Sarah Rosalena creates monumental textile work for LACMA’s new galleries

Artist Sarah Rosalena has created a 27-foot tapestry commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for permanent display in its new David Geffen Galleries.

"'Threading the Infinite: Omnidirectional Terrain' (2025) is really a textile that points to land and cosmos in a lot of different directions," Rosalena, an associate professor of computational craft and haptic media at UC Santa Barbara, told Alexander Schneider, associate editor collections for LACMA. "And a lot of that also is a way to look at weaving and how it operates in its origin, because it is something that is 3D - threads go over and under, up and down, soaring, hovering over spaces. So in many ways it almost resembles a terrain."

Rosalena's largest textile work to date, the piece will be installed in one of the building's ground-level spaces. Opened to the public in 2026, the galleries house LACMA's permanent collection.

For the past two decades, Rosalena has developed methods that combine craft and technology. Her work also examines the role of mapping and imaging technologies in colonialism and resource extraction. For the LACMA commission, she used her handweaving patterns to distort computer-generated satellite images of planetary terrains and translate them into woven structures. The tapestry was produced on an industrial-scale jacquard-rapier loom.

The work has no fixed orientation. Its layered composition connects the appearance of terrain with the physical structure of weaving.

"As a handweaver who's very interested in examining textile from digital media, I really wanted to make a work that really invoked the terrain, but that also put land and cosmos in all these different directions," Rosalena said. "For visualizing space, gazing at the cosmos or looking above means to be grounded on Earth, and there's an exchange between transmitting and receiving from above and below, of threads going up and down, over and under, and visualizing a planet. When looking at the work, there are no directions, there's no compass, therefore no boundaries or borders. It is, in woven form, an attempt to break geospatial edges because it has its own form of layers and strata, of different sediment and minerals."

The tapestry also addresses the use of technology to observe and represent land.

"The work is really a commentary on technology and what it means to be making work with technology at a time of with the rise of climate change, violence due to borders, future colonization," Rosalena said. "So here it's really a way to point back at us, to see how we understand land, understand terrain, understand Earth, future Earths. So much of this work is about speaking to power and how we think about land, visualizing land in multiple directions - thinking about Earth, weather, climate change, colonialism, and all the extractive technologies that are involved in how we see and understand land."

"This work becomes a disruption. It really challenges the grid and these older cosmologies," said Rosalena, who has worked with the LACMA Art + Tech Lab since 2019.

"I grew up in Los Angeles and was exposed to technology, learning textiles from my mother and grandmother and master weavers across the Southwest. I grew up with a very traditional weaving background, but my grandfather also worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I've always been very interested in the technologies that have made Los Angeles what it is today."

The commission grew out of Rosalena's work with LACMA and years of conversations about textiles, technology and how land is represented.

"This textile is really a result of many years of being in conversation about how textiles could operate as a form of disruption to the otherworldly in power: who visualizes, sees, names and carries land, whether it's humans, non-humans, life, or death, and Earth becoming terraformed or us having to leave Earth," she said. "It is about life and non-life, but at the same time, thinking of it in terms of an infinite planetary landscape."

LACMA is featuring "Threading the Infinite: Omnidirectional Terrain" in "50 Works 50 Weeks," a series highlighting works that will be displayed in the David Geffen Galleries.

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