Sheila Hicks on Life as a Series of Portals

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Sheila. Thank you for welcoming us into your beautiful courtyard here in Paris. I would feel strange even saying “welcome to Time Sensitive” because of where we are… [Laughs]

I wanted to start our conversation with a fact I pulled up in my research, which is that, in your youth, when you were living in Detroit, you joined a synchronized swimming team. Maybe this is a stretch, but I feel there is this deep connection between synchronized swimming and weaving. What throughlines, if any, do you see between swimming and weaving?

SHEILA HICKS: Nothing.

SB: Nothing?

SH: One is tactile, with the hands. The other is body movement in water. What’s your association?

SB: I was thinking about— Both involve intricate formations. Both are about timing, in a way. There’s ritual, there’s rhythm, there’s repetition.

SH: Next question.

SB: For you, weaving’s a way of life, and I was feeling—or thinking—how do you think about the relationships between weaving and thinking? Where does the thought find its way into the weaving? Or do you see a link there between what you’re thinking and—

SH: You see any weaving here?

SB: Outside [in this courtyard]?

SH: In your visit to my studio.

SB: Of course.

SH: Where’s the weaving? There’s no loom.

SB: It’s in the making, right?

SH: No. I don’t see any weaving in my studio. I see them drawing some threads into alignment and twisting them and sculpting them. Like this [points at sculptural stick wrapped in fabric and thread]. Where do you see weaving? Because that’s kind of easy, but I don’t see the weaving you’re talking about.

SB: So you don’t see weaving in this stick here that’s in front of us.

SH: Do you?

SB: I see what you mean.

SH: How about here? [Points to a sculptural bundle of yarn] See any weaving?

SB: I see lines.

SH: And?

SB: Sort of a trip through yarn and…

You’ve been living in Paris now for sixty years—sixty-plus years, actually—and in this area [Cour de Rohan in Saint-Germain-des-Prés], this very courtyard for nearly fifty—

SH: This neighborhood. This arrondissement. Since 19—coming and going. I’ve lived in many places, but this has been sort of my check-in and check-out place. I’m still doing that.

SB: What does this place mean to you?

SH: I lived in… I used to, a couple of years ago before Covid—you know where Connecticut is. I would spend a lot of time at the house that [Edward] Steichen had in [Redding] Connecticut that my husband and I acquired and have since sold. That was a special atmosphere on a little pond, which was very different than this courtyard, which is all cobblestone, materials… Looking at water, grass, cobblestones, wood, leaves, flowers, all these different textures.

That’s why I’m showing you these [points to fabric- and thread-wrapped sticks], because I’m very attracted to these that are things you can read with your hands. A lot of things you can only read with your eyes or with your ears. These you can read and touch with your hands.

Children are attracted to this very early on. But also it lasts your whole life long, because every day you get dressed—unless you’re in a tribe in Africa someplace, where you might dress differently than the way you dress. That means you start your day with feeling, getting out of the sheets or the blankets or the sleeping bag and moving to the shower and taking a shower and then using a towel and choosing each time the texture that you want to identify with or be friendly with, start your day with, and then move out into space and then see if everything is entering your consciousness through your eyes or through your ears.

If you’re in a traffic area in Shanghai, a big city, New York, your first impressions are going to be audial and how to protect yourself. You’re going to find a place where maybe you go have a coffee, where you can sit down, anda place where you feel safe. And then you’re visual—back to visual—you want to sit next to somebody or not sit next to somebody, and then you watch what’s going by or ignore and turn your back and go into your own introspection. But you’re constantly aware that you’re wearing certain things and certain people are looking at you. You either choose to be anonymous or you choose to be seductive, or expose yourself to attract certain kinds of friendships. So, textiles and weaving and threads and all these kinds of things have crept into my life. I didn’t really choose them. They just sort of crept in.

SB: Yeah.

SH: I think you probably have the same problem.

SB: [Laughs] Your upbringing actually comes to mind here. You were traveling all the time. Your family was kind of always on the move, right? You lived in—if I have my research right—I know you were born in Hastings, Nebraska.

SH: Do you know where that is?

SB: I know where Nebraska is because I grew up in Colorado. [Laughs]

SH: Have you been through Nebraska?

SB: I have, yeah.

SH: You don’t just take planes and fly over?

SB: No, I’ve driven through Nebraska, up through to Iowa, through to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio.

SH: That’s where they linked the railroad, remember?

SB: Mm-hmm.

SH: From the East Coast to the West Coast. [Editor’s note: Nebraska was central to linking the East and West Coasts through the Union Pacific Railroad, which began its westward construction from Omaha, Nebraska, in 1863. As part of the first transcontinental railroad, it connected to the eastern rail network and stretched across Nebraska to Utah, meeting the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869.] 

