{"id":265130,"date":"2025-10-07T10:18:38","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T14:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/?post_type=id_news&p=265130"},"modified":"2025-10-07T10:18:40","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T14:18:40","slug":"sheila-hicks-textile-artist-creative-voices","status":"publish","type":"id_news","link":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/designwire\/sheila-hicks-textile-artist-creative-voices\/","title":{"rendered":"Thread Count: How Sheila Hicks Continues To Redefine Fiber Art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\"tall
Toward Unknown Horizons<\/em>, 2023, a column of pigmented acrylic fiber, centering the SFMOMA show. Photography by Don Ross.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n

October 7, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n

Words: <\/span>Peter\u00a0Webster<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Thread Count: How Sheila Hicks Continues To Redefine Fiber Art<\/h1>\n\n\n

In Norse mythology, the Norns\u2014three ancient sisters\u2014spin the thread of fate and weave it into a fabric, the world\u2019s unfolding story. At 91, there\u2019s something Nornlike about Sheila Hicks<\/a>, who has spent a lifetime turning fiber into an astonishing array of artworks, textiles, and compositions that resists categorization\u2014just as the world\u2019s plenitude constantly escapes neat classification. There\u2019s a poetic sense of return in one of Hicks\u2019s most recent endeavors: the reissue of Inca, a textile collection she created for Knoll in the mid-1960\u2019s, now reborn with a new name, Altiplano, and nine fresh colors\u2014neither of which was she, as a young designer working on her first commercial assignment, able to determine at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back then, the Nebraska-born Hicks was living in Mexico\u2014she would move permanently to France in 1964\u2014experimenting with ancient Andean weaving techniques. Her interest in the subject was nurtured at Yale University, where she studied painting with Josef Albers, who instilled in her the disciplines of color, structure, and material inquiry that still underpin her practice. But it was her art history professor, George Kubler, the eminent pre-Columbian scholar who validated her turn toward textiles, providing the intellectual frameworks to think about them seriously and encouraging her to pursue a Fulbright Fellowship in South America, where she encountered Peruvian weavers still employing the pre-Inca techniques she had studied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From those beginnings, Hicks has developed an oeuvre of fiber-based works of extraordinary scope, ranging from her intimate Minimes<\/em>\u2014small woven studies she has produced steadily since the \u201950\u2019s\u2014to monumental site-specific commissions for institutions such as the Ford Foundation in New York and Banque Rothschild in Paris. She has collaborated with architects, created radiant, disklike sculptures she calls Comets<\/em>, and fashioned elongated, stafflike B\u00e2tons<\/em>, each tightly wrapped in vivid threads. Her practice is both scholarly and nomadic, drawing on textile traditions observed around the globe while continually reinventing the medium in contemporary terms. Alongside her artworks, she has also produced distinguished commercial textile design\u2014not least the Knoll collection. We spoke to Hicks about that reissue, as well as her current and upcoming museum exhibitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"headshot
The American artist in the courtyard of her 17th-century studio and home in Paris, the city she moved to in 1964. Photography by Nick Ball\u00f3n.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sheila Hicks Draws On Textile Traditions Around The Globe\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Interior Design: The Altiplano collection for Knoll Textiles<\/a> derives from a pre-Columbian geometric pattern that\u2019s still made by Andean weavers today. When did you first en\u00adcounter it?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Sheila Hicks: The first time I saw it being produced was in South America in the late \u201950\u2019s. But the first time I laid eyes on the pattern was in a book in the Yale library\u2014The Textiles of Ancient Peru and Their Techniques<\/em>, by Raoul d\u2019Harcourt, published in 1934, the year I was born\u2014recommended by my art history professor, George Kubler. It has schematic drawings that show how to set up the warp to produce the pattern, which is not a complex structure\u2014in fact, it\u2019s so utterly simple and subtle, it\u2019s hardly believable. Before the Jacquard loom existed, Andeans were putting threads together to make some very complicated pliable fabrics. This one is the kingdom of simplicity\u2014I dare anyone to do better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ID: How did you adapt it for modern textile production?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

SH: It never occurred to me to reproduce the pattern commercially. I got samples while in Chile and had a suit made, which I wore in New York, knocking on doors to show my work\u2014small weavings I was making in Mexico, not meant for functional textiles. A curator at MoMA gave me the address of someone she said I should meet, and sent me off saying, \u201cGo dressed as you are.\u201d I did, and that\u2019s how I met Florence Knoll. When I took my work out of my backpack to show her, it was just like opening a sample book. From that basis we began making the first textile for production, which was a new experience for me\u2014I mean, I didn\u2019t know how to design for production, but they did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\"Sheila
Hicks and her granddaughter, Louise Za\u00f1artu, in a handwoven Andean\u2013fabric suit the artist wore to her first meeting with Florence Knoll in 1964. Photography by Louis Boudart.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"multiple
Based on the same pre-Columbian geometric pattern, the new Altiplano collection for Knoll Textiles, a refresh of Inca, first introduced in 1966. Photography courtesy of Knoll Textiles.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"black
An experimental reweaving of the pattern: Inca Chinchero, 2017. Photography courtesy of Sheila Hicks.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

