For Sarah Zapata, Weaving Is a Radical Act
Observer ·
At Sargent’s Daughters, the artist transforms yarn, thread and architectural forms into an immersive landscape rooted in embodied knowledge and community. "Textiles are human," she tells Observer. "It's about people who preceded us and who made it. It's about us being together."
Two sharply opposing threads run through many of New York’s September shows . One finds artists openly confronting the grotesque and the paradoxical at a moment when the very notions of intelligence, embodiment and lived experience feel under pressure from the rapid advance of A.I.—as in the tense carnal oddity of Joseph Jager’s gessoed watercolors at Gladstone or the weird, A.I.-slop-driven parody of American bad taste in Jordan Wolfson’s menacing industrial structures at Gagosian. The other moves toward the fantastical and mythical, most often bound to the sensory and the emotional, with renewed emphasis on touch, craft and the physical shaping of materials as a way of reclaiming what remains irreducibly human.
Like the Haas Brothers exhibition at Marianne Boesky , Sarah Zapata’s latest show, “In escape from the vices of idleness” at Sargent’s Daughters, belongs to this second current. There, her vibrantly colored, handwoven and textile-covered forms have expanded into something akin to an archaeological site, with imagined ruins spreading across the gallery floor in one of her most architecturally ambitious and immersive installations to date.
“ In escape from the vices of idleness “ Artist: Sarah Zapata Venue: Sargent’s Daughters Address: 370 Broadway, New York, NY Through: October 24, 2026
The architectural dimension has become increasingly important to her, Zapata tells Observer as we walk through the show. As in previous installations, she built columns that are essentially functionless interventions. “The viewer might think, ‘Perhaps these are pre-existing,'” she explains, pointing out that in New York one always runs into strange architecture. “As you look closer, you realize they do nothing. So there’s this idea of what is pre-existing and what is not.”
Zapata has brought materials normally hidden behind the exhibition apparatus—crates—into the work itself. “The structures underneath are just very humble plywood plinths,” she reveals. “It was great to think about the possible evolution of these materials… what houses something and what can then be enclosed with textiles.”
The installation brings together different stages of her practice. While the architectural structures are all new, the textiles spread across the floor come from earlier pieces, including works shown in Wisconsin and Brazil. “I like to think of the textiles and my installations as living things,” she says. “They come apart into pieces, and they never happen again in the same way. I’ve been thinking about the works in that way as well. It’s the layering of new and old works to create something new. It’s always this evolving thing.”
Grounding the work in Peruvian textile heritage and millennia of craft, Zapata builds narrative spaces that invite viewers to navigate the works sensorially and imaginatively. The result is a new topography, intensely tactile, that reassembles the ruins of an ancient civilization from some hallucinatory dimension. Like glitches, they reveal new possibilities and readings through seemingly contrasting combinations that find, in their tension, a new dialectic of aesthetic and metaphorical symbolism. “I’ve been thinking about these works as landscapes and environments,” Zapata reflects, adding that she has approached her practice more consciously through the notion of world-building. “I wanted there to be moments of surprise. I think that’s always what you want: things that are hidden from view and ways to get the viewer to walk around and become part of it.”
Zapata understands that people instinctively want to touch textiles, but she recently decided to prohibit it, growing more interested in the unresolved tension created when that tactile desire cannot be satisfied. She offers viewers another form of physical engagement instead: they must walk around the structures, shift perspective and search for details. Ideally, she would like the installation to become a place where people linger, like a sequence of small public squares.
Her process has also become markedly more labor-intensive. She has, in these pieces, introduced more embroidery and handwork onto surfaces originally associated with latch hook, sewing directly into the material and treating it increasingly as cloth. “The language I’ve been using around it is that it feels almost anti-futurist as I intentionally go slower,” she says, recognizing in her approach a deliberate turn toward tactility and embodied knowledge at a moment of growing disembodiment. The permutations of the works become a way of thinking about evolution and time and, crucially, about the possibility that time spent making is never wasted.
While researching during her residency at Fountainhead in 2024, Zapata encountered the work of archaeologist Daryl Wilkinson . “He talks about geoglyphs as an expression of anarchy, particularly in relation to the Nazca Lines,” she explains, drawing a parallel between the seemingly random stratifications found in nature and the layering and repetition of gestures and labor over time that produce shared forms of knowledge. “Wilkinson uses this parallel to describe this innate sensibility of making just to make, and how this is something so productive for us as a civilization.” It’s an impulse that cannot be monetized, she adds, yet it has been one of the main drivers of evolution in human history, as in nature.
Beyond their functional use, textiles have carried symbolic and ritual meaning since the earliest civilizations, expressing a bond between humans and natural cycles and accompanying people and communities through the entire cycle of life. Zapata’s entire practice is anchored in a form of embodied knowledge passed down through generations, and from the start it has been informed by a deeper ancestral bond between humans and the nature of materials, as well as by the practice’s collective dimension. It is, after all, a ritual shared among communities of women. Her weaving, latch-hooking and embroidery hold the embodied temporality of their making as much as the accumulation of generations of technical knowledge, years of gathering and learning and hours of labor.
She has, she says, always preferred vintage looms—in this case American-style looms, including one she bought at auction from her alma mater, the University of North Texas. There is a quietly resistant stance in this, even as her contemporary practice also seeks to preserve tradition. If craft has always been radical, it feels especially so now. “It’s something that we can put our mark on,” Zapata says.
Her choice of colors, patterns and motifs carries a playful, highly sensual contemporary twist that suspends these installations in time and space. The intertwined geometries of her handweavings may recall the abstracted forms of pre-Columbian textiles, but they also share affinities with Middle Eastern textiles and with the rhythms and systems of repetition in South Asian patterns and techniques.
Raised as an evangelical Christian in Texas and now queer and living in Brooklyn, Zapata embraces hybridity: her kaleidoscopic installations are a reflection of what it means to exist across different contexts and to discover one’s own adaptability. Although her work remains partly biographical, she acknowledges leaning increasingly into fantasy and something more universal. In that context, these works can be read as metaphors that reveal the rich beauty that can emerge from the complexity of coexistence or from contrasting traditions, and how a new harmony can be found once they are woven together with sensitivity and shared creativity. Connecting heritage and contemporary expression across motifs, languages and cultures, her installations become monuments to diversity and inclusivity.
The flexibility of textiles, their capacity to assume new forms and adapt to new constructions and contexts, is an apt metaphor for human adaptability. Zapata welcomes mistakes, since the unpredictability of the human hand is precisely what reveals the human presence. “It’s that human error that leads you to things that are so much better than anything you ever could have planned,” Zapata says.
As the title of the show suggests, the imaginative landscape she has built is not one of idleness but an invitation to navigate complexity with a heightened awareness of the dynamics that shape structures of power, belief and behavior over time. The beauty of weaving lies in a continuous expansion of the possibilities of expression, imagination and creativity. “What I hope the viewer gets from experiencing the work is that textiles are human. It’s about people who preceded us and who made it. It’s about us being together. It’s about being excited about our history,” she adds.