Artist Talk and Opening Reception for Sarah Zapata: So the Roots Be Known

Description

Artist Talk & Opening Celebration

Thursday, August 17, 6 p.m.

Register

Bar Opens 5:30 p.m. | Artist talk 6 p.m. | Reception 7 p.m.

Seating is first come, first served.

Join us for an evening celebrating the eighth annual Atrium Project installation, Sarah Zapata: So the roots be known.

New York-based artist Sarah Zapata (Peruvian American, born 1988) creates vibrant and inviting site-specific installations. In her practice, she sources familiar materials—such as acrylic yarn and natural fibers—and traditional artforms including weaving, coiling, sewing, and latch hooking, to articulate the intersections of her plural identities: the daughter of a Peruvian immigrant; a first generation American born in Texas; and a queer woman raised in an Evangelical household.

In So the roots be known, Zapata centers local lesbian and feminist histories from her research at the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. In part, this installation pays homage to Womontown, a group of primarily queer women who established a revolutionary community in the Longfellow (Dutch Hill) neighborhood of Kansas City in the late 1980s. Zapata’s use of abstracted tulip forms and shades of lavender draw inspiration from the Womontown banner while simultaneously evoking histories of queer resistance, as the color lavender came to be associated with gay and lesbian communities, and thus stigmatized, in the mid-twentieth century. Ladders—a recurring motif in Zapata’s work alluding to ideas of fantasy and transitional spaces—here make reference to the national lesbian magazine The Ladder (1956–1970), founded by the Daughters of Bilitis and later operated remotely by recognized writer and publisher Barbara Grier in Kansas City.