Kyra E. Hicks

Kyra E. Hicks (born October 1, 1965) is an author, quilter and quilt historian. She writes about African-American quilt history and encouraging quilt documentation. She has created story quilts, such as Black Barbie, which is in the permanent collection of the Fenimore Art Museum in New York City.

Education
Kyra Hicks graduated from Howard University and the University of Michigan. She works professionally as an ecommerce and marketing director. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Quilting
Hicks specializes in creating narrative or story quilts. The themes include being a single black woman, politics, family, and religion. All of her quilts include words as well as designs.

Her Patriotic Quilt (1995) is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. It includes the names of prominent American black women Lani Guinier, Joycelyn Elders, and Anita Hill.

Hicks created her Black Barbie quilt, which was displayed in the Fenimore Art Museum's exhibition Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art (2010). She addressed issues of body image, western society's obsession with beauty, and the neglect of the African American when creating toys and other ephemera for children. The illustration features the American Barbie doll depicted as a black woman, with the text "Barbie" above it, and below it the phrase: "Was never intended for me." But Mattel sold the first black Barbie fashion doll in 1980.

Research
In her quilt history research, Hicks found only the second known photograph to exist of Harriet Powers, an African-American slave, folk artist and quilt maker from rural Georgia. Powers used traditional appliqué techniques to record local legends, Bible stories, and astronomical events on her quilts. Two of her quilts have survived: Bible Quilt (1886) and Pictorial Quilt (1898).

Hicks has confirmed the price of Pictorial Quilt, paid by owner Maxim Karolik. After acquiring it, he donated the quilt to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Hicks was one of four African-American women quilters profiled in a PhD dissertation by Yolanda Woods, New World African Conjurers Who Edify and Heal the Community.