Esteban Cabeza de Baca: Artistic Exploration

Good evening. I'm Kara Carmack, the exhibitions and public programs officer at the New York Studio School, and I'm honored to welcome you to our spring 2023 evening lecture series. We're thrilled to host tonight's artist talk entitled Four Dimensions by Esteban Cabeza de Baca. Before we begin, I would like to note The New York Studio School evening lecture series is free to the public with support in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding is generously provided by the Robert Lehman Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and individual donors. Please consider making a donation to help keep our evening lecture series free by clicking on the support button on our home page. Thanks to those of you joining us virtually and here on 8th Street. We'll reserve time at the end for Q&A with the audience. For those in the room, please raise your hand and we'll bring a microphone to you so our online audience can hear your question. For our Zoom audience, please submit your questions by clicking on the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Following the lecture, please join me and our guests downstairs in the clay room for light refreshments. Now I'm delighted to introduce our speaker this evening. Esteban Cabeza de Baca's childhood hometown of San Ysidro, California, virtually straddled the U.S.-Mexico border, as did his family. In his work, he employs a broad range of painterly techniques, entwining layers of graffiti, landscape, and pre-Columbian pictographs, in ways confounding cartesian single point perspective. Kabeza Dabaka's recent solo exhibitions include Let Earth Breathe, Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, Nepentla in Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, and Life is One Drop in Limitless Oceans in Kunstvoort 5000, the Netherlands. He received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2010 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2014. He currently lives and works in Queens, New York and is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery. Now please join me in offering a very warm welcome to Esteban. Hi guys, thank you so much for coming. I'll keep this as short and sweet as possible. So here we go. My name is Esteban. I'm an observational painter. My work starts by going outdoors, working directly in the southwest United States where I'm from. And then bringing those images back into my studio in New York City. And it's interesting, I use a projector. So, you know, in one sense, as you'll see in my slideshow, thinking about caves as a metaphor for a projector or timekeeping, ancient timekeeping devices, but then also a metaphor for how we see things and how we produce realities, how we sometimes objectify nature or how we can actually apprehend nature more authentically. So my ancestor Alvar Núñez Cavistavaca was part of, this is in 1527, part of the failed Panfilo de Narváez expedition, where he got shipwrecked and enslaved by Native American tribes like the Kapoké, Han, and Karankawa, and lived with them for about five to six years. And in that time, he taught Indigenous people. the ways in which they could acclimate to smallpox and also how to avoid colonial apprehensions. So over the course of time, he ended up gaining his freedom and traveling and trading and also faith healing. And then when he went to Mexico, as you can see on the map, he advocated to Spanish forces there in Nuevo, in the New World. uh for a grand alliance between indigenous and european nations but uh they didn't want that at all and um the european forces so he ended up becoming uh imprisoned later on in his life for trying to advocate for indigenous sovereignty so those are just some of like the uh predecessors to so my work um on the image on the left that's an image of cesar chavez my dad was a bodyguard for him uh when he after the Delano grape strike, but during the lettuce strike of organizing undocumented and documented laborers throughout the southwest for fair wages and bargaining in good faith with growers. On the right, my dad was also a bodyguard for Angela Davis at UCLA. So there's a lot of ideas in my work about liberation theology, that how do you practice charity, how do you start from the building blocks of community and work your way up towards representational justice and art, certain things about that I'm thinking about in my work. So this is where I was actually just here. I'm working on a documentary right now about my process. but um this is Tijuana side and then I was where my mom was born and we'd go here every weekend and then I was just born on the other side in San Cidrum which is a big ranching community and it's very lush you can just throw a seed down and it's things will grow it's not like in other parts of the border where it's more arid this is right next to the water so I think growing up this environment really shapes the way that I think about space, but then also stacking imagery and just ideas of creativity with very little means sometimes and making do with what you have. So this is some of the inspirations and of my work also is Jackson Pollock on the left and this Indian art of the United States exhibition from 1941 at MoMA. where they had Navajo sand painters almost in a zoological display for museum goers that could experience this. So