For Sarah Zapata, hand-weaving is a metaphor for both expressing and examining different facets of her identity.
As a queer undergrad studying fiber arts and weaving at the University of North Texas, the artist Sarah Zapata was wary of color. “Using it made me really nervous, which is so hilarious now,” she says, smiling through neon orange tresses. “There’s so much power that exists within color. There’s so much joy and beauty, as well as darkness.”
Since moving to Brooklyn 10 years ago, Zapata, 32, has fully embraced bright, vibrant color in sculptural works that explore textiles and handicraft as metaphors for expressing and interrogating her intersectional identities as a lesbian raised in an evangelical Christian household and the youngest daughter of a first-generation Peruvian-immigrant father and a Texan mother. Her pieces redefine craft, reclaiming it from the realm of “women’s work” while referencing and paying homage to Peru’s rich textile heritage. Indeed, handcrafting textiles “became my way to control my relationship to tradition and see where I fit into both of those cultures,” she says. “It has felt like this really incredible gift.”
The time-consuming, labor-intensive act of hand-weaving is at the core of Zapata’s mixed-media practice, which combines a range of traditional and contemporary techniques, often to abstract effect. Endurance and duration go hand in hand with “the feeling that you have to earn it,” she says. “My practice also speaks to honoring this tradition and labor, as well as to imagined time and imagined futures.” Her breakthrough work, “Siempre X,” a monumental wall-mounted piece installed at El Museo del Barrio in New York in 2016, is a riotous jigsaw of colorful, jagged planes of hand-woven and latch-hooked shag, rhinestone appliqué, pop culture imagery and long ponytails of artificial hair that riffs on femininity and fetishism. Zapata was inspired by arpilleras, narrative quilted tapestries created by communities of Peruvian and Chilean craftswomen as acts of political resistance and expressive agency. “They were telling stories on the ground and transcending words,” she says. “Textiles take so much time to create, but these were made in a really urgent way.”
The sensuousness of the textures she weaves is often part of the works themselves. In 2017, for her first solo installation, at Deli Gallery in Long Island City, Queens, “If I Could” (named for Simon and Garfunkel’s hit rendition of “El Condor Pasa,” a 1913 piece by the Peruvian composer Daniel AlomÃa Robles), Zapata marooned a group of hunched, mysteriously anthropomorphic figures, made from vessels of coiled rope and hand-woven fabric, in a crazy-quilt sea of acid-colored shag. Gallerygoers were invited to meander barefoot through the deep pile. Blending elements of Western kitsch, traditional Latin American handicrafts and pre-Columbian burial customs, the piece somehow invoked both ritual solemnity and carefree, even erotic pleasure. “I loved giving that to the viewer,” says Zapata, who often incorporates performative elements into her work. “Everyone has such a hunger for textiles because we are literally always surrounded by them.”
In other recent works, including a 2019 installation at Performance Space New York titled “A Famine of Hearing,” Zapata has used her signature multicolored woven rugs to reference Christian iconography and meditate on the sensual and the spiritual and on her complex relationship to her roots: “I’m critical of it, yet also protective of it,” she says of her devout conservative upbringing and the attendant guilt. “Texas is somewhere that I visit mentally quite often.”
When I visit her over the summer, Zapata is doing an artist’s residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in a former warehouse in East Williamsburg, a few miles north of her previous studio in Gowanus. The centerpiece of the space is an eight-harness wooden loom the size of an upright piano. Next to it are two neatly stacked towers of plastic bins filled with yarn of varying thicknesses and textures, roughly sorted by color: beiges, blues, earthy rusts and corals. Pascal, her five-month-old standard poodle, would normally be there with her, but today he is at the vet, having swallowed some yarn. On the wall are taped notes bearing such messages as “Knowledge can be accessible.” Textiles are inherently approachable, Zapata asserts, and invite larger conversations on gender, spirituality and value. “I really love making work that’s not deeply esoteric. Culture shouldn’t just be for the elite,” she says. “I like to use beauty and fantasy as an entry point, but I never want that to be the only takeaway.”
Even as the artist achieved a major milestone last year, mounting her first solo show in Peru, at the Mario Testino–founded Museo MATE, Zapata felt the pandemic caused her to rethink the role of her work. “Being an artist felt really indulgent and really unnecessary. It took quite a few months for me to just get back to my studio,” she says. Creating new work for “Latinx Abstract,” a group exhibition at BRIC Brooklyn earlier this year, helped Zapata recenter her focus — and with it, her approach to spatial relationships, texture and touch in a new era of social distancing. “I have always been weaving, and felt it was a really great way to come back to the root of my practice and be less controlled, less planned,” she says. “Weaving acts as a sort of meditative practice.” For the installation, she made a collection of stuffed, circular wall sculptures that invoke the symbolism of gargoyles, noticeably wall-mounted at a distance, high above reach. Where so much of Zapata’s previous work has invoked touch, intimacy and the realm of interiors, these mark a moment in which her gaze, along with her work, is shifting a bit inside-out. On church facades, gargoyles “were used to depict evil spirits, but they were also a symbol of change, the uncontrollable,” she says. “I felt that this time was pointing to all roads to change: to think about it, to celebrate it and respect it.”
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