Esteban Cabeza de Baca: Ancestral Dreams

For the MoMA PS1 Plaza Mural, Esteban Cabeza de Baca (b. 1985, San Diego) debuts a work that weaves together Mesoamerican iconography, labor histories, and speculative futures. The work envisions a rupture in the physical wall, opening into a dimension where for the artist, advocacy for migrant communities is inseparable from the protection of the land. Drawing from the ongoing United Farm Workers movement and tenets of Liberation Theology, which originated in Latin America in the late 1960s and drew from Marxist thought to address poverty and other forms of oppression, Cabeza de Baca anchors the composition with syncretic iconography of resistance and survival: a black eagle, hands entwined with prayer beads, and a sunburst of divine protection, amongst others. Collapsing chronologies, these motifs are interwoven with atmospheric abstractions and totemic references to the Three Sisters, deities of sustenance central to sustenance in indigenous cultures across the Americas, symbolized through corn, beans, and squash. Layered with nods to Mexican Muralism, the Works Progress Administration, and the local history of 5Pointz, the mural reframes the public plaza as a site of social advocacy and communal imagining.

Esteban Cabeza de Baca is a painter who lives and works between Queens, New York, and the Southwestern United States. His work has been exhibited at venues such as MoCA Tucson (2023), The Drawing Center (2019), the Royal Palace Amsterdam (2018), the Yale University School of Sacred Music (2017), and the Leroy Neiman Art Center (2014, 2015), among others. Cabeza de Baca has received numerous grants and awards, including a Civitella Ranieri Visual Art Fellowship (2024), a NYFA Painting Fellowship (2021), a Henk en Victoria de Heus Fellowship (2018), a Stokroos Foundation Grant (2017), a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award (2014), a Stern Fellowship (2013), and a Robert Gamblin Painting Grant (2013). He received a BFA from Cooper Union, School of the Arts in 2010 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2014.