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...

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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.