Sara Prado

SAIC SHOWS 2022 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2022 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Master of Design in Designed Objects

Sara Prado is a multidisciplinary designer and researcher. She received her BA in Design from California State University Long Beach, and is a Master of Design in Designed Objects candidate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is also the recipient of the Merrill Golightly Scholarship.

Sara’s current work reflects her social practices, which explore intersectional and inclusive frameworks within feminism, craft, decoration, community, research, and curatorial work. Her work focuses on resisting western, eurocentric, and masculine influences that have dominated design, while exploring her own “in – between” Mexican American identity growing up in Los Angeles, California. By challenging these themes, she utilizes craft as a form of activism to navigate complex identities through object design.

My Spirituality, 2022, Metal, paint, and cord

My Spirituality, 2022, Velvet, and embroidery thread

My California, 2022, Linen, and embroidery thread

In Hybrid Identities: Crafting Chicanx Objects, Prado re-creates a memory of traditional Sunday dinners held at her grandmother’s house, filled with music and family photographs. She invites the community to sit on chairs crafted from experiences of her own non-linear identity, providing the opportunity for audiences to hold mindful discussions that contemplate their own ancestry, memories, and hybrid identities. Each chair is purposefully labored over; woven, wrapped, painted, deconstructed and embroidered in resistance of decoration as “women’s work”, “craft”, or “bad design”.

Conceptually, Prado is influenced by a rasquachismo framework that celebrates “bad design” as a means of empowerment in a capitalist society, which typically suppresses complex identities. By using ready-made folding chairs, she draws upon a vernacular which unites the “in-between” of other intersecting communities, and welcomes all identities to congregate.

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