Biography
Writing in 1973, Monique Lévi-Strauss described Sheila Hicks’s (b. 1934, Hastings, Nebraska) life as ‘a tissue of threads woven together on purpose or through chance, fertile encounters’. While decades have passed since Lévi-Strauss offered this overview, her words remain continually relevant. Since the 1960s, Hicks has established herself as one of the most distinctive and consequential artists of her generation. Her significance rests on a pioneering practice that transformed fibre into fine art, the extraordinary longevity of her career, and the sustained institutional recognition her work has attracted across seven decades. She has received numerous distinctions, including the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in France and the US Department of State Medal of Arts.
Working to manoeuvre colour, texture and form, the Paris-based artist has produced a rich and complex body of large-scale bas-reliefs, sculptures and installations that indulge in material tactility and the collective experience of space. Her work has extraordinary range and scale, but it is united throughout by qualities of tactility, sensuality and what Hicks calls hapticity: a felt connection and the communication thereof.
Hicks was born in Hastings, Nebraska, in 1934, but she was nomadic from an early age: growing up in the Midwest during the Depression, her father spent much of his time on the road. ‘I always say I grew up in a car’, she told Artforum in 2019. From 1954–59, Hicks studied painting with Josef Albers at Yale School of Art and was personally mentored by Anni Albers, placing her at the centre of the Bauhaus lineage as it took root in America. During this time, she also attended art historian George Kubler’s class on pre-Columbian art and archaeology. ‘I was interested in how the pre-Incas structured thought with threads, with lines’, she told Jennifer Higgie in 2015. ‘The richness of the pre-Incaic textile language is the most complex of any textile culture in history’.
It was while writing a paper on ancient Andean textiles for Kubler’s class that Hicks taught herself to weave on a backstrap loom of tree branches and assemble threads on a small frame made of painting stretchers. To this day, she uses painting stretchers to create intimate works, which she refers to as minimes. In 1957, Hicks was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, which enabled her to travel extensively around South America, methodically documenting and photographing. She lived and worked in Guerrero, Mexico, from 1959 until 1964, where ‘people made everything that they wore’, as she told the artist Anicka Yi of her time on the Pacific coast, ‘including their shoes’. Hicks’s work is a genuinely global synthesis: across five continents, she has absorbed, studied and entered into dialogue with weaving traditions, developing a practice grounded in exchange, material intelligence and cultural encounter.
Hicks is at her most recognisable when producing monumental hangings, tapestries, bas-reliefs and sculptures. The Questioning Column (2016), first installed at the entrance of the 2016 Sydney Biennale, rose to over seven metres; Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands, presented at the 2017 Venice Biennale, saw an avalanche of synthetic, brilliantly coloured bales piled up to the ceiling of the Arsenale. For the 2020 iteration of the Nuit Blanche festival in Paris, Hicks suspended a luminous constellation of comets from the colonnades connecting the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Palais de Tokyo, an architectural reminder of the fleeting nature of lived experience.
On a contrasting scale, Hicks’s intimate minimes allow a valuable glimpse into the artist’s habitual, incessant making process, as well as her enduring interest in construction and material relationships. Among her most sought-after recent bodies of work is the lianes series, of which Colours Nesting in White Linen is an example. These cascading, vine-like sculptures represent her practice at its most distilled, combining formal precision with a sensuous understanding of fibre, gravity and colour.
For Hicks, spectacle is never the sole ambition. Regardless of scale, hers is a project of tactility, sensuality and hapticity; of felt connection and the communication thereof. As Hicks notes: ‘Hands, eyes, brain — it’s the magic triangulation. It comes from passion, heart and intellect inseparably cemented to your times and to your emotional experiences.’
Hicks was first collected by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, as early as the late 1950s and has since exhibited in over 150 institutions worldwide. Her work has been the subject of major international exhibitions, including Lignes de vie at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2018; Sheila Hicks: Reencuentro at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, Santiago, in 2019; Thread, Trees, River at the MAK, Vienna, in 2020; and Off Grid at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2022. More recent institutional presentations include exhibitions at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Centre Pompidou Málaga in 2023, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2024.
In 2025, Hicks presented New Work: Sheila Hicks at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, her first solo exhibition at the museum, which remains on view until August 2026. The same year, her work was also the subject of The Travelling Thread at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, an exhibition conceived in dialogue with Monique Lévi-Strauss. In 2026, Hicks’s work is also presented in Material Matters: Sheila Hicks & Shi Hui at the West Bund Museum, Shanghai, and she is scheduled to present further major exhibitions at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo; the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille; and PAC Milano. Continuing to live and work in Paris, Hicks remains actively engaged in her practice.
There are over 20 monographs, exhibition catalogues and artist books dedicated to her work, and she is represented in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Tate, London; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Works
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Fiery Sunset, 2026 -
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Ensemble, 2025 -
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Talking Sticks, 2025 -
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Colours Nesting in White Linen, 2026 -
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Sacred Temple Lavender, 2024 -
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Together is Better, 2023 -
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We Are At The Gate, 2024 -
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Orange Pleasure Chest, 2024 -
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Dialogue in the Forest, 2025 -
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Badagara white, 1966 -
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Talking sticks, 2021-23 -
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Untitled, 2025 -
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Nowhere To Go, 2022 -
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La Sentinelle de safran, 2017 -
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Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands, 2016–17 -
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Mighty Mathilde and Her Consort, 2016 -
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The Column of Inquiry, 2016
Press
Exhibitions
Books
News
Pacita Abad, Emma Amos, Sheila Hicks
‘EIGHTY YEARS OF WOMEN ARTISTS TRANSFORMING ABSTRACTION’, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS (NWA), WASHINGTON DC: UNTIL 26 JULY
Sheila Hicks
in ‘IF YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW. LORO PIANA’S QUEST FOR EXCELLENCE’, MUSEUM OF ART PUNDONG, SHANGHI
Sheila Hicks & Lenore Tawney
in ‘Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction’, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Sheila Hicks
in ‘Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women’, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington
Pacita Abad, Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, Sheila Hicks & Lenore Tawney
in ‘Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
The Threads of Architecture with Sheila Hicks and Frida Escobedo
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Sheila Hicks
in ‘Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962’, Grey Art Museum, New York University
Sheila Hicks & Dorothea Tanning
in ‘HARD/SOFT Textiles and Ceramics in Contemporary Art’, MAK Vienna
Sheila Hicks & Lenore Tawney
in ‘Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, Sheila Hicks, Veronica Ryan and Lenore Tawney
in ‘Making Their Mark’, Shar Garg Foundation, New York
Sheila Hicks
in ‘To Weave the Sky: Textile Abstractions from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection’, El Espacio 23, Miami
Sheila Hicks: New Public Commission, King’s Cross
Woven Wonders is on view at Coal Drops Yard until 16 October
Sheila Hicks
in ‘Installative Textiles. From Medium to Place’, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville
Sheila Hicks & Lenore Tawney
in ‘Crafting America’, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville
Sheila Hicks Honoured with Arts and Letters Award
The artist has been recognised for exceptional accomplishment in art
