Maker: Sarita Westrup
by Roseanne Pereira
March 11, 2021
Weaver and sculptor Sarita Westrup was in high school in the Rio Grande Valley when she watched the PBS show Craft in America and first saw a loom on the screen. “I learned that craft was something in the world, and I wanted to be a part of it somehow,” she says. At the time, Westrup hadn’t taken a formal art class and didn’t know about looms, but she remembers thinking, “I’ll do whatever to get on that loom that I saw on television.”
Westrup credits Ann Coddington Rast, who was a visiting artist when Westrup was in graduate school, with teaching her how weaving could become a three-dimensional form. Being exposed to Chicano art history and developing a formal understanding of the aesthetics of where she grew up also deeply influenced Westrup. Rasquache, for example, was a term that put a name to what she knew: “making use of what you have—to create something out of nothing.” One of Westrup’s sources of early inspiration for her art was dollar stores.
Being raised so close to Mexico and by parents of Mexican descent compelled Westrup to examine her identity. “I grew up on the border, not understanding my Americanness very clearly,” says Westrup. When she started making art, identity and geography kept showing up as themes. She often uses some combination of materials—like bottles, arches, eggs, and cement—to explore the borderlands she’s from. She traces her love of textiles to the border’s souvenir culture. “As a kid, we would go to Mexico, and I would come back with a little tela, a little purse, something we could afford…something I could keep and remember.”
“For me these water bottles started as objects to represent folks we had lost in the desert. When Zeke gave me them, I saw them as markers,” she says. Unlike the original containers, Westrup’s sculptures lack the ability to hold water—similar, she says, to how “the United States is not able to nourish our immigrant community.”
The way she combines different materials reflects both the joy and suffering that exist in the borderlands. “My work comes from a place of personal experience, a way for me to reflect on my home. It’s not always based on data, numbers, or news.” And, just as the border is a place of contradiction, she says, “The work holds all of that contradiction inside of it.”