Public Commissions

Fantasîa

2020

steven-and-william-ladd-fantasia-art-in-embassies

Commissioned by: U.S. Department of State, Art in Embassies Program, for the United States Embassy, Asunción, Paraguay
Medium: Archival board, fiber, trimmings, trinkets, pins, papier-mâché, shredded paper, wheat starch, glue, dye, MDF frame
Dimensions: 66½ × 66½ × 3½ in.
Photograph: Courtesy of the artists
Created in: New York, New York
Artists’ Registration Number: 2020.052.001
Exhibition History: Fantasîa, United States Embassy, Asunción, Paraguay, 2020. Curator: Welmoed Laanstra

The project became an opportunity to reflect on both connection and difference, to explore parallels between the textile heritage of Paraguay and our own process-driven practice.

Fantasîa emerged as a meditation on this shared language of making: an exploration of our varied studio processes, scrollwork, beadwork, papier-mâché, and pinwork, brought together in a unified composition. Installed among works by both American and Paraguayan artists in the embassy’s permanent collection, the piece embodies the Art in Embassies program’s belief that art can serve as a bridge between cultures, carrying empathy across borders through craftsmanship and care.

Commission Overview
In 2020, curator Welmoed Laanstra of the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies Program invited us to create a permanent commission for the United States Embassy in Asunción, Paraguay, after seeing our work at the Parrish Art Museum. We were thrilled to learn about the program and its mission, to engage artists from the United States and from each host country in building collections that foster cultural dialogue and understanding.

As we began to research Paraguay, we were deeply inspired by its rich craft traditions and how closely they aligned with our own dedication to materiality, repetition, and the handmade.

Artistic Approach
The commission coincided with the onset of the global pandemic, preventing travel to Paraguay. Our research turned inward, focusing on the country’s celebrated ñandutí lace, a hand-woven technique of circular motifs reminiscent of spider webs. Its intricacy, patience, and rhythmic repetition echoed the qualities that have long defined our own process.

Some trays are filled with tightly rolled fabric trimmings, recalling our collaborative scroll works. Others form densely textured fields of papier-mâché, studded with thousands of glass beads, trinkets, and pins that catch the light like constellations. In other sections, elliptical voids are cut into dyed papier-mâché to reveal the black tray beneath; around each void, hundreds of pins, some bare, others tipped with beads, encircle the edges in metallic halos, creating zones of light, tension, and release.

Together, these individual compositions form a single, unified field, a meditation on material, rhythm, and the balance between fragility and endurance.

Drawing from this inspiration, we designed Fantasîa as a 6 × 6 grid of thirty-six black-painted wooden trays, each a self-contained composition exploring a different facet of our studio practice. Within the trays, we developed variations of scrollwork, papier-mâché, and bead-laden surfaces in tones of white and blue, a palette inspired by sky, water, and serenity.

Engagement and Impact
Although created during a time of global isolation, Fantasîa was imagined as a work of connection and reciprocity, one culture reaching toward another through shared craft languages. Installed permanently in the U.S. Embassy in Asunción, it exists as a quiet yet luminous dialogue between American and Paraguayan makers, between repetition and variation, between touch and distance.

During a later visit to the Art in Embassies archives in Washington, D.C., we were struck by the vast lineage of artists who had participated in the program, thousands of works spanning decades and continents. To see Fantasîa enter that lineage underscored the enduring power of material care as a form of diplomacy.

For us, Fantasîa affirms that beauty and empathy transcend borders. It speaks to how the handmade object, built slowly, thread by thread, bead by bead, can become both structure and bridge, revealing the universal language of craft as a form of connection.

Context and Legacy
Fantasîa expands our exploration of repetition and handcraft into a broader conversation about cultural exchange. Rooted in our own vocabulary of scrolls, beads, pins, and layered surfaces, it also reflects the influence of Paraguay’s textile traditions—particularly the intricate patience and geometric rhythm of ñandutí lace.

Each of the 36 trays functions like a small world unto itself, a meditation on how material and gesture can carry memory across distance. Together, they form a constellation of techniques and ideas, part sculpture, part textile, part landscape, united through a shared devotion to process and care.