Esteban Cabeza de Baca
Esteban Cabeza de Baca (b. 1985, San Ysidro, California) is an American painter of who lives and works between Queens, New York, and the Southwest United States. He numbers among his influences San Ysidro, the liminal border town of his youth, and his parents, whose intersectional political awareness and respect for human dignity led them to shelter migrants during his youth.
Cabeza de Baca’s work entwines layers of graffiti, landscape, and pre Columbian pictographs in ways that confound Cartesian single-point perspective. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Art, Cooper Union (2010) and Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University (2014). He has had solo exhibitions at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (2025); Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2023); The Momentary, Arkansas (2022); Boers-Li Gallery, New York(2019); and Kunstfort Vijfhuizen, Amsterdam (2019). He has participated group exhibitions at MCA San Diego, California (2025); Museo Del Barrio, New York (2024); Armory Center for Arts, Pasadena (2023); the Drawing Center, New York (2019). Cabeza de Baca’s works are part of the permanent collections of Harvard University, the North Dakota Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Parrish Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum and Williams College Museum of Art.
Esteban Cabeza de Baca '14, Solstice
News
Columbia students, alumni, and faculty are making their presence known at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the world’s premiere art fairs. Upwards of twenty Columbia affiliates will have their work presented in connection with the fair’s wide array of platforms.
Twenty Columbia visual artists, including two faculty members and nineteen alumni, will exhibit work at the 2019 Art Basel and other associated art fairs in Miami during the first week of December.