, but they did not find it. An unstretched panel with the square edges of the cotton canvas support was included in Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, the artist’s 2011 retrospective at the ICA Philadelphia. Was this one lost? Or was it just remounted onto a curved panel for Textured Planes [lol], a show Demisch Danant staged alongside Hicks’ appearance in the 2014 Whitney Biennial?

two cream to tan textile works by sheila hicks hang on walls facing each other in a marble tiled gallery space. in the center are interlocking settees in the shape of a four pointed star with bulbous tips. the shape is like a chew toy, or the cingular logo, but neither reference feels especially helpful here. a smoky glass table with white mod chairs sits in the lower right corner of the image, and a hicks piece of cascading turquoise hangs from the ceiling at the far back. a 2014 exhibition at nyc furniture/design gallery demisch danant
Hicks’ Air France panel installed in 2014 for Textured Planes: Sheila Hicks, Joseph Andre Motte, Pierre Paulin, at Demisch Danant

Air France had eighteen 747-100 series planes; Hicks made nineteen panels. The fact that MoMA’s panel was still unstretched in 2011 suggests it was a spare that never flew. The fact that it was stretched and cropped between 2011 and 2014 suggests it was within the artist’s control. The fact that it was donated to MoMA by her husband, Melvin Bedrick, suggests his was the private collection the ICA Philadelphia borrowed it from. Bedrick, who retired as a partner from Cravath long before the law firm destroyed their reputation by kowtowing to Trump, gave two of Hicks’ works to MoMA in 2017. Hicks herself, her family, and her galleries, gave another seven, which makes me think the A&D acquisition budget needs not just some capital, but some equity.

It also makes me think Hicks is ably in control of her own work and legacy, and if she says Air France dumped the 18 747 panels after they soaked up a few years of Gauloise smoke, and the lounges were replaced by extra rows of high-revenue seats, I would believe her.

D’oh, this leaves me at the end, and I still haven’t worked my favorite piece of Hicks-related writing ever into the post. I guess I will reference it for the title.