LJ Roberts and Sarah Zapata “Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field”

Museum of Arts & Design

[Image: Sarah Zapata, Installation view, If I Could by Sarah Zapata (2017). Image courtesy of Deli Gallery.]

This event has ended.

Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field features interdisciplinary artists at work on large-scale, immersive, and community-engaged installations that challenge and expand the boundaries of traditional craft-practice. Over the course of nineteen weeks, a total of four alumni of the Museum’s Artist Studios Program—Xenobia Bailey, Maria Hupfield, LJ Roberts, and Sarah Zapata—will be invited back to MAD for two cycles of micro-residencies, with two artists working in the gallery at a time. Alongside the gallery-situated studios will be a lounge featuring small displays of ephemera, research materials, drawings, and studio experiments, providing the public with a deeper view into the process and transdisciplinary interests of each artist.

Studio Views also features the Point of View (POV) Gallery, co-curated by the artists, who will draw artwork and supporting materials from MAD’s permanent collection in order to contextualize their work within the history of studio-craft practice. The POV Gallery highlights innovators who, like the contemporary artists creating new work at MAD, have expanded the field of craft.

Together, the studios, lounge, and POV Gallery aim to offer visitors a more in-depth, personal, and engaging look at the ways contemporary artists (and their predecessors) have used craft techniques to engage in critical conversations about identity, creative practice, and the effects of historical influence on increasingly experimental forms of artistic expression.

Leading support for Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field is provided by Marcia and Alan Docter. MAD also thanks Marcia Docter for being the Trustee Chair for the exhibition.

Sarah Zapata’s work is supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

LJ Roberts
Roberts approaches working in textiles with political urgency. They are interested in materialities that mark political histories and enable future speculations. The promises and problematics of queer and alternative kinship structures, nomadism, landlessness, and concepts of time inform their current explorations. Roberts’ work has been shown at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, the Powerhouse Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the DePaul Art Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where their work is in the permanent collection. Roberts is a past recipient of the White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQ artists, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, the Fountainhead Fellowship, and residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, ACRE, and the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa. Roberts was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2009.

Sarah Zapata
Zapata uses materials that are common: yarn, ubiquitous objects, fabrics, paper, the kitchen sink. As a woman employing traditional craft techniques, Zapata appropriates value within processes and materials. By making work with meditative, mechanical means, Zapata produces pieces that are time-consuming and labor-intensive, dealing with imagery of the feminine, the fetishized, the handmade. Zapata’s work has been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, the New Museum, LA>