Textiles were long widely dismissed as craft rather than art. Sheila Hicks’s exhibition “Thread, Trees, River” demonstrates how to wash away the stigma. Though Hicks defends manual labor and artisanship, she does so to make plain the method of her art; sprucing up the dreariness of workaday life with beauty is not her mission. In countless small-format woven pieces she calls minimes—daily meditations and color and material studies—she presses forward with an endeavor that predates even the time she spent at the Yale School of Art in New Haven as a student of Josef Albers in the 1950s, when she