I try to trust intuition and allow the materials to guide the work rather than forcing an idea onto them.

— Jesse Hickman

Jesse Hickman (b. 1955, Chicago, Illinois) is an American artist whose work explores the expressive potential of humble, reclaimed materials and the quiet power of intuitive abstraction. Working across painting, drawing, and sculptural constructions, Hickman creates reductive compositions that balance structure and spontaneity, transforming everyday objects—burlap coffee sacks, salvaged wood, used paper bags, and charcoal—into poetic fields of line, texture, and form.

Originally trained in photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago in the late 1970s, Hickman soon moved beyond traditional photographic practice to explore painting and sculpture. By the 1980s he was exhibiting large-scale abstract works in Chicago and nationally, earning two Pollock–Krasner Foundation grants in recognition of his innovative approach to material and form. Over time, his practice evolved into a deeply personal language of abstraction rooted in experimentation and an embrace of imperfection.

Central to Hickman’s work is the use of found or repurposed materials. Coffee bags, burlap sacks, and salvaged wood often serve as the ground for his compositions, their worn surfaces carrying traces of previous lives that become integral to the finished work. Through gestures made with charcoal, tar, house paint, and oil sticks, Hickman builds compositions that are at once spare and expressive—works that emphasize line, rhythm, and the tactile presence of materials. These “Notes,” as he often calls them, function as intuitive records of thought and feeling, allowing the physical properties of the materials to shape the direction of the image.

Influenced in part by outsider art and the ethos of making do with what is available, Hickman’s practice celebrates simplicity and the dignity of the ordinary. His work resists polish in favor of directness, allowing raw surfaces, burn marks, and irregular edges to remain visible as evidence of process and time. The resulting compositions possess a quiet intensity, where minimal forms and subtle variations in texture invite prolonged looking.

Hickman’s work has been exhibited widely in galleries and institutions across the United States, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rose Art Museum, the Bemis Foundation, and The Painting Center in New York. He currently lives and works in Northern Michigan, where the slower rhythms of rural life continue to inform his disciplined, materially driven studio practice.