SB: Yep.

SH: Who was it? Was it the president? General Grant? The president when they linked the United States?

SB: I don’t know my railroad history. [Editor’s note: Ulysses S. Grant was President in 1869; Abraham Lincoln was President in 1863, when the project began.]

SH: Because one of my grandfather’s relatives was a stationmaster then when they linked the East Coast to the West Coast in the middle of nowhere. “In the middle of nowhere” is not very complimentary to Nebraska, but it does feel like that when you go there.

SB: I was bringing it up because it makes me think that, all that traveling around, you were seeing so many textiles from all these different— [Editor’s note: Hicks’s family constantly moved around throughout her childhood—to Iowa, Missouri, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, Illinois, and Detroit.]

SH: I was seeing people. But they weren’t naked.

SB: [Laughs]

SH: Depends where you go in the world, what you see. If you’re in the United States, most people are clothed. Poorly maybe, or extravagantly, or scantily, or abundantly. But the clothes story is a big story in the United States. Right?

SB: Yeah. It’s a big business. How do you think about your textiles in relationship—

SH: I liked what— I saw Yohji Yamamoto on a recent interview, and he said he didn’t care about the fashion world. He didn’t want to even talk about fashion. He only wanted to talk about clothes. He said he made clothes. Not fashion.

SB: How do you think about your work in relation to clothes?

SH: I don’t even think about art. People want to pull me into the art thing all the time. And: Is this art, or isn’t this art, or 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’re not validated and if you’re 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? It’s not your mother and father saying, or your teachers saying, “Was ist das?” when they see you having...

SB: That was [Josef] Albers, right? “Was ist das?”

SH: When I made this [holds at stick wrapped with fabric and thread], I didn’t make it with any intention that it’s supposed to be craft or art or design or decoration. Or what is it? It just is. Take it or leave it.

SB: [Laughs] I love that. I feel like we need more of that in our lives, don’t we?

SH: Yeah.

SB: This just is. Take it or leave it. It’s none of those things.

SH: Then, if you want to live with things and you sort of park them around in your vicinity, or if you just think you’re investing in something, or aligning yourself with what seems to be valuable in certain cultures, and then trying to figure out what those values are in different cultures, different countries, different ages… Choose a common material like garden plants, nature, animals, fur, hair, thread, yarn. Some of it you eat—food. What’s your eating habit? It’ll culturally define you. And maybe you’re alienated from your culture. I have grandchildren who are over in Asia. I’m sure they’re going to come back and change their whole eating culture, even though they’re brought up in France, which is very proud of its eating culture, its culinary art.

What are you going to have for lunch today?

SB: [Laughs] I’m not sure. I was thinking maybe the place [Le Procope] around the corner.

SH: Oh no.

SB: No?

SH: She’s making an omelet for you upstairs.

SB: Oh, excellent. [Laughs]

I wanted to bring up George Kubler. He wrote the book The Shape of Time, and he was your teacher at Yale and had a real profound impact on you.

SH: You’re one of the few people I know who’ve read that book.

SB: Oh, I love that book. All the listeners should read George Kubler’s The Shape of Time.

SH: His daughter [Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh] will be happy to hear that.

SB: [Laughs] I’m trying to remember when it came on my radar. I think it was… I interviewed the artist and photographer Trevor Paglen for the podcast, and he mentioned it. It’s one of the most important books to him and his work.

SH: Did he meet Kubler himself?

SB: No. So tell me about Kubler and what you gained from your time with him in that class. I know that sort of led you on your journey toward South America, right, your thesis? [Editor’s note: Hick’s undergraduate thesis at Yale was on pre-Incan weaving techniques.]

SH: Maybe I should give it a context. In many art schools, you study art history, not just the making of things. We had the benefit, at the school where I was, of many good art historians. Every year, we took an art history course along with everything else. I did art history courses, of all over the world and all different contexts. One of them I took was George Kubler’s art history course. His slides were so intriguing because of architecture. I mentioned Machu Picchu, of course, and all the rest, but also mummy bundles. Not only how mummy bundles looked like when they were wrapped, but what they looked like when they were unwrapped. That’s fascinating: What do people take with them to the next existence or nonexistence?

I got intrigued by every one of these art history courses, whether they be Asian, African, pre-Columbian—you have to write papers and you have to give term papers. When Kubler’s class came, I wrote a term paper about pre-Columbian art and about mummy bundles, and it took off in spite of me. I was just curious, but one of my teachers said, “What are you going to do when you graduate from college, from school?” I’m not mentioning the school purposely, because I don’t want to intimidate anybody.

