A new installation at the Kemper Museum explores the history of Kansas City's lesbian utopia

Peruvian American artist Sarah Zapata, who's based in New York, combines sculptural and textile techniques to create a site-specific installation for Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s eighth annual Atrium Project.
New York artist Sarah Zapata was on hand Wednesday morning to offer advice as exhibitions coordinator Sam Maloney and assistant preparator Darby Rolf draped a purple shag carpet over a ladder in the atrium of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Zapata’s textile pieces hung like flags, banners, and quilts along a 20-by-20-foot section of wall, painted with bold stripes of lavender.

The museum commissioned the Peruvian American artist for its eighth annual Atrium Project. In the wall-mounted piece, Zapata used traditional handicrafts of hand-weaving, latch-hooked shag, and sewing, combined with sculptural and textile techniques, to create the site-specific installation exploring local lesbian histories.

In "Sarah Zapata: So the roots be known," Zapata pays homage to Womontown, a collective of primarily queer women who established a community in Kansas City's Longfellow neighborhood in the late 1980s, and the national lesbian magazine The Ladder, one of the earliest lesbian publications in the country.