Esteban Cabeza de Baca

Esteban Cabeza de Baca (born 1985) is an American painter who lives and works between Queens, New York, and the US Southwest, whose abstract landscapes explore environmental and border issues.

He received a BFA from Cooper Union, School of the Arts in 2010 and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2014.

Biography Early life Esteban Cabeza de Baca was born in 1985 in San Ysidro, California, at the U.S.–Mexico border. His father and mother were active in the Brown Berets, as well as the Chicano, American Indian, and Black Panther movements. His father was a historian and his mother was a union organizer.

Professional life Cabeza de Baca teaches at Purchase College. His topics include Colonization and Color, the Generated Image, Painting Identity, Plein-Air to the Studio: Landscape and Figure.

"Beaver Moon", Acrylic on canvas, 6x18ft, 2022

"Winter Solstice", Acrylic on canvas, 5ftx5ft, 2020

Artistic style Cabeza de Baca employs disparate painterly techniques in his work, mixing graffiti, landscape, and pre-Columbian pictographs—confounding Cartesian single-point perspective. His influences extend from petroglyphs to Jackson Pollock, who was in turn influenced by Navajo sand painting. "I want to excavate the impact of colonial acts like that," says Cabeza de Baca. "To go farther with the drip than Pollock did and collide the infinite with the everyday."

Cabeza de Baca regularly begins his works en plein air, recasting the act of landscape painting, that was a favored surveying tool of colonizers. In Tsankawi (2018), the artist depicts the Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico viewed from a Pueblo cave.

Exhibitions His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, such as: Bluer Than a Sky Weeping Bones, Gaa Gallery, (2016, Provincetown, MA); Unlearn, Fons Welters Gallery, (2018, Amsterdam); Verano, with Heidi Howard, Gaa Gallery, (2018, Wellfleet, MA); Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Gaa Projects (2019, Cologne); Worlds without Borders, Boers-Li Gallery (2019, New York); and Esteban Cabeza de Baca – Life is one drop in limitless oceans ... , Kunstfort Vijfhuizen, (2019, Amsterdam). He has participated in over 15 group exhibitions at venues such as the Leroy Neiman Art Center (2014, 2015, New York), the Yale University School of Sacred Music (2017, New Haven, CT), the Dutch Royal Palace (2018, Amsterdam, Netherlands), the Drawing Center (2019, New York), and Let Earth Breathe at The Momentary (2022) among others. Recent solo exhibitions include Alma at Garth Greenan Gallery (2023), Cesar's Angels at Parker Gallery (2024), and Esteban Cabeza de Baca: Memories of the Future at San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (2025).

Collections Cabeza de Baca's works are held in the following permanent collections:

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, North Dakota Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, California Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts