At the the Met’s Cloisters museum in New York, there’s an amazing selection of tapestries. One room contains a series of tapestries called The Hunt for the Unicorn, or The Unicorn Tapestries. Unicorns rendered in cartoons or plushies are one thing — these tapestries are another. The tapestries bring out the mystery and strangeness of the unicorn in overwhelming fashion. The bestiary tapestries of Miguel Arzabe attempt to re-create that experience. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:
In Miguel Arzabe’s bestiaries, wide-eyed owls, pink pumas, and whale sharks emerge from planes of woven acrylic. The Oakland-based artist draws on his Bolivian roots and Andean textile traditions as he laces strips of sliced paintings into landscapes occupied by creatures both real and mythological. Arzabe’s most recent body of work, Animales Familiares, brings these beasts to the fore through vivid planes of blurred Earth and sky.
The artist begins each piece by reproducing a pair of modernist paintings, which he cuts into thin lengths and weaves together. Most often unrecognizable in their new forms—Rothko’s clear influence in the color-blocked “Tiburón Ballena” makes the piece an outlier—the replicas root the works in Western art history. Arzabe distorts these references, though, by layering the paintings into new landscapes, intertwining the varying geographies and cultures to allow both to coexist.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
