sheila hicks tapestry

Though her celebrated tapestries now hang in museums across the world, those she designed in 1967 for the Ford Foundation building in Manhattan have always been special to the textile artist Sheila Hicks.

A balance of detailed intricacy and monumental scale, they were made with an understated, honey-colored thread that warmed, but did not overwhelm, the rooms in which they hung and were important early works in what has stretched into a long career.
“In the ’60s, there were alternatives,´ Ms. Hicks said in an interview at the foundation building. “Rothko was alive. You could have brought color in here.” Instead, she opted for a subdued tone, so people “could spend hours in the room in meetings” without feeling an assault on the senses. But while being fireproofed sometime in the 1980s, the tapestries were saturated with a caustic chemical. Threads rotted, crisped and popped, and the work also suffered the wear and tear of time as people leaned or brushed their bags against them. “There was no reversal,” Ms. Hicks said of the damage.

“For 10 years, I’d been hearing about it: ‘What are we going to do?’ ” Ms. Hicks said. “The only thing I could do was roll up my sleeves and assemble a team.”
It is far from common for an artist to revisit the site of a commission to recreate the work of decades past. In Ms. Hicks’s case, the effort is particularly unusual.
She turned 85 in July. She lives in Paris. She had to finance much of the project herself. And at this stage in her career, she had nothing to prove.
“Even though everyone was against my doing this,” she said, “I thought it was a great way to go.”