When Cosmos and Earth Are Woven Together

A 27-foot tapestry now stands as a permanent acquisition in the David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Created by artist Sarah Rosalena, the work transforms NASA satellite imagery of Mars and Earth using Indigenous weaving patterns—it is not merely an oversized textile, but a complex manifesto where technology, craft, and Indigenous knowledge systems converge.

Why This Work Matters

As art institutions increasingly collaborate with Indigenous artists under the banner of diversity, Rosalena's LACMA commission takes a different approach. Rather than consuming tradition as material, she dismantles the colonial gaze embedded in satellite cartography and capture technologies through the logic of the loom. The surface appears to 'glitch'—an intentional refusal of digital smoothing that disrupts geospatial boundaries as an act of visual resistance.

The fact that LACMA—the largest art museum in the American West—selected this as a permanent acquisition signals that the institutional art world is beginning to seriously engage with the intersection of craft, technology, and Indigenous knowledge.

Two Legacies, One Loom

Rosalena grew up in northeast Los Angeles. Her grandfather worked as an astrophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), while her maternal Wixárika heritage passed down weaving traditions learned from her mother and grandmother. These two lineages—science and textile—became the foundation of her practice, which she now deepens academically as an associate professor of computational craft and haptic media at UC Santa Barbara.

Over 20 years of practice, she has evolved weaving from craft into a methodology for understanding the world. "I was always fascinated by cameras, media, capture, and resolution—but I tried to understand them from a weaving standpoint," she says. Just as textiles are formed through the binary crossing of warp and weft, digital images are composed of pixel grids—this structural analogy runs through the heart of her work.

12,000 Warp Threads, an Imagined Planetary Landscape

This LACMA commission is her largest work to date. Over 12,000 warp threads interlace to realize an 'imagined planetary landscape' derived from altered satellite imagery of Mars and Earth. Soft mohair evokes atmospheric haze; reddish metallic yarns recall the Martian surface; deep oceanic blues complete the composition.

The work was produced on an industrial-scale jacquard-rapier loom, one of only a few in the world large enough for this scale. Repurposing equipment designed for industrial production as a tool for artistic experimentation is itself consistent with Rosalena's methodology—breaking boundaries. She underwent dozens of rounds of sampling and experimentation to achieve the effects she sought.

Implications [Expert Analysis]

Rosalena's practice is likely to resonate ever more widely inside and outside the art world. In an era when artificial intelligence (AI) automates image generation and mapping technologies grow increasingly precise, the questions she raises—whose gaze captures terrain, and what does that capture erase—increasingly echo debates in technology ethics.

The reappraisal of textile craft as a mainstream contemporary art medium is also likely to accelerate. Artists worldwide—from Simone Leigh to Tord Boontje to Rana Sinai—are adopting weaving and fiber as conceptual languages, and institutional demand is growing. Within this current, Rosalena's commission is likely to be recorded as a case that institutionally affirms that craft and technology, Indigenous knowledge and science, can engage as equals.

'I'm interested in breaking binaries, barriers, and boundaries'—her words will continue to resonate as both an artistic manifesto and a sharp critique of the ways data and algorithms classify the world.