Sheila Hicks
Sheila Hicks is an innovative artist who has merged craft, fine art, and design in her visceral work with fibers since the 1960s. Although she studied under Josef Albers and George Kubler at Yale in the 1950s Hicks discovered Latin American textiles by way of Anni Albers, a weaver from the Bauhaus school. She trekked to Chile on a Fulbright scholarship in 1957, where she became enamored with the expansive potential textiles created internationally, from India to South America, Mexico to Morocco. By stitching, weaving, wrapping, braiding, and twining, Hicks utilizes these “supple materials” to draw in three-dimensions. Her series of “minimes,” small framed weavings made with a portable loom that integrate found natural elements, and hanging columns of fibers, often worked into the architecture of her space, both heighten the viewer’s attention to detail—be it spatial element or the ways in which unlike items might be fused together. She created a series of wall works in which paintings are mummified in yarn, wrapped and obscured, and another where wild strands of fiber descend gracefully onto a pedestal, both of which consider the connection these fibers have to art history. Hicks’s colorful works dramatically depict weight and volume, drawing attention …
Sheila Hicks is an innovative artist who has merged craft, fine art, and design in her visceral work with fibers since the 1960s. Although she studied under Josef Albers and George Kubler at Yale in the 1950s Hicks discovered Latin American textiles by way of Anni Albers, a weaver from the Bauhaus school. She trekked to Chile on a Fulbright scholarship in 1957, where she became enamored with the expansive potential textiles created internationally, from India to South America, Mexico to Morocco. By stitching, weaving, wrapping, braiding, and twining, Hicks utilizes these “supple materials” to draw in three-dimensions. Her series of “minimes,” small framed weavings made with a portable loom that integrate found natural elements, and hanging columns of fibers, often worked into the architecture of her space, both heighten the viewer’s attention to detail—be it spatial element or the ways in which unlike items might be fused together. She created a series of wall works in which paintings are mummified in yarn, wrapped and obscured, and another where wild strands of fiber descend gracefully onto a pedestal, both of which consider the connection these fibers have to art history. Hicks’s colorful works dramatically depict weight and volume, drawing attention to the versatility of textiles and their bodily connection independent of their function.
Hicks has completed commissions for public spaces including the Ford Foundation in Manhattan (1967) and Air France 747s (1977), among others. She has exhibited at institutions including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, The Drawing Center, New York, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others. Hicks was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and the 2012 São Paulo Biennial. She was awarded the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal in 2010 and a Gold Medal from the American Crafts Council in 1997, to name a few.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
The Cleveland Museum, Ohio
The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
The Smart Museum, Chicago, Illinois
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania
The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota
The Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri
Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile
The Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague, Czech Republic
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
The Museums of Modern Art, Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Sikkema Jenkins Co, New York, New York
galerie frank elbaz, Paris, France
