Esteban Cabeza de Baca
New York, NY
ARTIST STATEMENT
Cabeza de Baca’s childhood hometown
of San Ysidro virtually straddled the U.S.–Mexico border, as did his family.
His father and Mexican-born mother were active participants in the Brown
Berets, as well as the Chicano, American Indian, and Black Panther movements.
Of Mexican and Native American heritage himself, Cabeza de Baca was heavily
influenced by the border town’s liminal position, and by his parents, whose
intersectional political awareness and respect for human dignity led them to
shelter “illegal” immigrants in their basement during his youth. In his work,
Cabeza de Baca employs a broad range of painterly techniques, entwining layers
of graffitti, landscape, and pre-Columbian pictographs in ways that confound
Cartesian single-point perspective.
BIO
Born in San Ysidro, CA in 1985, Esteban Cabeza de Baca received a BFA from Cooper Union, School of the Arts in 2010 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2014. He currently lives and works in Queens, NY.