Sheila Hicks – What is that?

A narrative thread, a thread of thought, the thread of history. The word thread can also name things that are not made of strings and strands. We use it because these things behave like a thread: they extend, tangle, become lost, and can be picked up again at the exact point where they came loose.

In Lines: A Brief History (2007), anthropologist Tim Ingold starts from a similar intuition regarding the thread. For him, walking, storytelling, and weaving—activities we tend to distribute among body, voice, and hand—share a common structure: they all advance along lines. A path is a line traced by the feet; a story, by the voice; a fabric, a line that folds and crosses itself until it produces a surface. The line, in this sense, is one of the ways in which the world becomes habitable and intelligible. Ingold describes this meshwork-world as something quite different from a network of points connected by straight segments; it is more akin to a living tangle, without a center, in which each line crosses and is crossed by others.

Sheila Hicks’s work arrives, by its own path, at something of this understanding. For more than seven decades, the artist has worked with thread simultaneously as material and as a way of thinking. Color, structure, scale, and gesture come together in a practice that crosses boundaries between painting, sculpture, architecture, and design.

Trained as a painter at Yale University, Hicks turned her attention early on to the textile traditions of the Americas. In the late 1950s, a Fulbright grant took her to Chile and, from there, to other countries in South America. In the exhibition, textiles from the MASP Landmann Long-Term Loan historically situate some of the Andean technical traditions that Hicks studied during this period. In the following years, she lived in Mexico and developed a path characterized by movement across diverse cultural contexts and modes of production, bringing artistic research into dialogue with craft knowledge, architecture, and industry.

Brazil has been a part of this geography of interests and movements since the beginning of the artist’s career. In 2012, she participated in the 30th São Paulo Biennial, A iminência das poéticas [The Imminence of Poetics], curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas. More than a decade later, this dialogue is renewed in O que que é isso? [What Is That?], an exhibition curated by Ana Roman, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and Paulo Miyada, which offers an opportunity to follow a body of work that unfolds from small-scale pieces to architectural dimensions.

Her work finds particular resonances in Brazil, in histories in which making and knowing are deeply intertwined. Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian techniques, folk traditions, artisanal production, and investigations in the fields of art and design give textiles a presence that extends beyond materiality. Weaving, braiding, binding, and twisting are ways of transmitting and transforming knowledge through gesture. Without establishing equivalences between different experiences and contexts, the exhibition creates conditions for these stories to come into proximity and produce new relationships.

Experimentation is a permanent condition of Hicks’s work. At a time when textiles still occupied a peripheral position in art narratives, her practice destabilized distinctions between art and craft, autonomous work and environment, handwork and industrial production—a territory that we now recognize as the expanded field of textile practices in contemporary art.

This ability to set established categories in motion resonates with the work carried out by Instituto Tomie Ohtake, which seeks to bring together different fields of knowledge, modes of making, and audiences.

We thank the Ministry of Culture, which, through the Federal Culture Incentive Law (Rouanet Law), made the exhibition Sheila Hicks – O que que é isso? possible. The exhibition is produced by Instituto Tomie Ohtake and presented by Bradesco, and with support from BMA Advogados in the Bronze sponsorship category and Nara Roesler.

Instituto Tomie Ohtake

In the late 1950s, while still a student at Yale University, Sheila Hicks improvised a small loom using pieces of painting stretchers. Upon finding her at work, Josef Albers, her teacher at the time, asked, Was ist das, girl?—“What is that, girl?”. The question, expressing his puzzlement toward something that was not exactly painting, ultimately opened a path. Albers introduced her to the artist Anni Albers, and in the years that followed, Hicks would make thread the starting point for an investigation bringing matter, structure, color, and space into relation.

While still at the university, Hicks’s encounter with pre-Columbian textiles transformed the way she looked at objects. Rather than deciphering what they meant, she sought to understand how they had been made. How does one thread pass through another? What happens when it is twisted, curled, bent, tied, or tensioned? How does a surface become a volume? An attention to construction, to the properties of materials, and to the possibilities contained in each gesture would become fundamental to her work.

In 1957, Hicks left the United States for Latin America. In the following years, she lived in Mexico and traveled through Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Peru, coming into contact with textile collections and traditions she had encountered during her studies. She met artists, architects, researchers, and artisans, and began to build a network of relationships that would continue to grow throughout her life. Travel became a key dimension of her work: a way of learning through observation and encounter, tracing the circulation of materials and knowledge, and bringing procedures developed in distant places into relation. These movements expanded her understanding of the textile field and incorporated new gestures into her repertoire.