SB: [Laughs]

SH: Because I didn’t realize I was in such a good school. To me, it just—

SB: I might have already dropped it. I’m sorry if I did. [Laughs]

SH: After studying, I didn’t know what I was studying for or where I was going or what I wanted to do. I was just doing what I was told to do—that was to go to college—which was entertaining, to an extent, and challenging. I have three grandchildren who’ve done that also, or are doing that right now, and I see what they’re going through in terms of introducing confusion into their lives of multiple choices, and of having to validate and choose their futures and their existences through how they’re reckoning and selecting their course structures. It’s all so haphazard.

I don’t know if you and your friends know exactly their track or if they just do what they’re told to do, or if they wander into the wrong class and think it’s interesting, so you sit down and listen. That’s what I did one day at the school where I was. I wandered in and I heard a man talking about architecture, but I couldn’t figure it out because it was trapezoidal constructions. I was trying to figure out: Was architecture? Or was it sculpture? What was it?

But anyway, wandering into Kubler’s class, there I was, faced with mummy bundles. I wrote a term paper about this and one of the teachers said, “What will you do when you’re finished, when you graduate?” “I don’t know.” “Well, go down to my office and sign the papers I left for you, because I’ve suggested or nominated you for a grant to go to Chile and to continue your studies.” That’s what I did.

SB: Yeah, the Fulbright down to Chile.

SH: That’s a long way of answering that I had a Fulbright to Chile, but I didn’t know where Chile was. So I went to the library and looked at it, and it was kind of interesting, because it’s at the bottom of our hemisphere—of what was then my hemisphere. I thought, I’m not going to go to Chile twice. If I’m only going once, I might as well see everything between here and Chile. I did as much of it by land as I could, first to Venezuela by plane—cargo plane—and the rest as much by land as I could until I got to where I reported in Santiago and stayed and worked, and also gave lectures and taught classes in English and Español to architecture students at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. I was just repeating what I’d learned from my teachers and wrapping it up into a kind of Spanish format.

I’ve been doing that ever since. I’m very close to Hispanic culture. I feel, in a way, the expressiveness of Hispanic culture appeals to me more than German and more even than French. Not to mention English—because that’s my native language. But nobody in Paris knows where Nebraska is.

SB: Let alone Hastings, Nebraska. [Laughter] Well, I think it’s incredible hearing this story, how the chance of having a class with Kubler or a teacher like that can change one’s life.

SH: It’s the same. Everybody’s in the same situation… if they stay awake.

SB: You once said of your time at this school that we won’t mention, “Architecture enchanted me more than weaving. Weaving was something you could do on the side.” But—

SH: Where did I say this?

SB: It was in an interview that I pulled.

SH: Do you remember what it was?

SB: It’s not in my notes right here. [Editor’s note: The quote comes from the 2004 oral-history interviews by the Paris-based antique textile specialist and writer Monique Lévi-Strauss for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.]

SH: I’m trying to think of why I would say something like that.

SB: I was curious because architecture does seem to play this... It’s a very core part of your work in a lot of ways—your work with architects, the relationship I think you were even saying earlier to these models that you had seen: Were they architecture, were they sculpture? How do you think about architecture in relation to your work?

SH: Look where we’re sitting. This is one of the oldest courtyards in Paris. It’s still intact. It’s the birthplace of the French Revolution. It’s where people stood out at the gate and handed out little notices to those who were going to the open market, inciting people to revolt. They guillotined people here in the courtyard, multiple. They practiced on mouton. [Editor’s note: The Cour de Rohan and adjacent Cour du Commerce-Saint-André were the secret testing grounds for the guillotine in 1792. Tobias Schmidt, a German engineer working with Dr. Antoine Louis near Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s home, built and tested the early prototype on sheep before the device was used during the French Revolution.]

SB: Wow.

SH: I forgot. What was that answer to? What question? [Laughs]

SB: Well, I think it’s exactly the answer I was… maybe not expecting, but looking for in a way, which is how environments shape us and how you’ve been shaped by this one. Your little studio, I was thinking how profound this small compact space has created so much light, so much color, so much work. You were talking about your [338-foot-long “Four Seasons of Mount Fuji” (1993–95)] Fuji City mural earlier and how you made that in that small studio. That something so compressed and so intense and small can create something so large.

SH: Right around the corner is where we made the Ford Foundation walls, murals, auditorium, and boardroom.

SB: Which you had to re-create, correct?

SH: When the fire department sprayed them and poisoned them and made the threads pop and rot. Careful of the fire department. They protect you sometimes, and they also can cause problems. [Laughter]

SB: That’s an interesting instance of work to bring up from a time perspective, because I’m curious what it was like for you to return to that work in that way, and remake something that you had done decades earlier.