I'm pretty sure that Pollock saw this and was inspired by some of his work. He even talks about it in some of his documentaries about his work. Can you guys all see this stuff? Is this good? Okay, cool. Another inspiration has been Salish Katooni tribe member, John Quick to See Smith, whose indigenous nations are from what we call Montana. And yeah, I think thinking about the ideas of land acknowledgements and even how right now we're on Lenape land, unceded territory, also to the Delaware nations and how, during like the French and Indian War, a lot of the Lenape people were forcibly removed off their land and eventually pushed along the Trail of Tears to places like Oklahoma, and how this is just a recurring policy of the United States. And this painting for me encompasses a lot of those ideas of holding on to your community, but holding on to your sense of self even when things are taken away from you. And when I'm teaching art, there's this nomad art manifesto that John Quick to See Smith teaches that how do you make art with biodegradable materials, how can it be recycled. but the last two is how can you make art that's convenient for countries which may be disbanding or reforming or for the new age of diaspora so just thinking about where we are as a country with global warming and really addressing that and i think artists we we have the capability of imagining futures and imagining and keeping hope alive even if that sounds corny um i still think about that possibilities with art making um so i lived in europe i'm going to start around 2017. I lived in Europe for two years. I was on residency in Amsterdam, which you'll see in a second. But I got to see a lot of art from my homeland from Mexico, but then art from South America all the way across the waters in Europe. And I think for me, I kept on wanting to build off of that or think about ideas of repatriating objects. through the art of making things and bringing it back into the public and discourse around why and how these objects got to where they're at now. When I would go on trips from living in Europe and coming back home, I would go to these cave sites for the first few years like 2015, 2016 as like an adult and start to think about how these cave paintings, this is like a Paiute cave painting from the four corners area of the United States and how these are sort of portals or gateways to the world we used to live in to quote Vine Deloria Jr's text so this is some iconography that I've been thinking about that's going to be recurring throughout the lecture this was from 2017 there was the dakota access pipeline protests that were going on in the united states where oil and gas industries were going into indigenous territories like standing rock and trying to extract oil and so what we did in this protest that i did initially it's like a photographic realistic drawing of protesting at wells fargo that was in cahoots with the extractionist companies and trying to apply protest pressure onto them. But the painting just didn't really feel that interesting, so I just kind of buffed it and then masked out parts and did drop shadows and stuff like that. So I don't know. I think about how also important thinking about the New York school and this context of the New York studio school, how the history of action painting is one where... it appropriates the language of working on the ground, but how do you kind of use it to inoculate yourself in modernism? How do you kind of do a reverse drip or like a reverse gesture where you end up deconstructing that history and thinking about it through, not necessarily a one directional way, but a multi-directional way that it can... force us to think differently about the direction of history and and Almost like in in Photoshop how you have different layers and different histories How you can kind of play back and forth between the different layers of history with painting? So this is my open studios that I did at Reichs Academy It's a two-year residency This image is a little grainy but I was starting to I was finally able to start incorporating sculptural ideas, having formal conversations with my paintings, but then also introducing plants. And a lot of my large-scale installations I do with my partner Heidi Howard. And this is sort of like the premonitions of where my work is going right now. These are some install shots from a show I did at Fonz Velter's gallery around that time. So around this time, 2018, is when Trump restricted the amount of federally protected land to have access to natural resources like coal, tar, oil. And a lot of what my work is also trying to think about is. how to think about the resources of what we're using as oil painters or acrylic painters. Acrylic comes from petroleum, but to also point ourselves right back at the means of where these things are coming and being more self-conscious about things so i think if we were to just uh tax people like the coke brothers or at least hold them accountable for what they're doing to the environment but then also with their lobbying groups what they're doing to to politics that we wouldn't be having to put the burden on our own individuality to recycle and whatnot but that we could have a better shot at alleviating the worst symptoms of global warming. So this is an example of like a map of where their oil pipelines go through, some of the