In her hands, thread becomes line, surface, volume, and structure: objects small enough to fit in the palm of a hand coexist with works that alter the scale of architecture; natural fibers, industrial materials, and contemporary technologies form part of a single vocabulary; and color emerges alongside matter and takes shape through it. In the exhibition, these elements hang, cross, compress, curl, and expand, forming columns, panels, cords, bundles, and bodies that resist easy classification. By occupying the space, they connect points, delimit intervals, envelop volumes, and reorganize walls, floors, heights, and passages, creating a situation in which the visitor’s movement is also involved.

The question “What is that?” accompanies this encounter as an exercise in attention, guiding the eye toward relations between weight, color, gesture, and matter. Over nearly seven decades, Hicks has incorporated knowledge and procedures found across many geographies, continuously elaborating them in the face of new materials, scales, and contexts. In her work, each gesture holds the memory of other ones and opens onto the possibility of what is yet to come.

Ana Roman, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and Paulo Miyada

Curators

1

The Lianes are works made of long strands of fibers that extend vertically through space. Suspended from one end, these bundles remain free to fall, bend, touch the ground, and assume different configurations according to where they are installed. The name comes from the French liane, meaning “liana” or “vine”, and refers to the elongated, flexible form of these structures. Produced by Sheila Hicks since the 1960s, the Lianes mark an important moment in her investigation into the spatial possibilities of textiles. In them, thread is no longer bound by the weft and gains thickness, weight, and extension, establishing direct relationships with gravity, architecture, and the body of the person moving through space.

2

In 1957, a Fulbright grant took Hicks to Chile. Rather than going directly to Santiago, she first arrived in Venezuela and then traveled by small planes and overland through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, entering Chile through the Atacama Desert. The American archaeologist Junius Bird, a specialist in Andean cultures, suggested sites, excavations, and collections for her to visit along the way. In Peru, she traveled through Lima, Cuzco, and Machu Picchu. On her return from Chile, she went to Bolivia, where she encountered a textile production that was still a part of everyday life, with llama and alpaca fibers spun by hand and looms in operation in the countryside. Finally, she visited Uruguay. At the time, Hicks still considered herself a painter, but her interests already encompassed archaeology, ceramics, weaving, and architecture.

3

At Yale University, Hicks studied painting with Josef Albers—whose investigations into color and perception shaped her education—and art history with George Kubler, a specialist in the art and architecture of the Americas. In one of Kubler’s courses, she chose ancient Peruvian textiles as a research topic, following a lecture on Peruvian funerary bundles that made a strong impression on her. She soon realized that she needed to understand how they were made, and started tensioning threads on painting stretchers, using them as improvised looms. Albers found her at work with this setup and decided to introduce her to his wife, the artist Anni Albers, who wove on a loom and whose work, in Hicks’s eyes, gave meaning and expression to a material that had until then been regarded as utilitarian. Hicks also attended the university’s School of Architecture, where she attended Louis Kahn’s classes.

4

During her first trip to South America, Hicks photographed as she wrote and drew in diaries and notebooks, as a way of recording what she encountered along the way and bringing information for her research. In Machu Picchu, she took photographs that were later published in Perspecta, a journal of the Yale University’s School of Architecture. In Chile, she met photographer Sergio Larrain Echeñique, with whom she began developing and printing the trip’s negatives. Together, they traveled through the southern part of the country between December 1957 and January 1958, to regions of forests, glaciers and ice fields, also photographing from above, in small planes, in search of the relationship between the scale of the aircraft and that of the expanses of ice.

5

The Minimes are small-scale weavings that Hicks has developed since the beginning of her career, alongside her larger works. The first pieces were made on the same improvised looms fashioned from painting stretchers, with threads tensioned between small nails, some measuring approximately 25 by 15 centimeters, others closer to 35 by 30. She worked with cotton and wool, dyed or in their natural colors, experimenting with techniques observed in pre-Inca textiles. In 1961, she presented a set of these pieces at the exhibition Tejidos [Fabrics] in Mexico City and brought similar works to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which acquired some of them. Hicks never abandoned this format: she describes the Minimes as the place where she found her voice and where she continues to experiment freely, even while working on monumental projects.

