Taxco

Describing herself as “thread conscious” from an early age, Sheila Hicks is one of the world’s foremost artists working with textiles. Her innovative approach to materials placed her at the center of the burgeoning fiber art movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and she has never surrendered that spot, as evinced in 2017 by her simultaneous installations at the 57th Venice Biennale and on New York’s High Line. Inspired by international travel throughout her career, she has lived in Paris since 1964. The artist refers to her small works, such as Taxco, as “miniatures” or minimes (from the French for “very small”). Produced in the 1970s and titled after Hicks’s hometown of the time, this example was fabricated from wool and cotton, materials readily available in Mexico, and dyed a deep, electric blue; tight wrappings of red thread in a few dozen places pulsate against the blue, illustrating the importance of color to the artist. An area of flat weave at the top contrasts with the mass of cascad- ing, scissor-cut tassels below, arranged in a para- bolic shape that evokes the arched forms Hicks had likely seen in Spanish colonial structures in Mexico as well as in Islamic architecture on her travels in North Africa. Irresistibly tactile, the work expresses the artist’s fundamental philosophy: “Hands, eyes, brain: it’s the magic triangulation.”