Phil Hicken was born in Revere, Massachusetts in 1910. After graduation from high school he worked for Forbes Lithograph Company, where he developed his knowledge of color. During the Great Depression, to help his family, he joined the Civil Conservation Corps in Windsor, Massachusetts where his talent was noticed and encouraged by the director of the Berkshire Museum. The Museum held his first one-man show in 1941.

Beginning in 1936 he worked for the Federal Arts Project with a group of artists from Springfield, Mass. and New York City. Charged with the task of creating an inexpensive print-making procedure, they developed the silk screen technique known as serigraph. He continued to create prints until well into the 1970’s, with a total output of over 100 works. Hicken may well be the longest practitioner of the screen print process, and perhaps its most prolific.

In 1942 he volunteered for the Army and, after basic training, was assigned as an artist to make training serigraphs. Later in the war he was sent to the European theater as a field artist. After the war he worked as a specialist, supervising art schools for the Veterans Administration.

He soon began his long teaching career, which included positions with the Cambridge School of Design, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, the Lacedra School, Boston University and the Art Institute of Boston, where he served as Chairman of the Dept. of Fine Art, as well as conducting private classes in his studios in Boston and Nantucket. His memberships and affiliations included the Boston Arts Festival, Boston Printmakers, Cambridge Art Association, Cummington School, the National Serigraph Society, American Artists Congress and Boston Watercolor Society. In 1954 he was elected a Fellow in the Royal Society of Art in England.

Travels to the plains and big skies of Texas, to Portugal with its vibrant colors and the coasts of Nova Scotia and Nantucket provided inspirational subject matter for his works.

Philip Hicken first came to Nantucket the day the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm collided. Despite this inauspicious beginning he fell in love with the island and joined the Art Association, serving for several years as its president.

For many summers he held classes in his studio on Pine Street and, in 1976, after retiring from the Art Institute, he moved to Nantucket to live year round on the island he loved and to paint.

When he died in February of 1985, long time student and current Artistic Director for the Artists Association of Nantucket, Robert Frazier wrote in Yesterday’s Island:

“Phil was the closest thing to a quintessential artist I’ve ever known. He lived his art, working every day of the week, sunshine or dismal skies or nor’easters. He’d have a canvas on his big easel, scumbling in a dramatic sky to one of his landscapes, or using the edge of a painting knife to cut a line in an abstract work. He loved the possibilities that acrylic paints provided. And when Phil stood back from an easel and worked the stub of a cigar at the corner of his mouth, his eyes gathered the light of that room into a moment of intensity.”

His prints and paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally since 1940, with one man shows at the Eric Gallery, the Van Der Stratten Gallery in New York City, the Savage Gallery in Phoenix, and many others.

He is represented in the permanent collection of over thirty museums including:

The New York Metropolitan Museum

Philadelphia Museum

DeCordova Museum

Brooklyn Museum

Library of Congress

Baltimore Museum

National Museum in Jerusalem

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

A “Conversation with Phil Hicken” by Charles Movalli appeared in the December 1982 issue of American Artist Magazine.