How does a Brooklyn artist imagine both her past and future? After a decade of hard-fought accomplishments in New York City, artist Marela Zacarías completes a large-scale project while anticipating the arrival of her first child. Leaving behind a career painting public murals, Zacarías moved to the city hungry for artistic growth, and completed an MFA at Hunter College, shifting her practice towards a more satisfying form of personal expression. “Grad school put me upside down,” she says, “It really pushed me to find out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. And I’m glad, because now I feel like I can say a lot more things through my own language.” The fruits of Zacarías’s labor are evident in her Bedford-Stuyvesant studio: the artist, along with her husband, Weston Pew, and a team of assistants, are hard at work creating the undulating sculptural and painterly forms that have become the artist’s signature. The new work—a commission for the William Vale Hotel—reveals the historical evolution of neighborhoods like Williamsburg, where the hotel is currently under construction.
From the series, "New York Close Up"