Sheila Hicks: Fibre in Flight at SFMOMA
From 9 August 2025 to 9 August 2026, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will present New Work: Sheila Hicks, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the museum. Installed in the New Work gallery on Floor 4, with a companion commission in the Jean and James Douglas Sculpture Garden, the show invites visitors to encounter Hicks’s work in two contrasting settings — the stillness of the gallery and the shifting conditions of the outdoors.
Sheila Hicks, Vers des Horizons Inconnus, 2023 (Installation at Parvis de l'Institut de France, Paris, France, 2024) Photo: Claire Dorn.
The indoor installation is site-specific: cords are suspended, threads are bundled and coiled, and forms reach into space, catching and refracting changing light. Hicks’s sources are rooted in her own surroundings and travels — the uneven cobblestones of her Paris courtyard, the steadfast lighthouses of Ouessant, an island off Brittany’s coast where waves collide with rock.
Installation view, 2024, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Photo: Katja Illner
At its centre stands Phare — French for “lighthouse” — a column of tumbling cords that anchors the room. Around it, her “comets” trace vivid, intersecting lines through space, evoking topographical landscapes. Panels of hand-inserted linen drift like slow clouds, while smaller works record ongoing experiments in structure, colour, and tension. Reconfigured arrangements of her wrapped “bâtons” and mounds of tufted fibre in saturated hues show Hicks’s continual process of reinvention — a practice she describes as “walking the tightrope into the future.”
The outdoor commission in the sculpture garden extends this energy beyond the walls. Here, shifting weather and changing light alter the work’s appearance from hour to hour and season to season, rewarding repeated visits with new discoveries.
Sheila Hicks, Rempart, 2016 (installation view, Meyer-Riegger, Berlin, 2023) Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris.
Born in Hastings, Nebraska in 1934, Sheila Hicks studied at Yale University, where she earned both her BFA and MFA before travelling to Chile on a Fulbright scholarship in 1957–58 — a journey that cemented her lifelong fascination with fibre. From her Paris studio, established in 1964 and still in use today, Hicks has founded workshops in Mexico, Chile, and South Africa, and worked in Morocco and India, absorbing local materials, skills, and traditions into her own evolving language. Her practice spans the intimate and the monumental — from palm-sized woven studies to architectural interventions on a grand scale — and her work is represented in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
In New Work: Sheila Hicks, new and reconfigured pieces from across recent years are brought together, each shaped by her ongoing exploration of how fibre can occupy space, respond to its surroundings, and balance — always — on the edge of what is known.
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Further Information:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
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Image Credits:
Lead Image: Sheila Hicks, Talking Sticks (detail), 2023-24. Photo: Michael Brzezinski
All other images as credited in photo captions.