6

As she moved from small weaving to large-scale projects, Hicks preserved the same procedures of handwork: attention to color, texture, density, and the ways in which threads organize themselves in relation to one another. In the columns assembled here, the multiplication and grouping of threads transform individual lines into large textile volumes, in a direct relationship with the scales of the body and of architecture.

7

Hicks’s interest in Andean textiles began at Yale University, through the study of their imagery, structures, and methods of construction. Beginning in 1957, her travels through South America brought her into direct contact with this research: archaeological collections, living weaving traditions, and sites she visited under the guidance of archaeologist Junius Bird. This investigation would run through her entire body of work. The textiles gathered here offer a glimpse of the diversity of this universe, produced in different times and regions of the Andes, where fiber, technique, color, and pattern were articulated with distinct functions and forms of knowledge. The pieces are part of the Landmann Collection, on a long-term loan to the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), comprising about nine hundred objects from the pre-Columbian Americas, including a significant group of Andean textiles.

8

Separated by centuries, these two pieces come from different textile traditions in present-day Peru. Siguas (between 500 BCE and 700 CE), associated with the Siguas valley near Arequipa in the south of the country, is a tradition that has only recently come to be studied as distinct from the Nasca style, to which it was conventionally attributed. Its textiles include exceptionally long and narrow formats, such as this tapestry. Chancay came much later (between 1200 and 1450), in the valleys of Chancay and Chillón, on the central coast. Its society developed a large-scale textile production that combined cotton and camelid fiber in dozens of different techniques, from mantles to unkus, bands, bags, and loincloths. The tapestry and loincloth gathered here show how the same material could assume very different scales, structures, and relationships to the body.

9

Among Andean societies, textiles went beyond the function of protecting the body: they also signaled belonging and social status. The unku from the Pachacamac sanctuary—a major pilgrimage center on the central coast, occupied for more than a thousand years by different peoples, including the Incas—represents a fundamental piece of Andean men’s clothing: the woven tunic worn over the body. The small Inca bag, made of fabric and feathers, displays another scale and the combination of materials that this production also encompassed. Between 1430 and 1532, the Inca expansion incorporated peoples and territories across the Andean region, bringing together diverse textile traditions. Within this expanded context, material, techniques, and patterns also came to communicate identities, social positions, and ties between distant regions of the empire.

10

In 1966, Hicks traveled to Calcutta, in the state of West Bengal, to collaborate with a major textile manufacturer. Over the course of two and a half months, she became familiar with every stage of production: she studied the yarns and colors, observed the operation of the looms, and worked directly with the weavers. This experience gave rise to textiles such as Palghat, inspired by the braids of the girls Hicks used to see on their way to school, and the Kerala series, comprising around twenty textiles named after villages in the region. Produced by hand and never identical to one another, these works combined local knowledge and experimentation, exploring the material, irregularity, and variation possibilities inherent in manual production.

11

Hicks’s interest in architecture began at Yale University, where she attended the School of Architecture and Louis Kahn’s classes and discussions. She recalls that, at the time, architecture fascinated her more than weaving. After graduating, she moved to Mexico in 1959 with the intention of developing a project on architect Félix Candela, known for the experimental concrete structures produced by his firm, Cubiertas Ala. She began making a documentary about Candela’s buildings and came into contact with journals such as Architectural Record, Architectural Forum, and Progressive Architecture. Later, some of her works would enter into direct dialogue with spaces designed by architects; for many years, she considered this production a part of her artistic research as well.

12

In the early 1980s, Hicks was invited to take over an American magazine, American Fabrics, later renamed American Fabrics and Fashions (AFF). She had already been contributing ideas and photographs to its editor, William Segal, when he fell ill and asked her to run the publication. Hicks became editor-in-chief and was also responsible for the editorial content. The position opened doors far beyond the newsroom: it gave her direct access to textile factories, spinning mills, and research laboratories, places where one can see what is being developed before it reaches the market. For an artist constantly searching for new fibers and techniques, it was difficult to find this type of information elsewhere.

