Artist Sarah Rosalena featured in six Getty PST ART shows, gains spot in LACMA’s collection

Computational craft artist Sarah Rosalena is set to make a significant impact in the upcoming Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide with her work being featured in six exhibitions across Southern California. The region’s landmark arts event, PST ART (previously Pacific Standard Time), creates opportunities for civic dialogue around some of the most urgent problems of our time by exploring past and present connections between art and science in a series of exhibitions, public programs and other resources. 

Rosalena, an assistant professor of computational craft in UCSB’s Department of Art, researches and creates using machine learning, digital fabrication, ceramics, beading and weaving.  

In a recent episode of UCSB’s video series, “Research in 60 Seconds,” Rosalena discusses computational craft, a hybrid practice between analog and digital techniques. “This means that the art I make is done by hand and by machine,” she said, “Computational craft allows me to use Indigenous handcrafts, like textiles, beadwork and clay, at the same time I’m using new technologies, like, 3D printing, neural networks and digital weaving. By analyzing these kinds of hybrid digital/analog forms, I am able to question the boundaries between the ancient and the futuristic, the handmade and the automated, and the earthly and the other-worldly.”

Rosalena, who is Wixárika and based in Los Angeles, has built a reputation for breaking boundaries through her hybrid forms rooted in Indigenous cosmologies, re-interpreted through digital tools and her hand. Her experimental practice reconsiders craft in the context of art history and technology and suggests new possibilities as we attempt to define ourselves to innovation and computation.  

Her work will be presented at PST ART in the following shows: 

• From the Ground Up: Nurturing Diversity in Hostile Environments (Aug. 9 - Feb. 23, 2025, The Armory Center for the Arts)
• Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice (Sept 14 - Jan 5, 2025, Hammer Museum)
• INVISIBILITY: POWERS & PERILS (Sept 14, 2024 - Feb 22, 2025, Oxy Arts)
• All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (Sept 14, 2024 - Feb 23, 2025, REDCAT)
• Sangre de Nopal (Oct 6, 2024 - Jan 12, 2025, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara)
• Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures (Oct 20, 2024 - Mar 2, 2025, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA))

Additionally, she has been selected for New York’s El Museo del Barrio’s Trienal (October 2024, a major recognition in Rosalena’s artistic journey. This exciting period is further highlighted by LACMA’s recent acquisition of a third piece from her studio, which will be featured in “Cosmologies Across Cultures.”

Rosalena’s presence in these prominent exhibitions underscores her rising influence in the art world, blending art and science in ways that challenge and inspire.