Sheila Hicks: The Travelling Thread
Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Paris
30 September 2025 – 8 March 2026
Sheila Hicks, Orange Pleasure Chest, 2024 © Sheila Hicks; photo: Michael Brzezinski
Celebrating sixty years of friendship, creative and intellectual exchange, the exhibition traces the shared passion of two women – Sheila Hicks and Monique Lévi-Strauss – for textiles from around the world, enriched by their travels and discoveries. The collaboration between Hicks, a pioneering American textile artist renowned for her innovative works and bold explorations of materials and colours, and Levi-Strauss, a researcher specialising in the history of non-Western textile arts, highlights the diversity of textile practices and their contemporary reinterpretations.
The exhibition brings together nearly twenty textile pieces from the museum’s collections, as well as some thirty creations by Sheila Hicks. Inspired by ancient Andean weavings, her work offers a reinterpretation of the gestures that transform textile materials: knotting, weaving, braiding, twisting, wrapping, and tying. Through these encounters, a history of textiles emerges, spanning borders, civilisations and beliefs.