Art and Community with Margarita Cabrera

Margarita Cabrera is an artist and educator paralleling her work with others working with social engagement centered on social justice issues. Cabrera will share and discuss her collaborative works that exist at the intersection of art, craft, activism, and community-based learning and emphasize her concerns with social-political issues surrounding immigration, border politics, just work environments, and the importance of working with art to transform local communities. 

Bio: Margarita Cabrera received an MFA from Hunter College in New York, NY. Cabrera is an assistant professor at the Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Some of her most recent exhibitions include Unravel at the Barbican Museum in London, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Shape of Power at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a solo show at The McNay Museum of Art titled Blurring Borders, in San Antonio TX. Additional solo shows: entitled Margarita Cabrera: What Art Can Do at the Art League Houston, Houston, TX. Cabrera’s work was featured in the exhibit State of Mind: Art and American Democracy at the Moody Center, Rice University. Along with 80 artists in protest of Immigrant Incarceration in Nationwide skywriting campaign Cabrera participated in: In Plain Sight. At the Wellin Art Museum, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY Cabrera presented Margarita Cabrera: Space in Between; and PERILOUS BODIES, Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, NY. In New Orleans Margarita Cabrera presented by the Center of Southern Craft and Design at the Ogden Art Museum, as well as The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp at the New Orleans Prospect 4. Cabrera also was featured in The U.S.-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility at the Craft & Folk Art Museum and SITE LINES: much wider than a line in Santa Fe, NM. 

Cabrera’s work has been included in galleries such as, Jane Lombard Gallery, Talley Dunn Gallery, Ruiz-Healy, David Smith Gallery, Art 516Arts, Sara Meltzer Gallery, Walter Maciel Gallery, and Snyderman-Works. Her work has been included in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Kinder Building; The McNay Museum San Antonio; the Sweeney Art Center for Contemporary Art at the University of California, Riverside, the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, and El Museo del Barrio, NYC, LA County Museum of Art, CA, El Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City. In 2012 she was a recipient of the Knight Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC. Cabrera was also a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and presented a community public art sculpture commissioned by Lego at Discovery Green in Houston, Puentes Culturales. In 2019 Cabrera unveiled her public art community sculpture “Arbol de la Vida: Memorias y Voces de la Tierra” in San Antonio, Texas and named Texas Artist of the Year. In 2022, Cabrera’s work was exhibited at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, Phoenix Art Museum, and the McNay Museum of Art in San Antonio, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Kinder building.