March 29 - May 10, 2025
From Erin Cluley Gallery:
“Erin Cluley Gallery is pleased to announce continuous nurture, an exhibition of work by Texas-native, North Carolina-based fiber artist Sarita Westrup. The exhibition will debut new sculpture completed during the artist’s one-year residency at the Penland School of Craft in Western North Carolina. Replicating forms from nature and the built environment, Westrup’s weaving reimagines surroundings from her childhood growing up in McAllen, a border town in Texas. Her sculptural tunnels, archways, and loops reference vernacular architecture along the Mexican American border and human body parts, extending these forms into nurturing woven composites. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and the devastation it brought to the Carolinas in 2024, continuous nurture shows Westrup turning inwards, with her work following suit, to the comforting center of the body. Her new work emphasizes the warming heart of interwoven forms, and the disconnect migration enacts on our physical and mental presences.
Westrup’s approach to basketry focuses on repetition of shape and organic forms. The artist’s use of reed, cochineal ink, a traditional organic dye of the Americas, and mortar transforms everyday objects, such as bags her father brought to her from craftspeople in Mexico as a child. Like geopolitical borders, her sculptures balance openness with obscurity. continuous nurture presents baskets woven around Westrup’s lower body. These disconnected thighs, calves, and feet are molded from life-sized casts; they explore the effects of recent travels as she left the weather stricken East Coast for refuge in her home state of Texas, then back to her studio at Penland. dispersion and home (2025) positions fragments of Westrup’s legs in wire around a thin tube basket with crimson coloring. The wire leg fragments are transparent, allowing an intimate view into the uncovered parts of her. A looping “umbilical cord” shape connects Westrup’s disparate parts into a loose portrait of her moving body among the world. The work in continuous nurture situates itself in the physical memory of Westrup. Abstract and representational subjects come from specific places in her past and present, pointing towards personal and collective futures. In the artist’s work, baskets are a symbol of nourishment and comfort. Holding the shape of their molds, Westrup’s baskets console the outline of things: this consolation is then frozen in place. Weaving acts as an analogue for crossing language, cultural, and corporeal boundaries throughout her life. The flowing state of her lived experience holds for a moment between interlaced reeds. continuous nurture will be the artist’s second solo presentation with Erin Cluley Gallery. It will be exhibited concurrently with an exhibition of new work by Chul-Hyun Ahn.
Sarita Westrup (b. 1989; Edinburgh, TX) is a craft-based artist and art educator of mixed Mexican descent based in North Carolina. Rooted in weaving techniques and bricolage, her sculptural basketry works are inspired by her upbringing in the Rio Grande Valley on the Texas-Mexico border. Westrup received her MFA in Fibers from the University of North Texas (2016). Reflecting on memories of growing up in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas-Mexico border, she translates border culture sensibilities into her practice of experimental weaving. Her work has been shown at venues such as the Greater Denton Arts Council, Blue Spiral Gallery in Ashville, North Carolina, and was featured in the Nasher Windows series at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Most recently her work has been shown in “Cradling” a solo exhibition at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, Illinois. Westrup’s work has been featured in group exhibition such as, “a tender line” at Cluley Projects in Dallas, TX; “Materials Hard and Soft” at Greater Denton Arts Council in Denton, TX and “Staked Out” at Blue Spiral 1 Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina. In 2022, she was the first artist in residence at Arts Fort Worth’s Emerging Artist program and was accepted into the American Craft Council Emerging Artists Cohort and received a $10,000 accelerator grant. In 2023, she was one of five recipients of the 2023 Nasher
Sculpture Center Artist Grants, as well as a finalist for The Nest Heritage Craft Prize. From 2024-2025 she was a resident artist at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. Westrup’s work was included in El Museo del Barrio’s second large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art, La Trienal 2024.
Erin Cluley Gallery is a contemporary art gallery representing emerging, mid-career, and established artists from Dallas and the United States. The gallery presents a provocative program of artists working in both traditional and alternative forms including painting, sculpture, new media, photography, sculptural installation and public intervention. In 2014, Erin Cluley Gallery ignited a creative movement in West Dallas acting as a hub for visual arts and community engagement. After nearly five years on Fabrication Street, the gallery has moved its operation to Riverbend – a development in Dallas’ Design District celebrating the intersection between culture and commerce. From April 2021 to November 2024, Cluley opened and operated Cluley Projects – a satellite location in West Dallas acting as an incubator space focusing on regional artists and providing a platform for discovery and mentorship.”
Reception: April 9, 2025 | 6–9 pm
150 Manufacturing Street, Suite 210
Dallas , 75212 Texas
214-538-1148
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