Nara Roesler São Paulo is pleased to present Autobiography of a Thread, an exhibition featuring recent and previously unseen works by Sheila Hicks (Hastings, Nebraska, 1934), one of the major figures in international contemporary art and a leading pioneer of textile art. The exhibition is curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Artistic Director of Nara Roesler, who has maintained a close relationship with the artist since 2012, when he invited her to present a special project at the 30th São Paulo Biennial the following year. On that occasion, which marked Hicks’s first exhibition in Brazil, the artist occupied an area of approximately 400 square meters with an extensive group of works spanning different periods, personal documents, and a site-specific intervention.
With works held in the collections of major museums around the world, Sheila Hicks has been a leading figure in textile art for more than six decades. Her practice expands the possibilities of thread and fiber, bringing together abstraction, color, sculpture, painting, and architecture. Born in 1934 in Hastings, Nebraska, USA, and based in Paris since 1964, Sheila Hicks has developed her practice in constant dialogue with diverse cultures, embracing the global dimension of textile art traditions around the world, with significant stays in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since the 1950s. “Sheila Hicks was the first truly global textile artist, even before the term itself was coined. She was the first artist to research textiles across all five continents, with an awareness of all the ancestral and contemporary languages of textile art. That is no small thing; it is something enormous,” says Pérez-Oramas.
At the same time, the Instituto Tomie Ohtake will present the monumental exhibition O que que é isso? centered on the work of Sheila Hicks, offering a historical survey of the artist’s career and its connections with pre-Columbian art and Latin America. The exhibition is curated by Ana Roman, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and Paulo Miyada. The two exhibitions will be accompanied by a joint publication by the Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Nara Roesler Books.
Luis Pérez-Oramas, Artistic Director of Nara Roesler, and curator of the first presentation of Sheila Hicks’s work in Brazil, at the 30th São Paulo Biennial in 2012, is once again bringing the work of the major artist to the country, this time for her first solo exhibition at a Brazilian gallery. He has selected more than twenty recent and previously unseen works, produced since 2017, that reveal the different typologies within her practice.
Sheila Hicks’s solo exhibition at Nara Roesler São Paulo was originally scheduled for 2020, but the project was interrupted by the pandemic. In 2025, as Nara Roesler revisited the idea, Paulo Miyada—then Artistic Director of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake—and Ana Roman decided to invite Sheila Hicks to mount an exhibition. The coincidence of the schedules, a rare opening in the artist’s highly sought-after calendar, and the longstanding relationship between the two institutions—also marked by the friendship between Tomie Ohtake and Nara Roesler—made the moment particularly conducive to bringing the two exhibitions together. It thus became possible to join efforts around two autonomous projects, each conceived from its own curatorial perspective, while offering the public complementary dimensions of Sheila Hicks’s practice.
The two exhibitions devoted to Hicks in Brazil complete a circuit of exhibitions in Latin America that began at Museo Amparo (Puebla, Mexico, 2017) and continued at the Museo Precolombino (Santiago, Chile, 2019), with her presence in São Paulo representing a major return to the historical sources of her work as a textile artist.
“Latin America is inscribed in the original DNA of Sheila Hicks’s work,” says Pérez-Oramas. From her years at Yale, Hicks was deeply influenced by the teachings of pre-Columbian art historian George Kubler (1912–1996) and by her reading of Raoul d’Harcourt’s classic book on the textile art of ancient Peru, which introduced her to the cultures of thread and weaving in Latin America. At Yale, Hicks inherited the modern legacy of the Bauhaus through her professor Josef Albers (1888–1976), who sent her to Chile in 1957 to teach in his place. This became the occasion for the artist’s first formative journey through Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Chile.
It was in Chile, in collaboration with the great photographer Sergio Larrain (1931–2012), that Sheila Hicks held her first institutional exhibition, as a painter, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Santiago. “In Caracas, she became involved with Spanish Republicans who were conspiring to overthrow the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, but also with fundamental Venezuelan artists such as Alejandro Otero and Gego. She visited the works in progress at the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas with architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, the Niemeyer of Venezuela.”
“Later, Sheila lived in Mexico, where she worked as a photographer and developed friendships and close relationships with key figures in Hispanic American art and architecture: Félix Candela, Luis Barragán, Ricardo Legorreta, Mathias Goeritz, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Leonora Carrington, among others,” Pérez-Oramas recounts.