SH: Darren Walker, who was then directing the Ford Foundation, came and talked to me about this and said, “Everybody loves the walls so much, the way they were and where they sat and spent all their time in conferences and meetings. And now that they’ve been destroyed, what do we do? There’s nothing else we can put on those walls that people will accept.” In order to do them again, we can’t ask people in developing countries to replicate them, because the Ford Foundation doesn’t do things like that, to try and find cheap labor. All the fashion industry depends on cheap labor, right? All of the manufacturing in companies that do upholstery and rugs and cushions and—

SB: All about scale and cheap labor.

SH: It’s a lot to do with how to farm it out, subcontract and farm it out into cheap labor industries. He said, “The Ford Foundation can’t do that. So we want to go back to you and see if you would do it again as an artist, making something for us as an architecture commission.” I said, “You’re putting it to me in such a way that I don’t have any choice, so we’ll have to do it over again.” We did. It’s there now.

SB: Was that emotional for you to return to the work?

SH: I had to do it, and find a way also, because I didn’t want to make money doing something like this. Didn’t seem, to me, morally sound. It just seemed like an inevitability, if something happens like that.

We had to do two, three, four projects all simultaneously, sometimes indoors in a small space, and sometimes outdoors here in the good weather, to keep things going and to keep people who were working, that they could depend on—continuity. I have some people working for twenty, thirty years with me. They came as apprentices when they were in schools and never left.

SB: Wow. So they arrived in the nineties, and they’re still here?

SH: Eighties.

SB: Eighties!

SH: Seventies.

SB: Oh wow, so forty and fifty years even?

SH: Not legally.

SB: [Laughs]

SH: Because we have very organized labor laws in France.

SB: Right.

SH: It’s not like in some of the developing countries. But some people come and they just want to hang out with us and pretend they’re working.

SB: I would do that. [Laughter]

SH: Look, here’s one. [Points to her friend the curator, lecturer, and writer Cara McCarty, the former director of curatorial at the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, who’s sitting to the side of the recording] She pretends she’s working here.

SB: Since we’re talking about here and Paris, I also wanted to bring up—and sorry if I mispronounce this—Raoul d’Harcourt [the French anthropologist and ethnomusicologist].

SH: Raoul d’Harcourt, oui.

SB: Who wrote this important book [Les Textiles anciens du Pérou et leurs techniques, published in 1934 and and translated into English in 1962] on Peruvian textiles that you use—

SH: Pre-Columbian.

SB: Pre-Columbian textiles. Could you share a bit about him and how he comes into the picture in your life?

SH: You want me to talk about 1957?

SB: Sure.

SH: And you want me to bring it up to date?

SB: If that makes sense for you.

SH: I don’t think I can do it in a minute.

SB: [Laughs] Three minutes?

SH: I don’t think so. You’ve read his book?

SB: I actually have not read the book.

SH: We have to be careful that we’re not just name-dropping.

SB: Right.

SH: People like Raoul d’Harcourt, [Monique] Lévi-Strauss, George Kubler, people like this. I’m going to try and reach into the subject of where you’re going and see if I can find a way to make these bridges. What’s the next question?

SB: It was really more about your journey to Paris and what drew you into Paris.

SH: None of these things.

SB: So what was it?

SH: It was a man who... Nothing drew me into Paris. I think I was naĩve. I didn’t think much about Paris at all, but someone [Henri Peyre, the linguist, literary scholar, and Yale professor] told me—I won’t give the context, but someone told me, he was French, might have been the literature critic for The New York Times—he said, “I’ve heard about what you’ve done in Latin America and what you’re doing.” He invited me for lunch, and he said, “You’ll never be a cultivated woman until you know la France.” I’ve repeated this a few times because the French are that way. There’s your photographer right there [looks at Agathe Karsenthi], French.

SB: [Laughs]

SH: “You’ll never be a cultivated woman until you know la France.” You tell that to a young person, man or woman. But he was talking to a young woman, and he said, “I’m prepared to give you a grant to go to France, but please do not become a baby factory and disappear, because I’ll have a hard time giving it to women. This is the first time we’re giving this grant to a woman.” I didn’t answer him what I thought, and I didn’t know French, but I did know the word merde [“shit”]. That’s what I thought. [Laughter]

SB: I know that word well because my dad is fluent in French and he used to use it a lot when we were misbehaving. [Laughs]

SH: Anyway, he gave me this opportunity to get to know la France. I came, and I tried.

SB: And it checked out.

SH: And I hated it. [Laughter]

SB: So what kept you?

