Sheila Hicks Revives a Textile Born from Andean Weaving Traditions
First developed in the 1960s after an unexpected meeting with Florence Knoll, the newly reissued Altiplano textile traces its roots to a pattern the fiber artist encountered in the Peruvian highlands
Before Sheila Hicks became a pioneer of fiber art, she was a Yale student of painting and art history enthralled by the interlocking motifs of pre-Incan textiles. What she remembers most vividly from an early lecture by historian George Kubler about pre-Columbian art and architecture was Peruvian mummy bundles. “When they lost members of their tribes, they buried them as mummies and wrapped them in a very special way,” Hicks recalls. “Each weaver had a little mummy basket full of implements, utensils, and tools.” The woven wrappings inspired her to write an undergraduate term paper on ancient Andean craft techniques—a formative step in what would become her lifelong exploration of fiber.
In 1957, Hicks traveled through South America en route to Chile and saw the very motifs she had studied brought to life. Weavers in the Peruvian highlands would anchor tree branches into terra firma to create makeshift looms. “They drove four little posts into the ground, attached two other sticks, and stretched threads between them so they remained in tension,” she explains. “The complexity and variety of what they could make with such basic utensils was amazing. Anybody could do it.” One particular check pattern, composed of alternating vertical and horizontal threads, appeared repeatedly. She began experimenting with the structure, developing a series of variations based on the interlocking motif.
She later had one of the Andean textiles made into a suit, which she wore to a portfolio meeting with Greta Daniel, an early member of the Museum of Modern Art’s design department, in 1964. The textile wasn’t her own weave, but one she purchased after watching it made by hand on a backstrap loom in the Andes. That meeting resulted in an introduction to Florence Knoll. “I wasn’t aware of who she was!” Hicks admits. Knoll, however, immediately took interest. “She didn’t look at me in the eyes. She was looking at what I was wearing. Then she looked at the scrapbook that I brought with all the samples, colors, and threads inside,” she recounts of their initial meeting. “Then she pushed a button and said, ‘Don’t let her leave this office until you sign that she reports to us and shows more of her work.’” Hicks walked out with a contract. That led to the production of Inca, a textile inspired by the interlocking motifs, that KnollTextiles officially introduced in 1966.
Nearly 60 years later, the pattern is being reissued under a new name: Altiplano, a reference to the highland plateau where Hicks first encountered it. “I thought the Inca name was too limiting,” she says. “All of the tribes preceding the Incas were already weaving this pattern. It was already very much in their vocabulary before the Incas even rose to power. It seemed more fair to call it the region of the Altiplano.”
The reissued textile is woven from heathered wool yarns at a single facility that handles spinning, weaving, and pressing, minimizing the environmental impact of standard textile production. The updated palette draws from the natural tones of the Andes with a scale and durability suited to the performance upholstery standards associated with KnollTextiles. “It’s not just a curtain fabric,” Hicks says. “It’s a structured, pliable plane that becomes an integral part of your interior once you move into an empty cube and start creating. It can go on all kinds of furniture—Scandinavian, Brazilian—it adapts very well.”
The original cloth that Hicks wore was handwoven on a narrow backstrap loom, in which one end wraps around the weaver’s body and the other anchors to a tree. The new production allows for broader widths and more robust performance. Still, it retains what Hicks describes as the “intelligence” of the original construction. “If you unravel a piece that’s six inches square, you’ll start to see the sequences of the way the threads are lined up,” she says. “It’s so subtle that when people figure it out, they’re floored.”
Revisiting the pattern has given Hicks the chance to reflect on its longevity. “When something so basic survives all these centuries and gets reintroduced in our sophisticated circuit, the longevity causes me to be very optimistic,” she says. “We’re pushing this glider off the top of one of the pyramids of Machu Picchu and seeing where it flies.” And her original suit lives on. During a recent visit to Hicks’s studio in Paris, her granddaughter Louise wore it for a campaign shoot—another link in a story that continues to unfold.