Sheila Hicks unveils Cosmic Jewelry in Venice, extending textile art into wearables

Sheila Hicks brought her textile language off the wall and onto the body in Venice, where Cosmic Jewelry was unveiled during the opening of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia at the Monaco & Grand Canal Hotel on May 6, 2026. The effect was intimate by design: a collector could carry Hicks’s tactile, fiber-driven sensibility as wearable art, rather than encounter it only at monumental scale.

Developed with Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery in London, the collection is being presented as the first unique jewelry line by Hicks, a distinction that matters in a practice built on material precision. Hicks has worked with thread and fibres for more than seven decades, and that long discipline gives the jewelry its authority. This is not a detour from her art career but a distilled extension of it, translating the same attention to texture, color, and structure that has defined her woven work for generations.

The Venice presentation placed Hicks alongside other Cipriani-represented artists, including Giorgio Vigna and Michele Oka Doner, reinforcing the gallery’s interest in objects that move between art and adornment without collapsing into either category. In that setting, Cosmic Jewelry read less like a licensing exercise than a rare, carefully framed collaboration between artist and gallery, one that treats jewelry as a serious site for contemporary sculpture at the smallest scale.

Hicks’s path to that moment is anchored in the foundations of postwar art. She studied at Yale University, where Josef Albers and George Kubler shaped her thinking about color and weaving. Those influences still register in her work’s insistence on surface, rhythm, and spatial logic. She also appeared at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and her recent exhibition history spans Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo, London, and Seoul, underscoring how central Venice remains as a stage for her latest turn into wearables.

For a artist whose reputation was built on expansive fiber installations, Cosmic Jewelry feels like a concentrated statement. It carries the scale, rigor, and tactile memory of Hicks’s broader practice, but compresses them into pieces meant to live close to the skin, where art becomes personal possession.