The Peruvian-American Artist Weaving Vibrant Artworks That Explore Craft and Sexuality

“Our current administration is performing masculinity so horribly,” Sarah Zapata tells Artsy. “I feel like it’s our duty as queer people, as lesbians, to fuck that up.”

As Zapata expresses her frustrations with our current political moment, she runs her hand over a 5-foot-tall knit sock, situated in the middle of her Brooklyn studio. She goes on to explain that the garment was constructed to house her body––or, rather, the body of her drag king persona, Jesus Zapato.

The 29-year-old artist regularly hosts drag king nights, where participants take on a masculine persona, just as drag queens perform femininity. For Zapata’s drag king shows—titled “Nightwood,” after the celebrated novel by Djuna Barnes—she invites fellow artists to perform, but never specifies what style of drag or masculinity she is looking for. The result is a public space for participants to experiment and play; at the most recent iteration, Jesus performed a dance while inside of the aforementioned enormous sock.

The artist’s urge to elaborate on identity extends into the everyday of her studio, where she crafts fiber art pieces that are as intersectional as herself. While Zapata’s extended family is split between Peru and the United States, she was born and raised in Texas, where she often felt isolated from her Peruvian heritage. In response, Zapata began learning traditional craft skills that she still employs in her work today. To create her lively, shaggy, and colorfully loud sculptures, she combines Peruvian weaving techniques and American rug-making traditions. The resulting cross-cultural objects become a way to connect her body to the craftworks women have been performing in Peru for hundreds of years.

For her first solo show with Deli Gallery in March 2017, Zapata titled the exhibition after Simon and Garfunkel’s 1970 hit “If I Could (El Condor Pasa),” which samples a Peruvian piece of music. The conversation between Peruvian and American culture attracted the artist to the song, as well as the title’s nod to self-reproach. “There’s all these verses in Psalms talking about the ‘good woman’ and how she works with wool and performs honest labor,” Zapata says, rolling her eyes. “I’m originally from Texas and was born into a very strict evangelical Christian household, so being a lesbian, I just have a lot of guilt.”

Plenty of honest labor is embedded in each of her works––whether Zapata is coiling yarn (a technique in which you continuously wrap fibers around each other) or weaving threads on a loom. Though her art is not conceptually dependent upon how long she spends making it, labor is an invaluable currency for Zapata.

“I think in the end, the labor goes back to guilt,” she says. “I feel like I have to push myself to these really insane limits in order to really feel like I earned it.” That hard work undoubtedly pays off, culminating in an alluring excess of textures, shapes, and colors. In one work, A little domestic waste I (2017), a 3-foot-tall form sits in a small coiled basket. Rising out of the green container, the curvaceous artwork is a spectacle, with a piece of long blonde hair emerging from the yarn’s extravagant display of color. Looking at the shaggy sculpture, it’s hard to resist running one’s fingers through the fibrous features.

For “Haptic Tactics,” a recent exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, Zapata recreated her encompassing installation on a smaller scale. Tucked into the corner of the exhibition, a brightly hued panel extended off the wall and onto the floor, with a shaggy sculpture placed in the middle. And on the wall, a sign requested visitors to remove their shoes and socks before entering the installation. Going barefoot in a public place may make some viewers uneasy or slightly embarrassed, but this is just the experience Zapata hopes to spark in her viewer––a moment of humility and intimacy.