Draft:Suzanne Tick

Suzanne Tick

Suzanne Tick (b. 1959) is an American textile designer, artist, and innovator based in New York City. She is known for her use of industrial materials in hand weaving, her work in commercial design for the architecture and interiors industry, and her integration of sustainability and spirituality into her design practice.

Early life and education

Tick was born in 1959 and raised in Bloomington, Illinois, where she spent weekends working at her father's scrap metal yard. Her grandmother was a portrait painter, her mother a set designer, and her father is an artist and business owner. Tick received her BFA in Fiber from the University of Iowa in 1981, and later earned an AAS in Textile Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Suzanne taught at Parsons School of Design.

Career

Tick began her design career in the early 1980s, first working at Boris Kroll Mill Textile in New Jersey. After working at companies such as Unika Vaev and Brooklawn, she became Creative Director for Knoll Textiles (1997–2005), where she pioneered sustainable textile innovations and built a strong reputation in the commercial design industry.

In 1997, Tick founded Suzanne Tick Inc., a multidisciplinary studio located at 44 East 3rd Street in the East Village of Manhattan. The studio serves as both her commercial textile design firm and a weaving studio. She has developed glass, floor coverings, upholstery, and wall coverings for the contract textiles industry. She formerly served as Creative Director at Luum Textiles, Design Partner for Skyline Design, and maintained long-term collaborations with Tarkett (formerly Tandus Centiva) as Design Director for commercial flooring and carpet products. Her studio has created textiles for workplace interiors, hospitality, and healthcare environments, often beginning with fiber-level innovation. Her philosophy blends traditional craft with advanced material science and sustainability.

Artistic practice

Tick’s artistic practice focuses on the transformation of discarded materials into large-scale woven sculptures and conceptual textile installations. Drawing on her background in commercial textile development, she recontextualizes industrial and everyday objects, such as dry cleaning hangers, Mylar balloons, shredded documents, cardboard, neon, and fiber optics into meaningful visual narratives that explore memory, ritual, spirituality, and environmental urgency.

In 1998 Tick made a stainless steel weaving using surplus material from the Bridgestone Metalpha Corporation in Japan, which had excess stainless steel following a tire recall. The fiber was developed by fellow textile designer Junichi Arai. The Museum of Modern Art contacted Tick about the material, and she imported it to weave a banner for the exhibition Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles. She also wove a large stainless steel blanket during this time, which was subsequently included in the exhibition. The piece exemplifies Tick’s transformation of industrial waste into sophisticated textile art.

Her Woven Fiber Optic pieces, developed in the early 2000s in collaboration with industrial designer Harry Allen, combined double-cloth weaving techniques with illuminated fiber optics, one of which is held in the Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection. The 2004 piece Crossform Pendant Lamp, featured in Cooper Hewitt’s 2006 Design Life Now: National Design Triennial, was acquired by the museum for their permanent collection.

In 2012, RefuseDC, created for the Gates Foundation in collaboration with Gensler, reimagined waste from dry cleaners, including cardboard inserts and approximately 5,000 wire hangers, bridging art and upholstery development. One of these woven panels became the basis for the commercial textile Earthworks, developed for Luum Textiles, demonstrating Tick’s process of converting studio-based experiments into large-scale, industrially reproducible patterns.

Her various Fire Island Mylar Weavings make use of over a thousand Mylar balloons collected from the beach over a decade. These balloons—remnants of birthdays, graduations, and other celebrations—are sorted, stripped into long, continuous strands, and woven into complex, reflective compositions. The works consider the intersection of joy, waste, and memory, elevating celebratory detritus into contemplative objects of transformation and underscore Tick’s ongoing commitment to environmentalism by highlighting the persistence and beauty of discarded synthetic materials. As she has said, “I’m driven by multitudes of things that you find and how you can take things that have one meaning and turn them into something else.”

In 2019, Woven Neon, a neon glass weaving commissioned for the Venice Biennale, was featured as part of the exhibition, bending the boundary between drawing, sculpture, and textile—illuminating not only physical space but also the emotional and conceptual landscape of transformation.

In 2023, Tick completed A Light Span, a commissioned woven Ark cover, the sacred cabinet that houses Torah scrolls in synagogues, for a temple chapel in Dallas, Texas. Created using Mylar balloons collected from the beaches of Fire Island, the work embodies themes of celebration, ecological waste, and spiritual transformation. Tick described the piece as a reflection on human disposability and redemption—material once considered trash reimagined as sacred cloth.

Tick’s Torah Series reimagines damaged or decommissioned Torah scrolls into woven artworks that explore Jewish mysticism and gendered readings of scripture. The series emerged from salon-style gatherings and discussions held in collaboration with Rabbi Zach Fredman, whose teachings inspired Tick’s interpretive and spiritual approach to the material. While Fredman provided thematic guidance and historical insights, the woven pieces are solely the work of Tick, reflecting her inquiry into how faith, craft, and personal identity intertwine in contemporary life.

