Sarah Zapata

Please note: viewing hours for this exhibition are Mon - Fri 12pm to 6pm

Zapata invites you to enter and linger in her large-scale textile installation—handwoven, hand-tufted, and sewn into shapes and textures that are a bit misshapen, and refreshingly different from familiar everyday objects. Zapata’s objects can hold our fantasies. They form a landscape in which we can spend time and experience ourselves with other bodies. Through the excess of labor put into this work, Zapata conveys an amorphous sense of time, honoring tradition with untraditional aspects of existence and queerness. This approach also mirrors Zapata’s complex identity: a Texan living in Brooklyn, a lesbian raised as evangelical Christian, a first-generation American of Latin American descent, whose work is inspired by ancient indigenous traditions and ritual.

Sarah Zapata (b. 1988, Corpus Christi, TX, USA) makes work with labor-intensive processes such as handweaving, rope coiling, latch hooking, rug tufting, and sewing by intersecting theories of gender and ethnicity with pre-colonial histories and techniques. Zapata’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum (NY), El Museo del Barrio (NY), Museum of Arts and Design (NY), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NY), Boston University (MA), LAXART (CA), Paul Kasmin Gallery (NY), Deli Gallery (NY), Arsenal Contemporary (NY), amongst others. Zapata has also completed residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design (NY), Mass MoCA (MA), A-Z West (CA), and Wave Hill (NY). She has received grants from the Dallas Museum of Art, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and is a finalist for the Burke Prize 2019.