Pictured above: UC Santa Barbara artist Sarah Rosalena stands with “Threading the Infinite: Omnidirectional Terrain” in LACMA's new David Geffen Galleries. Photo by Damien Maloney.
The associate professor of art’s 27-foot textile has been installed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries.
UC Santa Barbara artist Sarah Rosalena has created a 27-foot textile commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for its new David Geffen Galleries.
“Threading the Infinite: Omnidirectional Terrain” (2025) is Rosalena's largest textile work to date. The piece is installed in one of the building's ground-level spaces as part of LACMA's permanent collection.
Sarah Rosalena, an associate professor of computational craft and haptic media in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Art, combines traditional handweaving with digital and industrial technologies. For the commission, she used handweaving patterns to distort computer-generated satellite images of planetary terrain, then translated the designs into woven structures 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 while examining how mapping and imaging technologies shape ideas about land, borders, climate change, colonialism and resource extraction.
“This work becomes a disruption,” Rosalena said. “It really challenges the grid and these older cosmologies.”
The commission grew from Rosalena's work with the LACMA Art + Tech Lab and years of conversations about textiles, technology and the representation of land. LACMA is featuring the work in “50 Works 50 Weeks,” a series highlighting pieces that will be displayed in the David Geffen Galleries.