Two contrasting threads ran through many of New York’s September fashion shows. One finds that at a time when the rapid development of artificial intelligence is straining notions of intelligence, embodiment, and lived experience, artists are openly confronting the grotesque and the paradox—like Joseph Jager’s nervously carnal weirdness in Gladstone’s plaster watercolors, or Jordan Wolfson’s at the Gagosian Gallery Wolfson’s sinister industrial structures spoofed America’s strange taste for artificial intelligence, while Bad Industrial Structures veered toward the fantastic and the mythical, often tied to the sensual and emotional, with a renewed emphasis on touch, craftsmanship, and the physical shaping of materials as a way of reclaiming what is irreducibly human.
Like Marianne Boesky’s Haas Brothers exhibition, Sarah Zapata’s latest exhibition, “Freedom from the Vice of Idleness,” at Sargent’s Daughters, belongs to this second wave. There, her brightly colored, handwoven and textile-covered forms have expanded into something resembling an archaeological site, with imagined ruins spread across the gallery floor in one of her most architecturally ambitious and immersive installations to date.
As we visited the exhibition, Zapata told the Observer that the architectural dimension became increasingly important to her. Like previous installations, the columns she constructed were essentially functional interventions. “The viewer might think, ‘Maybe this is all pre-existing,'” she explains, noting that people encounter strange architecture all the time in New York. “When you look closely, you see they don’t do anything. So there’s this idea of what’s pre-existing and what’s not.”
Zapata brought materials usually hidden behind exhibition installations (the crates) into the works themselves. “The structure underneath is just a very crude plywood base,” she revealed. “It’s wonderful to think about the possible evolutions of these materials…what could hold something, what could be wrapped in textiles.”
The installation brings together different phases of her practice. While the building structure is all new, the textiles that line the floors come from earlier works, including those on display in Wisconsin and Brazil. “I like to think of textiles and my installations as living things,” she says. “They break into pieces and never happen the same way again. I’ve been thinking about these pieces that way too. The layering of old and new pieces creates something new. It’s always an evolving thing.”
Zapata’s works are based on Peruvian textile heritage and thousands of years of craftsmanship, constructing narrative spaces that invite viewers to navigate the works with their senses and imagination. The result is a new terrain with a strong tactility that reassembles the ruins of ancient civilizations from a kind of hallucinatory dimension. Like glitches, they reveal new possibilities and interpretations through seemingly contrasting combinations, finding in their tension a new dialectic of aesthetic and metaphorical symbolism. “I have always thought of these works as landscapes and environments,” Zapata reflects, adding that she approaches her practice more consciously through the concept of world-building. “I want there to be moments of surprise. I think that’s always what you want: something hidden from view and a way for the audience to move around and become a part of it.”
Zapata understands that people instinctively want to touch textiles, but she recently decided to ban this practice because of a growing interest in the unresolved tension that arises when tactile desires cannot be satisfied. Instead, she offers viewers another form of physical participation: they must move around the building, changing perspectives and looking for details. Ideally, she wants the installation to be a place for people to linger, like a series of small public squares.
Her process has also become significantly more labor-intensive. In these works, she introduced more embroidery and handcraftsmanship to surfaces originally associated with latch hooks, sewing them directly into the material and treating it increasingly as fabric. “The language I’ve been using is that when I deliberately slow down, it feels almost anti-futuristic,” she says, recognizing in her approach an intentional turn toward tactility and embodied knowledge in increasingly disembodied moments. The arrangement of these works becomes a way of thinking about evolution and time, and more importantly, the possibility that time spent creating can never be wasted.
In 2024, while conducting research at Fountainhead Station, Zapata encountered the work of archaeologist Daryl Wilkinson. “He saw geographical symbols as an expression of anarchy, particularly in relation to the Nazca Lines,” she explains, drawing an analogy between seemingly random layering in nature and the layering and repetition of gestures and labor that create shared forms of knowledge over time. “Wilkinson used this metaphor to describe this inherent sensibility to create for the sake of creating, and why that has been so fruitful for us as a civilization.” It’s an impulse that cannot be monetized, she adds, but it has been one of the main drivers of evolution throughout human history, just like the natural world.
In addition to their functional uses, textiles have had symbolic and ritual significance since the earliest civilizations, expressing humanity’s connection to the cycles of nature and accompanying people and communities throughout their life cycles. The entire practice of Zapatista is based on concrete knowledge passed down from generation to generation, and from the beginning it has been influenced by the deeper ancestral connection between humans and the nature of materials and the collective dimension of the practice. After all, it is a ritual shared among groups of women. Her weavings, hooks, and embroideries reflect both the temporality of their production and the accumulation of generations of technical knowledge, years of collecting and learning, and hours of labor.
She said she has always preferred vintage looms, in this case American looms, including one she purchased at auction from her alma mater, the University of North Texas. Although her contemporary practice also seeks to preserve tradition, there is a quiet stance of resistance within it. If craftsmanship has always been radical, it is especially so now. “This is something we can leave our mark on,” Zapata said.
Her choice of colours, patterns and subjects carries a playful, highly sensual contemporary style that makes the installations suspended in time and space. Her hand-woven interwoven geometric shapes may recall the abstract forms of pre-Columbian textiles, but they also have affinities with the rhythmic and repetitive systems of Middle Eastern textiles and South Asian patterns and techniques.
Zapata, who grew up as an evangelical Christian in Texas and now lives as a queer person in Brooklyn, embraces hybridity: her kaleidoscope installations reflect what it means to exist in different environments and find one’s own adaptability. Although her work remains partly biographical, she admits to an increasing tendency toward fantasy and the more universal. In this context, these works can be read as metaphors, revealing the complexity of coexistence or the rich beauty that can emerge from contrasting traditions, and how new harmony can be found once they are intertwined with sensitivity and shared creativity. Her installations connect tradition and contemporary expression across themes, languages and cultures, becoming monuments to diversity and inclusion.
The flexibility of textiles, their ability to take on new forms and adapt to new structures and environments, is an apt metaphor for human adaptability. Zapata welcomed mistakes because the unpredictability of the human hand reveals exactly what it is to be human. “It’s that kind of human error that gets you something much better than you originally planned,” Zapata said.
As the play’s title suggests, the imaginative landscapes she constructs do not sit idle but invite people to navigate complexity through heightened awareness of the dynamics that shape structures of power, belief, and behavior over time. The beauty of knitting is the ever-expanding possibilities for expression, imagination and creativity. “What I hope viewers take away from experiencing this piece is that textiles are human. It’s about the people who came before us and the people who created it. It’s about us being together. It’s about being excited about our history,” she added.
