Alan Shields valuation
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.
What a work by Alan Shields is worth
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Bio
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, making editions on handmade paper, and those are the accessible part of the output.
Kansas State, Paula Cooper and Shelter Island
Shields grew up on a farm at Herington in Kansas, watching his mother and sisters quilt and embroider, and studied civil engineering and studio art at Kansas State University from 1963 to 1966, with a close interest in Buckminster Fuller. He moved to New York in 1968 and showed with Paula Cooper from 1969 to 1991, beginning the two-sided, three-dimensional paintings in 1970.
He bought a house on Shelter Island in 1971 and lived there from 1972, and in the 1980s also worked as a ferryboat captain and commercial fisherman. J + K, of 1972, made from industrial webbing, canvas and beaded fishing line, is in the Whitney Museum, and in 1973 he shared an exhibition with Richard Artschwager at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
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