SARITA WESTRUP •   Dallas, TX

Sarita Westrup is a contemporary artist and sculptural basket weaver originally from South Texas, currently based in Western North Carolina. Drawing upon my bicultural heritage, her work investigates themes of migration, identity, and the interplay between personal and collective histories. Employing materials such as reed, mortar, wire, paint, and cochineal ink, Westrup produces mixed-media sculptures that recontextualize everyday objects through the lenses of cultural memory.

Westrup holds an MFA in Fiber Arts from the University of North Texas (2016). Her work has been exhibited at prominent institutions nationwide, including El Museo del Barrio (New York), the Penland Gallery (North Carolina), and the Chautauqua Institution (New York). In 2023, she was honored with a Nasher Artist Grant and recognized as a semi-finalist for the Nest Heritage Craft Prize. In 2025, she received a $15,000 grant from the Center for Craft’s West North Carolina Crafting Futures cohort.

Having recently completed a one-year residency at the Penland School of Craft in Western North Carolina, Westrup currently resides and maintains her studio practice in Burnsville, NC. She is represented by Erin Cluley Gallery in Dallas, TX.

"Rooted in sculptural basketry techniques, my work explores containment, memory, and transformation. While baskets are traditionally meant to hold, my sculptural pieces resist serving their expected function. Where there might typically be an opening, I build a ridge—a mountain line, a waterline. The form undulates and waves, with only small, porous points of entry. It invites closeness but not utility.

When I weave, the materials are soft and malleable. But through the application of mortar—a mixture of cement, sand, lime, and adhesive—the piece shifts into an in-between state: somewhere between rigid and collapsible, grounded and vulnerable.

“Pair (Blue)” exists between blue and violet. Blue like tarps after a hurricane, like plastic jugs of water used in emergencies, like the glassware from Mexico, where my parents are from. It’s also the blue of dumpsters collecting debris and recycling bins meant for transformation. The violet comes from cochineal ink, tied to both Indigenous and colonial history of my family’s country. Together, these colors form a veil—a filter I see through as a child of immigrants.

If you look closely, you’ll see bugs trapped in the mortar—tiny, accidental remains. They echo my own porous experience growing up on the Texas–Mexico border: able to cross, to know my family’s homeland, but always aware of the fracture. This work brings past and present into conversation. It lives between memory and material, containment and openness."