Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field
Cycle 1: LJ Roberts, Sarah Zapata
August 22, 2017 to October 15, 2017
Museum of Arts and Design
Jerome and Simona Chazen Building, 2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019
LJ Roberts will be featured on the third floor and will be there creating new work with Sarah Zapata every Wednesday-Saturday from 10-6 PM until the 15th. There will be programming throughout the show.
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.
http://madmuseum.org/exhibition/studio-views-craft-expanded-field
