Cycle 1: LJ Roberts, Sarah Zapata
August 22, 2017 to October 15, 2017
Cycle 2: Xenobia Bailey, Maria Hupfield
October 24, 2017 – December 17, 2017
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.
Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field is co-curated by Carli Beseau, Manager of Artist Studios and Docent Programs, and Danny Orendorff, Manager of Public and Community Engagement Programs.
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><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 an NFA Project Grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures. Zapata was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2016.
Xenobia Bailey
Bailey is best known for eclectic crocheted hats, large-scale mandalas, and tents consisting of colorful concentric circles and repeating patterns. Her designs draw influences from the African American homemaker and the vanishing multicultural African American, Asian, and Native American community of her birthplace, Seattle, and of the 1960s funk aesthetic. Bailey has exhibited at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum, the High Museum of Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Her work is in the permanent collections at MAD, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Allentown Art Museum. Bailey has been an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Society for Contemporary Craft, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, and was recently Fellow for Socially Engaged Art at A Blade of Grass. In 2015, a large-scale mosaic installation of her work opened at the NYC MTA subway station at 34th Street/Hudson Yards. Bailey was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2013.
Maria Hupfield
Hupfield activates her creations in live performance. She is interested in shared moments that open spaces for possibility and new narratives. In her work, these moments of connection are recalled and grounded by coded and recoded hand-sewn industrial felt creations. She is deeply invested in intersectionality, indigenous feminisms, race, gender, and class. Hupfield is a member of the Anishinaabe Nation at Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada. Her recent traveling solo exhibition, The One Who Keeps On Giving, opened the thirtieth anniversary of the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Hupfield is an alumna of the AIM program at the Bronx Museum and a Joan Mitchell Foundation recipient. Exhibitions include shows at the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, James Gallery, the BRIC Biennial, the Bronx Museum, Vox Populi, and Panoply Performance Laboratory. Hupfield was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2012.
