The Global Arts + Humanities is committed to building Ohio State’s capacity for meaningful and sustainable community-engaged partnerships aligned with practices that respect stakeholders, prioritize their needs, foster reciprocity and an ethics of care.
Funded through a GAH Community-Engagement Grant, the “Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions” at the Columbus Museum of Art (September 8, 2023 to February 4, 2024) exemplified building capacity through community engagement. The exhibition featured interdisciplinary artist and researcher Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika), whose work fuses traditional and Indigenous craft techniques with emerging technologies to break boundaries and borders imposed by colonialism.
Associate Professor Kris Paulsen (History of Art) and museum staff mentored students involved with the project in exhibition planning, programming and publishing. The project enabled new connections between multiple departments and units on campus, including the Translational Data Analytics Institute, Wexner Center for the Arts, Center for Ethnic Studies, American Indian Studies program and Departments of Art, History of Art, Astronomy, Geology, Geography, Architecture and Landscape Architecture.
About Sarah Rosalena
Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Los Angeles. She is Assistant Professor of Computational Craft and Haptic Media at The University of California, Santa Barbara. Rosalena is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, the Carolyn Glasoe Baliey Art Prize, Artadia Award, and the Craft Futures Grant from the Center for Craft. Recent solo exhibitions include LACMA at Mount Wilson Observatory, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Clockshop, and Blum & Poe Gallery. Her textiles and ceramics are in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
About the Exhibition
Rosalena’s artworks fuse the materiality of traditional and Indigenous craft techniques with emerging technologies to produce objects that break boundaries and borders imposed by colonialization. Her hybrid forms of ceramic, textile and beadwork examine the geo-political effects of climate change, dispossession and extractive economies through anti-colonial and feminist perspectives. Through her art, Indigenous and craft technologies open new knowledges between the ancient and the futuristic, the human and nonhuman, and handmade and autonomous. The title of the exhibition, In All Directions, at once signals the irrelevance of the compass points in the expansiveness of the universe, and the potential held in multi-cosmologies, temporalities, and the infinite that could help us rewrite the narratives of the past and imagine different futures that break the binary structures rooted in “discovery.”
Central to the exhibition is Rosalena’s investigation of scholarly and corporate dreams of space exploration and colonization, such as pottery series Transposing a Form. Working in consultation with researchers at NASA-JPL, she prints 3D ceramic sculptures from simulated Mars regolith that cite Indigenous coil pot techniques and the most advanced research in material science and space architecture. Likewise, her expansive textile practice transforms astronomical and satellite data into sensuous and tactile material form. Above Below, a series of AI-generated double-sided jacquard weavings, uses a neural network trained on satellite data to model geological transformations of Mars over millions of years, hypothesizing the red planet’s wet past in deep time and its potential future as influenced by human intervention and desire. The front of each tapestry envisions the melting and terraforming of Mars and implies, on the reverse, the simultaneous, disastrous effects of climate change on Earth that provoke neo-colonial fantasies of leaving our world and which exacerbate environmental destruction through extractive resource mining.