Sara Hubbs & Sarah Zapata: between gravity and ground at MOCA Tucson!

I am so very excited that I have my first two-person museum show opened February 2nd at MOCA Tucson in Tucson, AZ. I am honored to show work alongside artist Sarah Zapata and to have the opportunity to work with curator Alexis Wilkinson.

Here’s an excerpt of Alexis’ writing from MOCA Tucson’s website:

“Between gravity and ground is an exhibition that features glass and textile works by artists Sara Hubbs and Sarah Zapata who combine craft-based techniques with experimental processes to create objects that merge familiar and ambiguous. Together, their artworks converge in a constellation of strange forms, vibrant colors, and an abundance of textures to conjure a space of fantasy and possibility.

Sara Hubbs takes an intuitive approach to working with glass, using improvisational processes to produce collections of tactilely-rich objects. She often makes vessels  – containers that map the contours of absence – to consider the act of holding space within caretaking and grief. Her works are formed with objects that reflect her roles as parent and kin such as medical tubing, architectural features, toy packaging, bows, and body parts. Attending to the ways we shape one another, she uses multi-step casting, slumping, and firing methods that alter her material references, resulting in varied states of legibility, distortion, and abstraction. The soft curves and hard surfaces of her sculptures evoke multiple associations such as shiny oversized candies and draping fabric, snaking riverbeds and translucent topographies, or brightly hued internal organs and mysterious organic matter.”

Check out installation images here.

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by an AMPLIFY CREATIVITY GRANT from the ARTEZONA Foundation; University of Arizona Institute for LGBTQ+ Studies; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Arizona Commission on the Arts; and MOCA Tucson’s Board of Trustees, Ambassador Council, and Members. In-kind support provided by Rune Wines and Exo Roast Coffee, Co.

Recipient of THE AMPLIFY CREATIVITY GRANT from ARTEZONA!

Great news…I am a recipient of THE AMPLIFY CREATIVITY GRANT from the ARTEZONA FOUNDATION! I am very grateful for this grant and the timing of it. This grant will help me expand my practice and make new work for my first museum show (more on that later). I can’t wait to share the work I’ve made with the support of ARTEZONA.

To find out more about this grant and the ARTEZONA FOUNDATION visit www.artezona.org

and follow on Instagram @artezonagallery and @artezona.foundation

New Glass Review 42

I haven’t done a News post in a while and I wanted to highlight some amazing things that happened this past year. My piece, “Weaning Fountain” was included in The Corning Museum of Glass’ yearly publication, New Glass Review 42!

From The Corning Museum of Glass: “New Glass Review is an annual exhibition-in-print featuring 100 of the most timely, innovative projects in glass produced during the year. It is curated from an open call for submissions by the curator of postwar + contemporary glass at The Corning Museum of Glass and a changing panel of guest curators. 

In 2020, 927 individuals and companies from 50 countries submitted 2,501 digital images. All entries, including those that were not selected for publication, are archived in the Museum's Rakow Research Library.”

Thank you to the curators: Susie J. Silbert, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Glass, The Corning Museum of Glass / Simón Ballen Botero, designer, Medellín, Colombia, and Amsterdam, Netherlands / Sarah Darro, independent curator and Gallery Manager, Center for Craft, Asheville, North Carolina / Erika Diamond, artist and Assistant Director of Galleries Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, New York 

Finalist: The Hopper Prize!!!!

I was stunned to find out I was chosen as a finalist for the Spring Hopper Prize! Thank you to the organization and also to the amazing jurors: Pamela Meadows, Curator at Boulder Museum of Art, and Jody Graf, Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1. Check out my online portfolio here!

In the Archives: The Pandemic Mother Map

Pandemic Mother Map during the early stages of Covid-19. It was funded by the “Pandemidiarios On the Border” grant program through the @confluencenter at The University of Arizona. Centered in the Sonoran Desert, the projects responded to living through Covid-19, in this particular place. Tucson Weekly and Alexandra Pere recently covered Pandemidiarios and my project was featured! The projects were also recently archived in the Special Collections at the library at the University of Arizona. You can see the project by clicking here.

Inspired by the story that my Great-Great-Grandmother emigrated from Altar, Sonora, Mexico, to Phoenix during and ‘epidemic’, "Pandemic Mother Map" visualizes the cyclical nature of pandemics through the my own ancestral line across five generations, my families movement through the Sonoran Desert, and the occurrence of three global pandemics (epidemics) spanning 131 years.

This idea came about because of the burden the pandemic placed on mothers. I saw my friends and family struggling in different ways while reading about mothers leaving the workforce in record numbers. Personally, I had so many questions about how to help my child through Covid beyond homeschooling. “What did she need from me?” At the same time I was struggling with how to help my mother who was in the hospital in a different city. “How do I keep the people I love safe?” It was in those moments I thought about my Grandmothers, especially my most favorite human ever, my Grandma Preach and how incredibly strong she was. I kept thinking, this is not new, so why don’t we know what to do??? My relatives experienced epidemics and pandemics, the times they lived in saw the “Russian Flu”, smallpox, and the Flu of 1918 and yet, here I am. I became curious about the deeper time of Pandemics and the resulting movement of women across borders, in and out of certain sectors of society, and the deep and hidden work we do to care for others.