Sheila HicksWhat Is This?
Current Museum Exhibition
Instituto Tomie Ohtake
São Paulo
Brazil
28 Aug – 25 Oct 2026
read inGerman
The Ministry of Culture, Bradesco, and Instituto Tomie Ohtake present Sheila Hicks – What Is This?, an exhibition dedicated to American artist Sheila Hicks (Nebraska, United States, 1934), one of the leading international figures in the expansion of textile practices within contemporary art. The exhibition occupies two galleries at the Institute and brings together a wide selection of works produced over more than six decades, including historical pieces, recent works, and a new installation conceived especially for the exhibition. Developed in close dialogue with Hicks, the exhibition follows her exploration of thread as material, structure, and a form of thinking, in a practice that crosses the boundaries between painting, sculpture, design, and textile art. Around 30 works produced over the past six decades are presented, including small weavings, reliefs, sculptures, and architectural-scale installations. The exhibition also includes photographs taken by the artist and Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain during travels through Latin America in the late 1950s, as well as a selection of Andean textiles that were fundamental references in the development of the artist’s practice. The title What Is This? borrows a question posed by Josef Albers, then a professor at Yale University, to the young Sheila Hicks during her studies there. Upon finding his student experimenting with an improvised loom, Albers asked: Was ist das, girl? (“What is this, girl?”). The question became the starting point for an investigation that has accompanied the artist throughout her career. Beyond serving as the exhibition’s title, the question encapsulates a practice grounded in experimentation, curiosity about ways of making, and a refusal to subject her work to rigid definitions. Alongside large-scale works such as The Soft Side of My Nature and the major installation Aprentizaje de la Victoria, the exhibition also presents several examples of the Minimes, small weavings that the artist has produced since the beginning of her career. The first emerged from looms improvised from painting stretchers and served as a testing ground for materials, colors, and techniques observed in pre-Inca textiles. The same attention to color, texture, density, and the organization of threads reappears in her monumental works, in which the multiplication of individual elements transforms lines into volumes that relate directly to the body and architecture. Among the works on display are also the Lianes, a series Hicks has developed since the 1960s, consisting of long fiber cords suspended in space. The works take on different configurations depending on where they are installed. In them, thread is freed from the constraints of the weave, gaining thickness, weight, and length while establishing relationships with gravity, architecture, and the movement of the body through space. Hicks’s relationship with the textile traditions of the Americas is further explored through a group of Andean pieces temporarily loaned to the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) through the MASP Landmann Loan Agreement. The artist’s interest in these objects began during her studies at Yale and took on a new dimension in 1957, when she traveled through countries in South America, visiting archaeological collections, historic sites, and communities where weaving practices remained alive. Produced in different periods and regions of the Andes, the pieces demonstrate the diversity of techniques, materials, scales, and functions that Hicks encountered in this tradition and that would become a continuous reference in her artistic research. At the same time as the exhibition at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Nara Roesler São Paulo will present, beginning August 29, the exhibition Autobiography of a Thread, curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Artistic Director of Nara Roesler. More than twenty recent and previously unseen works by Sheila Hicks, produced since 2017, have been selected, encompassing the different typologies of her practice. Together, the two exhibitions offer the public distinct yet complementary perspectives on Sheila Hicks’s work and will be accompanied by a joint publication by Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Nara Roesler Books.
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- Courtesy: Instituto Tomie Ohtake
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