Join artist Sarah Zapata, featured in MAD’s current exhibition Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field, for an afternoon seminar that explores the technique of coiling. This technique, present in many pre-Columbian indigenous cultures in South and Central America, offers the ability to create a variety of dynamic forms and abstracted designs.

As Zapata teaches participants to use rope, yarn, and tapestry needles to create small coil vessels, she will also discuss the artists Anni and Josef Albers, avid collectors of pre-Columbian objects. Zapata will explore how the Alberses approached thinking about these artifacts, and how this ethos has influenced her own relationship to indigenous histories and material cultures.

In addition to learning a new technique, participants in this seminar will gain insight into the historical and contemporary perspectives on coiling that influence Zapata’s practice. 

About the Artist

Sarah Zapata employs traditional craft techniques in immersive, unconventional ways. 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, and the handmade.

Zapata’s work has been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, the New Museum, LA><ART, Deli Gallery, Chamber, and Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center. Zapata has also completed residencies at MASS MoCA, A-Z West, and Wave Hill, and is the recent recipient of both an NFA Project Grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Zapata was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2016.