British Vogue: Age of Reason

"The world hasn’t mellowed, so why would I?” New York-based multimedia artist Ida Applebroog tells Vogue. At 92 years old, the feminist pioneer, known for her paintings and sculptures that frequently comment on sexuality, power and domestic violence, is the subject of a major career retrospective at Hauser & Wirth Somerset this month. 
Born Ida Appelbaum to Orthodox Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx, she christened herself Ida Applebroog following a spell at a mental hospital for depression in the late 1960s and burst on to the New York art scene at the age of 45. Since then, she has been the recipient of multiple honours, including the MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” in 1998, and her intimate, at times confessional work resides in the collections of major museums including the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum. And still, she is creating: this latest exhibition will not only span more than five decades, but will include new unseen works made in 2021, too.
She is part of a coterie of female artists who have continued making vital, important work and exhibiting well into their eighties and beyond – a group that includes the 87-year-old conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady, who had her first retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum last year, the 91-year-old artist and activist Faith Ringgold and the 106-year-old painter Carmen Herrera, who celebrated her centenary in 2015 with new work at the Whitney Museum of Art in 2016. In an era when the young and new are celebrated in the art world, these women embody a different, rarer kind of success: that of the artist who has ignored the prevailing trends of the day and never wavered from her singular vision. 
Take American artist Sheila Hicks, who at the age of 87, will this April unveil a new site-specific commission at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire alongside a retrospective. 
She may be in her ninth decade, but Hicks keeps the same routine as when she was an art student in the 1950s. Using a pocket loom she carries around, she works every day making miniature weavings she calls “minimes” on a handheld frame that incorporates threads and found objects, eventually resulting in her monumental fabric-based sculptures that have inhabited the High Line in New York, the Palace of Versailles and the 2017 Venice Biennale. 
Like Hicks, Applebroog remains defiantly experimental with a rigorous work ethic. The latter may now get around on a scooter and have assistants to help place canvases but, she insists, “My age never factors into it, I merely adapted my approach. I just want to keep going and working as I’ve done before.”