Alan Shields
Sewed, dyed, beaded and stitched his canvases, and hung them away from the wall.
Alan Shields was born in Kansas in 1944, studied engineering before art, and spent his working life on Shelter Island off the end of Long Island. In the late 1960s he took painting off its stretcher entirely: canvas cut into strips, sewn together with a sewing machine, dyed, stained, threaded with beads and stitching, and hung freely in space so that both sides are visible and the work moves. It sat awkwardly between painting, sculpture and craft at a moment when those categories were policed, which is part of why the reassessment took so long. He died in 2005.
A market that has strengthened notably as the boundary between fine art and textile has been reconsidered. The hanging sewn canvases are the signature works and are also serious conservation objects: unstretched dyed fabric, thread, beads and paper, sensitive to light, prone to distortion, and requiring purpose-built mounting — how a work has been stored and hung matters a great deal. Shields was also an inventive printmaker, working with Paula Cooper and with paper mills on handmade-paper editions, and those are the accessible part of the output.
If you own a work by Alan Shields
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.