SH: I didn’t stay. I stayed for a few months, and I met a whole bunch of Latin Americans who were living here and who were functioning and working. Because I spoke Spanish already from having been in Chile and Mexico. I saw France through the perspective and the eyes of these floating, imported entities here in France. We all laughed a lot about the French, in our own way, because we’d eat at long tables. Along Rue de Seine, there were these restaurants that just had tables where everybody could sit down and eat together, ten people at a table, and joke and laugh about our different experiences here in France. That gives you an impression of what my introduction to France was.

But I did go and visit and ring the doorbell of Raoul d’Harcourt because I’d found out where he lived, and his daughter opened the door. He was in a wheelchair, and I’d brought him a box of chocolates, and she grabbed them and she said, “He’s not allowed to eat chocolate!” You see how futile it is? [Laughter] When you come? Today is May Day and you came bringing beautiful little bouquets of lily-of-the-valley, which I appreciate. I like them, and I’ll put them on my desk. All these are symbols.

France, it seemed to me—I felt locked out, but I think, coming from Nebraska and then going to a school that was mostly boys, too, later, that was normal to feel locked out.

SB: To be an outsider.

SH: And figure out which door, how can you go in? In what way? And how can you go in? And see what’s behind the door? So that’s what I’m trying to do now.

SB: Sixty-plus years later. How would you define your Paris time, if you could?

SH: I can’t, because I’m living it.

SB: It’s this courtyard.

SH: I’m living it. Every week, I walk into a different neighborhood and see different... I don’t get lost, but I just wander. And it’s true, there’s no end to it here. You don’t see it in a day. You don’t see it in a week. You don’t see it in a month. You don’t see it in a year. And maybe you don’t see it in a lifetime. So you just keep wandering around and looking and seeing and discovering here. There are so many things coming here. Not only what is here, but things that drop in here, because everyone wants to come make an exhibition in Paris or a concert or a ballet or a lecture.

SB: Or a podcast. [Laughs]

SH: Or a podcast. Or a meeting. You can just sit still and watch things pour in here. I still haven’t figured out what your podcast group finds interesting in Paris, because it looks like they don’t even know Paris. They’re just here in the same way: with a sense of inquiry.

SB: An openness.

SH: Uh-huh. An openness.

SB: What is this? Where am I?

SH: Yeah. What are we doing?

SB: [Laughs]

SH: We’re making an omelet for you upstairs.

SB: I love that.

SH: And we’re going to bring it down. We’re going to plunk it on the table there.

SB: In the time we have, I also want to ask you about India and Morocco, these two places that you spent time.

SH: These are the ones that fascinate you?

SB: Yeah.

SH: You know them?

SB: I’ve been to Morocco. I have admittedly not been to India. Major omission in my life story, but I’m still relatively young. I need to go.

SH: What’s high on your list?

SB: The Jantar Mantar in India. I want to go to these ancient observatories and understand what compelled people to make them in the [early eighteenth] century. I probably won’t understand when I go, but at least I’ll experience them and see.

SH: You want to go to Iran?

SB: I’d be fascinated to.

SH: Do you have children?

SB: Not yet.

SH: Because you’ll take ’em. They’ll be your excuse to get to know places.

SB: [Laughs]

SH: I took my children all over the place. If someone invited me to come and work or do something or make something, I’d figure out how to take my children, too. Now, their children, I’m doing the same thing.

SB: Could you share any memories from India or from Morocco?

SH: I went to a Mexican exhibition last week with a Moroccan who’s an art organizer, writer, critic. I still have contact with Moroccans, and we talked a lot about Morocco. I think I’ll do something more in Morocco. I think I’ll go back and make some more prayer rugs in Morocco... In the souks and in the markets in Morocco, the architecture’s very beautiful.

SB: The arches.

SH: Arches like the one we have here in the courtyard, this arch, which lends itself and it becomes an extension or a part of the architecture. When you make an arched shape inside a rectangular shape, you can leave it on the floor or hang it on the wall and imagine that you can trip if you walk through that arch. So Morocco is like a gateway for me, in a way, because it facilitated when I saw those arches in the architecture—beautiful. That’s one memory I have of Morocco.

They asked me to make models of rugs and things with the Ministry of Community Development, which enabled me to go into villages where people were working in workshops and work side by side with them and invent things,now I can jump to India. That’s what happened, too. They asked me to go into an ancient hand-weaving factory in Kerala, Malabar Coast, and see what they were making, what they were doing, and ad lib in the context of that immense workshop.