13

The relationship between Hicks and Monique Lévi-Strauss spans nearly sixty years. Friends in Paris since the late 1960s, the bond also extended into their professional lives: after a visit to Hicks’s studio, Monique’s husband—anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—wrote one of the first critical texts about her work, for an exhibition at Galerie Suzy Langlois in 1968, in which he recognized the dialogue between the artist’s weaving and Indigenous American traditions. Monique, an art historian and researcher of textile practices outside the West, was responsible for the first book on Hicks’s career, in 1973, and decades later, in 2004, would conduct an oral history interview with her, for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. This decades-long friendship, shaped by travel and conversations, took the form of an exhibition in 2025: Le Fil voyageur [The Traveling Thread], at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, curated by Isaline Saunier in dialogue with the two.

14

The sweetness and simplicity evoked by the Brazilian expression mamão com açúcar, somewhat equivalent to “easy as pie,” led Sheila Hicks to propose an installation with materials readily found in Brazil, such as natural and dyed sisal, cotton ropes, and PET fibers. With these elements, she proposed assembly procedures through which large scales and compositional force can be achieved without resorting to complex gestures. The inherent properties of the materials are incorporated and reiterated: ropes are twisted, fibers are fluffed. At the same time, their colors and textures expand in relation to the surrounding space. The artist preserves in her process a dimension of play and spontaneity, shared with her collaborators and her audience.

1934
Sheila Hicks is born in Hastings, Nebraska, United States.

1943–1952
Attends classes at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where she encounters the murals of Mexican artist Diego Rivera. Later, she studies painting at the New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, and takes courses at the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on drawing and draping—an experience that brings her closer to weaving as a form of drawing.

1954
Spends the summer studying painting in Taxco, Mexico. Continues her education at Yale University, where she studies with Josef Albers, an artist and educator associated with the Bauhaus, and George Kubler, an art and architectural historian specializing in the Americas.

1957
Receives her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale and is awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Chile. Attends architecture courses at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and travels through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, observing and recording textiles in drawings and sketchbooks.

1958
Travels to Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego. In Chile, photographer Sergio Larrain documents her paintings and tapestries, which are then presented at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago and subsequently in Buenos Aires. Her textile works are also exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de Chile.

1959
Receives her Master of Fine Arts from Yale and is awarded a fellowship that enables her to travel through Europe. In Paris, she meets Raoul d’Harcourt, a scholar specializing in pre-Columbian textiles, who assists her in developing her research.

1960
Returns to Mexico and settles in Taxco with her husband, architect Henrik Tati Schlubach. Collaborates with local artisans and begins teaching at the School of Architecture of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, invited by artist and architect Mathias Goeritz, a central figure in the country’s modern art scene. During this period, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquires Blue Letter (1959), one of her first textile works to enter the collection of a major international institution.

1961
Holds her first solo exhibition at Mathias Goeritz’s gallery. Develops a close relationship with Mexican architect Luis Barragán and creates a tapestry for the Convento de las Capuchinas Sacramentarias in Tlalpan, designed by him. That same year, MoMA acquires Small Hanging, a work made of hand-spun white wool, bringing a second work by Hicks into its collection only one year after the acquisition of Blue Letter.

1962
In New York, Hicks meets Florence Knoll, an American architect and designer who played a central role in the development of postwar modern design, and begins collaborating on textile projects for the Knoll company. Establishes a craft cooperative in Ireland and is invited by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta to develop works for a hotel in Mexico. In Paris, she meets Monique Lévi-Strauss, a textile scholar who would become an important interlocutor throughout her career.

1963
Participates in group exhibitions at the MoMA in New York and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. At the same time, her work begins to enter larger-scale architectural and commercial contexts: she receives a commission from the French branch of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM France) and develops a series of silk bas-reliefs for Air France.

1964
Participates in her first European group exhibition, Gewebte Formen, at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich. Settles in Paris, becoming part of a network of artists, writers, and architects that includes composer and architect Iannis Xenakis and poet Jean-Clarence Lambert.

1965
Opens a textile studio in Milan, works with artisans in Galway, Ireland, and begins experimenting with industrial production in Wuppertal, Germany. These different modes of production—from handwork to industry—come to coexist within her practice.

1966
Receives an important commission for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) headquarters in New York, a building designed by Eero Saarinen and completed by Kevin Roche, with interiors by Florence Knoll and Warren Platner. The commission brings her work into a scale directly connected to architecture.

1967
Creates a linen bas-relief for the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States and participates in the Biennale Internationale de la Tapisserie de Lausanne, an important international platform for the transformations of tapestry and textile practices in the postwar period.

