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For Sarah Zapata, Weaving Is a Radical Act

Grounded in Peruvian craft traditions, "In escape from the vices of idleness" at Sargent's Daughters celebrates the slow, collective labor of making and the irreducibly human.

Two sharply opposing threads run through many of New York’s September shows. One finds artists openly confronting the grotesque and the paradoxical at a moment when the very notions of intelligence, embodiment and lived experience feel under pressure from the rapid advance of A.I.—as in the tense carnal oddity of Joseph Jager’s gessoed watercolors at Gladstone or the weird, A.I.-slop-driven parody of American bad taste in Jordan Wolfson’s menacing industrial structures at Gagosian. The other moves toward the fantastical and mythical, most often bound to the sensory and the emotional, with renewed emphasis on touch, craft and the physical shaping of materials as a way of reclaiming what remains irreducibly human.

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Like the Haas Brothers exhibition at Marianne Boesky, Sarah Zapata’s latest show, “In escape from the vices of idleness” at Sargent’s Daughters, belongs to this second current. There, her vibrantly colored, handwoven and textile-covered forms have expanded into something akin to an archaeological site, with imagined ruins spreading across the gallery floor in one of her most architecturally ambitious and immersive installations to date.

"In escape from the vices of idleness" Artist: Sarah Zapata Venue: Sargent's Daughters Address: 370 Broadway, New York, NY Through: October 24, 2026

The architectural dimension has become increasingly important to her, Zapata tells Observer as we walk through the show. As in previous installations, she built columns that are essentially functionless interventions. “The viewer might think, ‘Perhaps these are pre-existing,'” she explains, pointing out that in New York one always runs into strange architecture. “As you look closer, you realize they do nothing. So there’s this idea of what is pre-existing and what is not.”

Zapata has brought materials normally hidden behind the exhibition apparatus—crates—into the work itself. “The structures underneath are just very humble plywood plinths,”........

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