They’d pick me up in a rickshaw in the morning, instead of a taxi or a chauffeur-driven car or a bus. In a rickshaw, pedaling to work, to this workshop, I looked at all the people walking, because we were within a whole mass of people walking to work, and I’d see the way they were doing their hair and what kind of sari they were wearing and what kind of cloth they were enveloping themselves with and how it moved. Because, if you’re in a rickshaw, you’re at a certain pace, you’re not just rushing through a street, you’re not on a motorbike. You delve into a culture through being immersed in it, and then walk into an ancient, huge, common workshop where hundreds of people are sitting behind looms and then figure out from bundles of threads what you can do on the loom and off the loom, with both men and women.

Since this is for fun, I’ll tell you a story: At lunchtime, I would walk around. I would also wear a piece of cloth wrapped around myself, so I was inconspicuous. I saw people under their looms: men, with just a cloth around their waists, reading books, lying on the sand, lying on the sand inside the workshops, reading books during their lunch. That’s more than I see here in Paris in the cafés. Interesting, huh? I even noticed one of them reading Victor Hugo in Malayalam. Can you imagine?

SB: [Laughs]

SH: That really stayed with me as a memory. Another one? Yes. This is India, too, because I went quite a few times. I was hired continually to do the design of an export collection of handwoven and hand-knotted and hand-braided and handmade textiles. I noticed on one of my flights that they put placemats for lunch on Air India. It was my placemat. It was my design, the placemat. It had entered into Indian culture. That made me so happy. It wasn’t just export for design companies in Copenhagen and Stockholm and Dusseldorf. I was sitting on Air India, and I was eating on my placemat, and I went to the bathroom and walked down the aisle and I realized I was walking on my rug. Isn’t that fun?

SB: [Laughs]

SH: Then, because I did all of this anonymously, that’s the whole purpose.

SB: Yeah.

SH: You don’t go around trying to sign everything. Some people do who have a superego. They want to sign everything, but I—

SB: You’ve never signed a work.

SH: I don’t sign. It’s not the idea. It’s not behind it.

Then I checked into the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay before I was supposed to report to duty in Côte Malabar. I went in my room, and I saw the bed cover, and it was mine [laughter], but it was moving. It was moving.

SB: Hmm.

SH: The man who brought my luggage put it on the floor and left, but the bed cover was moving and there were people sleeping under the bed. They were people who had been cleaning the room, but were taking a nap or making love. [Laughter]

SB: Did you find out?

SH: They crawled out, and they bowed, and they left me the room.

SB: [Laughs] That’s quite a memory.

SH: That’s India.

SB: There are so many places we could go. I want to talk about your Japan chapter. In 1987, you had a serious accident, if I understand correctly, an injury, and this led to your Japan adventure in a certain sense. I don’t know the full backstory to it, but I know you were in Japan from 1989 to 1997, roughly. Could you just talk about that?

SH: No, I wasn’t. I was living in Paris.

SB: In Paris, but traveling to Japan, yes?

SH: I had visited my son, who was in school, in university, in New England, and we were walking in New York City. This was when I was visiting New York City, to see him. I stepped off a curb. I was talking to him, but we stepped off the curb, and I stepped into the gutter—

SB: Oof.

SH: Because the cover of the drain had slipped or sunk. So I fell in the gutter of New York. [Laughs] I was taken to an emergency hospital in New York, but your question was what?

SB: Basically, how did that then lead to Japan?

SH: I checked in at an emergency hospital in New York, N.Y.U., and a man, the doctor who was going home with his overcoat, heard me speaking Spanish to an Ecuadorian woman who was helping me, and he took off his coat and stayed and helped me. It was to decide whether or not they’re going to sever my leg. I mean—

SB: Amputate?

SH: Amputate.

SB: Oh, wow.

SH: They kept me under ice, ice packs and all this kind of stuff for the weekend and what to do and X-rays. You like stories. [Laughter] So I’m waiting to get X-rayed and the woman before me—this is a Saturday night—they’re X-raying has swallowed a spoon. How can you swallow a spoon in a restaurant? She was drunk.

SB: Wow. You’ve got to be pretty drunk to swallow a spoon. [Laughter]

SH: They had found a spoon in her stomach in the X-ray. What are they going to do? They operated, how else are they going to get the spoon out? I thought that you keep your sense of humor, even if you’re going in there to get an X-ray to see if they have to amputate your leg.

Anyway, they iced me and this Ecuadorian doctor followed and helped me and they put metal, two metal and many screws and many crossbars... It was like the Eiffel Tower inside my right leg. For a long time. Couldn’t walk for a long time. But I slowly started walking. Slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly.

