Shared Ground
A Two-Artist Show Exploring Contemporary Basketry
with Lewis Prosser and Sarita Westrup
January 8 - February 21, 2026

Opening Reception: Superhouse
120 Walker Street, 6R New York, NY 10013
Thursday, January 8, 6 - 8 PM
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 12 - 6 PM


Superhouse is pleased to present Shared Ground, a two-artist exhibition bringing together the sculptural basketry of Sarita Westrup and Lewis Prosser—two artists who transform inherited craft traditions into living acts of storytelling, ritual, and repair. On view from January 8 through February 21, 2026, Shared Ground stages a transatlantic conversation between South Texas and South Wales, tracing how each artist weaves identity and environment into their material practices.

Though separated by geography, Westrup from the borderlands of South Texas, Prosser from the landscapes of Wales and the Westcountry, both artists work at the intersection of basketry and storytelling, using their hands to tangle together histories both personal and collective. For each, the basket is a conduit for memory, place, and possibility.

Westrup’s sculptural baskets and free-flowing hanging forms translate her Mexican-American identity and the material languages of the Rio Grande Valley into tactile meditations on border, belonging, and transformation. Working through traditional basketry and dyeing techniques, she employs cochineal-dyed reeds, woven membranes, and bound sculptural structures to explore permeability and protection. Her practice bridges inherited craft traditions with experimental processes, binding natural and synthetic materials to evoke the fluid boundaries between land, body, and culture. In her hands, weaving becomes an act of empathy and reclamation, a way of mapping belonging across shifting terrain.

Prosser approaches basketry as both sculptural language and performative event, drawing on the craft techniques and cultural traditions of the British Isles to animate the social life of objects. His practice blends meticulous craftsmanship with playful improvisation and embodied performance, celebrating ideas of ritual, heritage, and humour while inviting moments of joyful disruption. Treating weaving as a vehicle for connection and exchange, his speculative forms link region, community, and custom—balancing levity with sincerity.

In dialogue, their practices reveal weaving as a living knowledge system, rooted yet restless, ceremonial yet unconventional. Shared Ground explores how tradition, when re-embodied through contemporary art, becomes a tool for empathy and reinvention, a way to build connection across borders, disciplines, and time.

An accompanying essay by Janet Koplos situates the exhibition within the evolving discourse of global craft and the politics of place. A leading critic and historian of the field, Koplos is the author of Contemporary Japanese Sculpture (1990) and What Makes a Potter: Traditional Pottery in America Today (2019), and co-author of Makers: A History of American Studio Craft (2010) and Contemporary Basketry: New Directions from Contemporary Artists Worldwide (2025). She has contributed to numerous publications and catalogues, taught at major art schools, including Parsons, Pratt, UArts, and RISD, and was, for 18 years, a staff editor at Art in America. Recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Warhol Foundation’s Art Writers Grant, she lives and works in New York City.