ID: What was your rela\u00adtionship with Florence Knoll like?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

SH: It was productive and positive, with some humor. She knew her own mind and when she gave orders, everybody jumped! She called Robert Cornell, the president of the company, into her office and said, \u201cDon\u2019t let this young lady out the door until she agrees to work with us.\u201d He did what she said\u2014so it was pretty simple!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ID: Apart from offering a different palette, you\u2019ve also changed the name of the collection to Altiplano. Why\u2019s that?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

SH: Inca was a good name, because everybody remembers it. But before the Incas took over in their systematic way\u2014getting all the tribes to follow the same rules, line up and do things the \u2018correct\u2019 way\u2014individual Andean weavers were producing interesting, experimental kinds of textiles. The new name gives credit to those earlier, independent artisans spread throughout the Altiplano\u2014in the mountains of Peru and elsewhere. I like how, alphabetically, the name goes right to the head of the parade, too!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"tall
Toward Unknown Horizons<\/em>, 2023, a column of pigmented acrylic fiber, centering the SFMOMA show. Photography by Don Ross.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

ID: A solo show, \u201cNew Work: Sheila Hicks,\u201d opened at SFMOMA in September. Tell us about it.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

SH: It runs for a year in the new work gallery and the sculpture garden on the roof. There are six or so major pieces including Toward Unknown Horizons<\/em>, which is like a phare<\/em> or lighthouse<\/em>, at the center of the space. Then there\u2019s a wall with about 12 Minimes<\/em>\u2014small woven works\u2014and another with 10 Comets<\/em>, which are disks wrapped or bundled in threads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ID: One work, Rampart<\/em>, is like a large pile of soft boulders. An even larger pile\u2014Saffron Sentinel<\/em>\u2014was a knockout at the Pinakothek der Moderne\u2019s summer exhibition in Munich.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

SH: It was held in the Herrenchiemsee Palace, which is the Versailles of Germany. Saffron Sentinel<\/em> is a massive mountain made of pure pigmented fiber. Pigment from Turkey is transferred into the fiber in Germany and then sent to North Carolina for weaving by Sunbrella. We get it in the intermediary state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"multiple
The monumental pigmented-fiber installation Saffron Sentinel<\/em>, 2017, recently included in \u201cAre We Still Up to It?\u2013Art & Democracy,\u201d the summer group show at Munich\u2019s Pinakothek der Moderne. Photography by Katja Illner.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

ID: Another exhibit, \u201cThe Traveling Thread,\u201d just opened at the Mus\u00e9e du quai Branly\u2013Jacques Chirac, Paris\u2019s museum of non-European arts and cultures. Running through March 8, 2026, it\u2019s cocurated by you and your lifelong friend, art historian and textile scholar Monique L\u00e9vi-Strauss.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

SH: Yes, she wrote the catalog. This is a minor miracle\u2014on her next birthday she\u2019ll be 100, and she\u2019s still very much alive! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Explore Sheila Hicks’ Poetic Textile Endeavors<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"two
Two works in wool from the \u201960\u2019s\u2014Peluca verde<\/em>, left, and Quipu blanco<\/em>\u2014as shown in \u201cWoven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,\u201d recently at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photography by Jonathan Dorado.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"multiple
Also in the exhibit, Rampart<\/em>, 2016, boulderlike, pigmented acrylic\u2013 fiber forms. Photography by Oliver Roura.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"multiple
Designed in 1967 for the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York, Medallions<\/em>, in linen, silk, and anodized aluminum. Photography by Robert Glowacki.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"multiple
A selection of recent natural and synthetic fiber works, known collectively as Comets<\/em>, part of \u201cNew Work: Sheila Hicks,\u201d her first solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, running through August 9, 2026. Photography by Don Ross.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
\"long
Intended for outdoor display, the Horizons<\/em> column installed on the Parvis de l\u2019Institut de France, Paris, 2023. Photography courtesy Of Sheila Hicks, Galerie Frank Elbaz, Meyer-Riegger, and Galleria Massimo Minini.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"tall
Only 10 by 14\u00bc inches, A Certain Distance<\/em>, woven cotton and silk, 2007, one of Hicks\u2019s Minimes at SFMOMA. Photography courtesy of Sheila Hicks.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
\"multiple
From 1970, Rothschild Cords<\/em>, incorporating linen, silk, and cotton. Photography by Robert Glowacki.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n