My brother said—he came to visit me in the hospital to cheer me up. Because he was a psychoanalyst. He thought he’d cheer me up. What do you tell somebody in the hospital with something like this? Have you ever gone to the hospital to see a friend who was checking out? My brother says, “You’ve had such a great time in your life. You’ve done so many things. Think about it. Think about all your people you know and the friends and they’re like, ‘Who’s done all these things like you have?’” I said, “Oh yeah, but I missed a really important one.” “What’d you miss?” I said, “I never went to Japan and I wanted to go to Japan. I wanted to see…” “Okay, get well, and we’ll go.” [Laughs]

SB: So you fixed your leg and got to Japan?

SH: And kept working for ten years. Gained ten years of work on twenty projects in Japan. It was amazing. I would have missed it all.

SB: Yeah. That incredible “Fuji” wall.

SH: I would have missed a whole chapter. Now my grandchildren are there. They’ll be back on Sunday.

SB: They’re in Japan?

SH: Mm-hmm.

SB: On vacation or…?

SH: No.

SB: They live in Japan?

SH: They’re learning about it.

SB: Oh. So special.

SH: They’re designers, and their work will be shown in the Venice Biennale next week when they come back. It’s wearable art. I’ll show you photographs.

SB: Great. I love that we haven’t identified these distinctions of “art” or “craft” or just “it.” I want to ask you about your meeting in the midcentury with Florence Knoll, which also led to this commercial project [the Altiplano textile].

SH: You are here because of her.

SB: Yeah, actually, in a way, I am here because of Florence Knoll, and because of Jason Purdy [the communications manager of Maharam and Knoll Textiles] in New York.

SH: Because of Knoll Associates, which has joined with a group, Maharam, which has joined also with other groups, too [to form the brand collective MillerKnoll]. But they’re the ones that gave you the key to get in my door.

SB: Thank you, Knoll Associates [laughs]—Knoll Inc.—and Maharam.

SH: She’s your associate? [Points to Agathe Karsenthi, the photographer for this “site-specific” recording]

SB: She’s a new friend and photographer taking pictures and—

SH: So we’ll see you again because you live here in Paris.

SB: Johnny [Simon] came in from New York to make sure we could record this because…

SH: [Speaking to Karsenthi] You’ll show us your photographs, right?

SB: Yeah. The listeners will be able to find some of the photos.

SH: And we’ll listen to his—recording. Then we’ll figure out what happens next.

SB: Yeah, exactly. [Laughs]

How do you think about the Florence Knoll connection now, today?

SH: Like most things in life, it’s just a series of accidents.

SB: Following the thread.

SH: Who are you going to meet this afternoon, by chance? Someone’s going to open the door for you to go someplace and see something or do something, and what are the consequences?

SB: I think you have to be open.

SH: Do you know what selvages are?

SB: Yes. The remains of the… no?

SH: Selvages.

SB: Selvages.

SH: Tell me what a selvage is.

SB: I always understood selvage to be sort of like the parts that are the cutoffs, but maybe I’m not understanding it correctly. [Laughs] Teach me.

SH: No, no. Take a look at what selvage is, and it’s pretty funny.

SB: S-E-L-V-A-G-E? Okay. Now I have to Google this.

SH: What do you come up with for “selvage?”

SB: “The self-finished, tightly woven edge of both sides of a fabric roll, designed to prevent fraying and unraveling.”

SH: Pretty good, huh? That’s what I’m trying to do. They say you only live once. Who knows? But that’s what I’m trying to do.

SB: Well, there was one quote I wanted to pull up at the end of our conversation from a short film your son [Cristobal Zañartu] made. You said, “What I’m trying—”

SH: Is it called Opening the Archives?

SB: I believe it was that film, yes, Opening the Archives.

SH: Is it where he’s shooting over my shoulder as I’m going through photography and prints?

SB: Correct. Old black-and-white images.

SH: Right.

SB: Yes.

SH: Opening the Archives. [Editor’s note: The quote is actually from another short film by her son, Hanging by a Thread.]

SB: You said, “What I’m trying to do, or have been trying to do for fifty years is find a universal communication channel, system, way that I cross cultural, racial, geographical boundaries, all the different divisions that cause us so much grief. And I think I found it and that is thread.”

SH: I said thread was the word?

SB: You said thread, but maybe it’s selvage. [Laughter] Would you update it now to selvage?

SH: Once you’ve got the thread in your hands, how do you finish it? Where does it begin and end? Here. You see how they tied it off to this to keep it together there? But how does this begin and end? Is there any selvage? This is what you just told me.

SB: Wow.

SH: Where’s the selvage?

SB: Beats me. [Laughs]

SH: Here, any selvage? [Laughter] But it’s intact. It’s integral. If it’s integral, what most people want to know, which is an irrelevant question, is what’s inside? Because if it’s wrapped, why’d they wrap it? What’s inside? À quoi ça sert? What’s it for?

SB: What’s inside? What’s it for?

