Fig. 37. Sheila Hicks. Willow, 1960. Cotton, wool, 11 ⼀洀 × 15 15/16 in. (29.5 × 40.5 cm). Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, Gift of Anonymous Donor (2006-14-5) thanks to her early studies of Andean techniques. Willow (1960; 昀椀g. 37), for example, is woven with all selvages 昀椀n - ished, like many Peruvian textiles. Eventually, the Minimes became her modus operandi to respond to and register a broad range of personal experiences, research, and travel that continues to date. “I found my voice and my footing in my small work,” she declared.31 Upon her return from South America, Hicks presented her thesis project for a Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale, an exhibit titled Andean Textile Art. It included Inca Chinchero (1959), a small weaving with a checkerboard pattern inspired by a plain weave reproduced in Raoul d’Harcourt’s seminal study of 32 Peruvian textile techniques. Years later, Inca Chinchero became the prototype for a textile pattern manufactured by Knoll Associates. Like Albers, Hicks was inspired by the sophisticated structures of Andean textiles, as well as by their unique path to systematize abstract designs. Further, she contin- ued the modernist alliance with industry through numerous collaborations and commissions over the years. Her signa- ture style is found, however, in the innovative ways she subverted the orthogonal rigor of weaving, expanding to the more unruly and expressionistic territories of abstrac - tion. Untitled (1986; 昀椀g. 38) presents warp threads not 昀椀lled with weft, hanging vertically to create slits that allow light to 昀椀lter through. Hicks 昀椀rst used this technique, which echoes the Moche culture’s use of the negative spaces of slits to codify a linguistic system of signs, in 1961. Fig. 38. Sheila Hicks. Untitled, 1986. Two-ply linen, 89 × 16 in. (226.1 × 40.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Sheila Hicks, 1987 (1987.368) 36