Miguel Arzabe

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://www.miguelarzabe.net

City / State: San Francisco, CA

  Miguel Arzabe’s colorful woven paintings are a remix of European and Indigenous cultures that draw from the textile tradition of his Bolivian heritage. His process begins by creating acrylic paintings on canvas that reference the Western canon of modernist abstract painting. These works are cut into strips, which he weaves together by hand. Arzabe’s unique weaving patterns, a result of both planning and improvisation, are inspired by Andean motifs and symbology rooted in the oldest active textile tradition in the world. Simultaneously, his patterns also resemble low-res pixelated digital content. Arzabe brings together the cultural differences present in his work for a dynamic, contentious, and reciprocal conversation.