SH: What are you going to do with this? Just stand it up right there. [Points to a flower pot next to a table and Spencer’s microphone stand] Stand this one right up there. Right next to the plant. Yeah. Got it? Try this one. [Hands Spencer another fabric- and thread-wrapped stick]

SB: Also here?

SH: Yeah. Okay. Wow!

SB: I’ve just leaned two of these objects—sticks. We’ll take a picture of them. I think we should have our omelet maybe?

SH: Yeah. I’m hungry.

SB: I think it’s omelet time. Sheila, thank you for being in conversation with me and letting us through the door.

SH: There’s no door here.

SB: The arch—the portal.

SH: That’s good.

SB: The portal.

SH: That’s good. Maybe that’s the title. I think you found a title because… Be brave enough to walk through the portal when you discover one. Not just feel like, I don’t know where I am, where I’m going, what’ll happen, and should I dare?

What’s your next portal?

SB: I hope it’s as magical as this one. Hard to beat. [Laughs]

SH: Are you going to do another in Paris?

SB: There’s an upcoming portal to Venice, where I’ll interview Dries Van Noten. That will be a portal, too.

SH: You’ll be in the chaos of Venice, where there are portals everywhere.

SB: [Laughs] I like to think this portal—

SH: How about Paris? More Paris portals.

SB: I’m going to see the “Calder: Rêver en équilibre” exhibition [at the Fondation Louis Vuitton] tomorrow. That’ll be a portal of sorts.

SH: I worked with him.

SB: You were in a Musée des Arts Décoratifs exhibition with him.

SH: Yeah, but I worked… It was a project [“The Bicentennial Banners”] with him when they did the anniversary of Philadelphia. When they hung the banners in the big building in Philadelphia.

SB: Oh, wow.

SH: He made all the banners, the designs. He brought them to me, and I made the banners. I think they still have them hanging in Philadelphia. A lot of banners. A lot of his sort of... But who else in Paris? Because there are a lot of interesting people here.

SB: Yes.

SH: Come back to Paris.

SB: Well, I’ll be back in Paris at the end of May.

SH: Let me try and see if I can think of some people you might like to meet.

SB: Another portal. I would love that.

SH: What’s your main interest? Music or architecture or art?

SB: Time.

SH: Okay. Would you like to meet a woman who’s a hundred years old?

SB: Yes.

SH: Who’s very clear, has a very clear brain. Do you know who Lévi-Strauss is?

SB: Yes. She’s who interviewed you for the Smithsonian, correct?

SH: So it’s Mrs. [Monique] Lévi-Strauss. Madame Lévi-Strauss. We’re going to have dinner tomorrow.

SB: I read that [oral-history] interview in advance of our conversation today—or series of interviews, I should say—and it’s incredible.

SH: Did you see the little red book Musée du quai Branly published?

SB: No.

SH: You know where to find that red book? I think that’s important. They just republished. I’ll give you a copy. It was my first book, and it was her first book. I’ll give it to you. It’s better if you look at it.

SB: You’ve been friends with her for a very long time now.

SH: She’s the only one who knew where Nebraska was.

SB: [Laughs] Have you taken her to Hastings, Nebraska?

SH: No, she knew it because she’d been there twice. Once to see her mother, who was diagnosed with a tumor, who was a nurse and working in Nebraska—after having spent the whole Second World War hidden in Germany. As a child, she spent the whole Second World War in Germany. [A member of Sheila’s studio hands her the Lévi-Strauss book] Thank you great. Here she is. [Flips through book] Here, this you’ll like, because it has India, it has Morocco. There’s Monique.

SB: Oh yeah.

SH: And the director of the Quai Branly. That’s the Museum of Natural History here in Paris. He decided to republish this book. There’s his foreword note. I think that last page. He’s the director of the Quai Branly.

SB: I would love to meet her and thank you for that portal.

SH: Have you interviewed anybody a hundred years old?

SB: The oldest guest on the podcast has been the sculptor Thaddeus Mosley, from Pittsburgh. He was 97 years old when I interviewed him—and very sharp.

SH: Clear?

SB: He just passed away a few months ago, and I cherish that conversation. Before we did the interview, I’ll never forget what he told me. He apologized for what he called his “leather tongue,” and he had the most beautiful voice. I should listen to that episode again.

SH: I’ll look and see. I’ll try and find your podcast, huh?

SB: Yeah. Time Sensitive.

SH: I’ll find it.

SB: Thank you, Sheila. Thank you.

This interview was recorded in one of the courtyards of Cour de Rohan, in Paris, France, on May 1, 2026. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Olivia Aylmer, Ramon Broza, Mimi Hannon, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak based on a photograph by Claus Troelsgaard.