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Reuter--page 2
Israeli soldiers (1981), etc. Often Hicks darned, washed and stacked them in the same manner that Hamilton continues to employ. Like Hamilton today, she bought the from rag pickers when necessary and used them to create ordered, room-size environments. 
Hamilton graduated with a B.F.A. in Textile Design from the University of Kansas in 1979. She then studied at Banff in the internationally-active fiber department. She became what was pigeonholed at the time "a fiber artist." It was during the middle years of the eighties, while working on an M.F.A. in sculpture at Yale, that she began to chart her own course by incorporating the attitudes of Beuys with the materiality (and the actual materials even) of Hicks. The continuity of Hamilton's art with the past, and thus even the continuity of installation as an art form practiced in the latter decades of the twentieth century, has been obscured by the same, silly, critical polemic that dismissed in the first place Hick's twenty-five years of creating installations. Critics, by subscribing to the arbitrary division of arts and crafts, fail to see Hamilton's roots in the contemporary fiber movement.