Across all projects, Tick investigates the relationship between handcraft, sustainability, and collective experience. Her home and studio are located in a former performance art venue, once the site of the Reuben Gallery (now Paula Cooper Gallery), where the original “Happenings” took place in collaboration with artists such as Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg, whose experimental performances in the late 1950s and early 1960s challenged traditional notions of art, incorporating everyday actions and audience participation into immersive environments. In the same vein, Tick has hosted live performances in the space, including site-specific dance works that weave together the sound of her loom with movement.

Her work as an artist is deeply connected to cycles of transformation—personal, material, and spiritual—and she often allows emotional or life events to dictate the medium and message of her work. From scrap metal to neon, torahs to glittering refuse, her weavings seek to elevate the overlooked, inviting a deeper conversation about process, memory, and meaning.

Meditation practice

Tick is a practitioner and certified teacher of Vedic meditation, which she credits with restoring her creativity, focus, and inner peace. In 2020, she launched Fifth Floor Meditation from within her East Village studio, where she offers one-on-one instruction, group sessions, and weekly knowledge talks. Tick studied with teacher Thom Knoles and completed advanced training in India. She frequently integrates the philosophy of “follow your charm”—a principle rooted in Vedic teaching—into her creative and personal life. She offers meditation courses in her New York studio and leads retreats on Fire Island, maintaining a commitment to making wellness practices both accessible and embedded within the fabric of art, work, and everyday living.

Philosophy and process

Tick’s work emphasizes transformation—of materials, space, and the self. Whether designing textiles or creating art, she begins with raw matter and builds from the fiber level up, believing the more you touch and work with a material, the more life and longevity the final piece gains. She frequently draws inspiration from architecture and nature, turning building structures into weave drafts and incorporating materials like wire, mylar, shredded documents, and recycled yarns.

Legacy and recognition

Suzanne Tick’s designs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, among other institutions.[13] She was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame in 2023 and named an Honorary Fellow of the American Society of Interior Designers in 2022. Her studio's interdisciplinary collaborations continue to set a standard for innovation, sustainability, and material experimentation in the textile industry. In 2024, Tick announced her retirement as Creative Director of Luum Textiles, stepping back from corporate work to focus on her art and meditation practice. Reflecting on her impact, Luum President Dave White said: “If you’ve ever met Suzanne, you’ll know there is no stopping her. Suzanne is a master of her craft. Her ability to create products, market her ideas, and work directly with our clients and their end users has made the brand what it is today.” Tick’s textile work remains deeply rooted in sustainability, innovation, and mentorship. She continues to work with corporations to identify waste streams and create custom woven art using recycled materials, while also teaching Vedic Meditation to designers and artists in her Fifth Floor Meditation studio.

Personal life

Tick was married to Willard Cook from 1989 to 1995, with whom she has one son. She was later married to Terrance Mowers from 1999 to 2013. She lives and works in a historic live-work townhouse in New York City’s East Village, a space that also houses her studio and meditation practice. The building, originally home to the Reuben Gallery—site of the early “Happenings” performance art movement—has a storied legacy of creative experimentation. Her Midwestern roots and upbringing in a scrap metal yard continue to inform her approach to materiality, reuse, and artistic integrity.

Selected exhibitions

• Material Meaning, Craft in America, 2024 • Threads of Power, BravinLee Projects, 2023 • Textiles Revealed, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2022 • Venice Biennale, Italy, 2020 • Textile Month, New York, 2020 • Reimagining Mylar, Dallas, 2019 • Design at Large, Centre du Design, Montréal, 2001

Selected awards

• Interior Design Hall of Fame, 2023 • ASID Honorary Fellow, 2022 • IIDA Titan Award, 2021 • Best of NeoCon Gold Award (multiple years) • Metropolis Likes Award (multiple years) • Best of Year Awards, Interior Design Magazine

See also

• Fiber art
• Textile design
• Weaving
• Sustainable design
• Industrial design

References

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• 1959 births
• Living people
• Artists from New York City
• American textile designers

Further reading

• Design Milk. "Friday Five with Suzanne Tick." https://design-milk.com/friday-five-with-suzanne-tick/
• Interior Design Magazine. "3 Hall of Famers Pivot into Retirement." https://interiordesign.net/designwire/3-hall-of-famers-

pivot-into-retirement/

• Architectural Digest. "Suzanne Tick Profile." https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/suzanne-tick-article
• Metropolis Magazine. "Suzanne Tick Ventures into Glass with Skyline Collection." https://metropolismag.com/projects/suzanne-tick-ventures-glass-skyline-collection/
• TEDxAsbury. "Weaving Life and Happiness." https://tedxasbury.com/04/2016/weaving-life-happiness/

External links

• Suzanne Tick official website - https://suzannetick.com/
• Suzanne Tick on Cooper Hewitt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=z8punOgSRKw
• Suzanne Tick on Artsy - https://www.artsy.net/artist/suzanne-tick
• Suzanne Tick on Knoll - https://www.knoll.com/designer/Suzanne-Tick
• Suzanne Tick YouTube interviews and talks - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=suzanne+tick