1968
Presents her Minimes—small weavings that would become a continuous strand of her practice—at the Centre Culturel Américain in Paris. In the Montsouris district, she acquires a property and invites Luis Barragán to design a residence and two studios. A monograph on her work by Monique Lévi-Strauss is published in Stuttgart.

1969
Participates in Wall Hangings at the MoMA in New York, an exhibition devoted to transformations in weaving and fiber within contemporary art.

1970–1974
Expands the scale and architectural dimension of her work. In Rabat, develops a commission for the Moroccan government; creates bas-reliefs for Air France and, in Paris, five works in linen fiber for the entrance hall of the Assemblée Nationale, the French National Assembly. In 1974, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam presents a retrospective of her work.

1975–1979
Hicks’s work circulates among museums, public spaces, and architectural projects in France, Switzerland, Sweden, the Balkans, and Israel. In Paris, she establishes her studio in Montsouris. In Sweden, she presents an installation in which linen extends through the space over tons of newspapers and magazines; in Israel, she develops linen works for kibbutzim.

1980–1984
Conceives an environment for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and develops projects in Japan and for King Saud University in Riyadh. In 1984, receives an honorary degree from the Rhode Island School of Design.

1985–1989
Participates in exhibitions in the United States that bring art, design, and textile practices into dialogue. In 1987, a film produced by the Centre Pompidou surveys her career, and her work is also documented by the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. Toward the end of the decade, she travels to Japan and collaborates with Arata Isozaki, one of the leading Japanese architects of the postwar period.

1990–1995
Holds her first solo exhibition in Tokyo and expands her presence in Asia. In 1993, installs Four Seasons of Mount Fuji, a 103-meter-long bas-relief, at the Fuji City Culture Hall. In 1995, her work is featured in the 16th and final Lausanne International Tapestry Biennial, concluding a cycle of participation that had begun in the 1960s.

1996–2000
Creates seven works in stainless-steel fibers as part of a public commission in France and is appointed Officier des Arts et des Lettres. In 1997, receives the Gold Medal of the American Craft Council. Toward the end of the decade, develops projects in Morocco and Mali, continuing her interest in different textile traditions and modes of production.

2003–2009
Receives architectural commissions in the United States. In 2006, presents Weaving as Metaphor at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. The exhibition catalog, designed by Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom, brings her small weavings into dialogue with drawings and notes, and receives international recognition. In the following years, Hicks gives lectures at institutions including Harvard University, the Institut de France, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

2010–2011
The traveling exhibition Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, conceived by Joan Simon and Susan Faxon, brings together five decades of her work. The following year, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in Rotterdam, hosts the exhibition One Hundred Minimes, following its presentation in Prague.

2012
Participates in the 30th São Paulo Biennial, A iminência das poéticas [The Imminence of Poetics], held at the Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo in Ibirapuera Park.

2013–2017
Holds exhibitions in London, Tokyo, Paris, and Dijon and participates in the Whitney Biennial in New York. Retrospectives of her work are presented at the TextielMuseum in the Netherlands, the Joslyn Art Museum in the United States, and the Textile Museum of Canada. In 2017, participates in the 57th Venice Biennial and presents a retrospective at the Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico.

2018
The Centre Pompidou in Paris presents Lignes de vie [Threads of Life], an exhibition devoted to more than six decades of her work.

2019
Returns to Chile with Sheila Hicks: Reencuentro [Reunion] at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, bringing together approximately fifty works. The exhibition renews her connection with the country where, more than sixty years earlier, Hicks had deepened her engagement with pre-Columbian textiles and held some of her earliest exhibitions. That same year, she receives an honorary doctorate from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

2020–2022
The Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna presents her first solo exhibition at an Austrian museum. In 2022, in France, she is awarded the distinction of Chevalière de la Légion d’Honneur.

2023–2025
Presents exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland and Centre Pompidou Málaga in Spain. Participates in Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art, an exhibition bringing ancient textiles into dialogue with modern and contemporary art, presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2025, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosts an exhibition of her work; Hicks is elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris presents Sheila Hicks – Le fil voyageur [The Traveling Thread].

2026

Holds the exhibitions Sheila Hicks: Rivers Near and Far at the West Bund Museum in Shanghai; O que que é isso? [What Is That?] at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Autobiografia de um fio [Autobiography of A Thread] at Nara Roesler, both in São Paulo; Au-Delà at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille; and a large retrospective show at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporaneo in Milan.