The Queue: John Paul Morabito

A high school teacher introduced John Paul Morabito to weaving, unwittingly setting them on their path as an artist.

Since then, the Kent, Ohio–based artist and professor has fashioned a career on the loom, weaving exuberant, shiny textiles that exalt queer aesthetics and resistance. Morabito uses materials such as gold-leaf thread and glass beads in their work, imbuing their tapestries with glamour and heft. “My weaving transubstantiates queer embodiment into flamboyant tapestries that channel splendor, sensuality, sacrament, eroticism, metaphor, mourning, and protest into glittering abstractions that reach for the promise of queer futurity,” they say. The recipient of a prestigious 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, Morabito also edited Weaving Beyond the Binary, a special issue of Textile: Cloth and Culture, and their work is widely collected by museums and collectors. They are the head of textiles at Kent State University. Morabito’s new show, Take Me to Heaven, runs at Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Los Angeles from January 18 to February 22.

The works in your upcoming show Take Me to Heaven at Patricia Sweetow Gallery reference Sylvester, a legendary gay and genderqueer disco artist. Tell us about how you take inspiration and influence from music. 

I’ve been reaching for the feeling created by the sad gay disco songs of artists like Sylvester and Donna Summer. There is the thrumming beat, the rapid electronic percussion, the haunting falsetto wail.… Your heart breaks but you keep dancing. I bring these rhythms with me into the studio. Within the matrix of the loom, I engage ecstatic improvisation as a methodology to move beyond language and access the queer imaginary. I see this tectonic improvisation as akin to dancing. 

Late at night in queer bars, bodies move in response to the pulsing beats of disco, house, and pop. There, ecstasy, glitter, and sweat open pathways to a place beyond the self. This is reborn at my loom, where the rhythm of the tectonic grid is the beat that I follow. Working in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, I am retracing the queer resistance born in the urban discos of a prior generation. As social and political forces once again seek to eradicate queer people, I, like those who came before me, reach for the promise of queer futurity.