companies that they are connected to and their think tanks on the left. So around this time too, I was finishing up in Amsterdam. This is my final exhibition that I did in the Rijksakademie. And there were some cave paintings that were being threatened because of the Trump administration's extractionist incentivizing policies that were going on. So, you know, and I was also thinking about repatriating things back to the public and making it something that we engage with, and it's not behind some glass veneer or whatever. So I started to get look at like cave paintings and turn them into three-dimensional objects and then also think about ways at which I could have it become an interactive installation for people too. So here's just some shots of the installation. If you guys have questions too, I guess well we could wait but I'm also interested in people's ideas as we go along too so i think too i was not really used to amsterdam um i hadn't lived in europe before so some of these works are kind of like a reaction to how cold it felt there too um so this was like uh me starting to go into the caves of uh northern new mexican uh cave dwellings to Sancauy which is in Bandelier, northwestern New Mexico. And this is not from observation, but I was taking photographs and one of my friends was mentioning how it almost looked like a telescope, like the way that the light would like specifically go through the cave floor in a specific way. And it has pushed me to look more into the history of cave dwellings. as almost like ancient watches for indigenous communities of the southwest before 1492. So around this time also there was the border crisis along the US-Mexico border right in my hometown. And also there was the Syrian refugee crisis that was going on in Amsterdam, through Turkey and then... into the European Union. So I think a lot about how people become othered or turned into aliens when we're all the same global community, but that people can be demonized or turned into different ways of thinking of a person that aren't based in humane ideas of philosophy that I'm interested in. So then we moved back to the United States. We were living around this time in Carrizozo, New Mexico on a residency. And yeah, I could just let the work speak for itself. It felt good to be back in the United States also, I think. It just felt much easier to have. people connecting with my ideas and also just being closer to my subject matter as well too was really nice and to the point where I had my first solo show in 19 I mean 2019 excuse me at Boers Lee Gallery and there's like a snake on the bottom that my partner Heidi made but it there's a lot of positive feedback about that show it was like my first New York solo show and it went really really well and to the point where I sampled that same painting that I showed you earlier, John Quick-to-See Smith's painting, Fear, but remixed it to think about... how the forcible separation of miners at the border is concurrent with fear-mongering techniques of U.S. domestic and also foreign policy for enemy non-combatants. So that's something that I was thinking about with this painting. This is a painting of my mom. this is like a bird's eye view of the indigenous territories along the border before 1492 and how we wouldn't always live as idealistically as sometimes we are portrayed to be but that it was routes of of communion also combat also trade and that have existed for a millennium that I wanted to show that connected rather than broke people's connections to communities along the border before 1492. Cool. So there's this. It's an installation from 2019, installation I did at the drawing center. This is part of another show that I did at the drawing center in the basement. Then I was asked by a curator to come back to the Netherlands to do a show there at a former military outpost. So thinking about how the colonized can come back towards the forces that actually helped create New York and like Wall Street and the Dutch East Indies Company and how that that small country like the Netherlands have such a reverberatory effect on you know Asian African and American colonies so I'm going to show you quick some images of some of my process when I go out to do outdoors to paint When I move back to the United States, I also just work in acrylic. It helps in some ways when I'm back in the studio to do different chemical experimentations and layering. But in other ways, when you're painting out in the desert, you have to work faster because it's dry. So sometimes I use acrylic retarders to slow down the drying time. And this is the result of that. process. It's like five feet by five feet. And thinking about looking from inside of caves and looking outwards, thinking about how our body is also interconnected with the earth's body and looking in and out of different orifices that, you know, it could be an ocular way of seeing, but it could also be like more sophisticated ways of maybe you I like the examples of artists like Hilmoff Klimt that thought of themselves as almost like mediums for spirits to work through them. And I think about that also when I go to paint outdoors in these sites that maybe I could, if I'm in the right perceptive mode, that I could be a vehicle for certain ideas. So then this is around the time that COVID happened and we were living in Queens and I was like biking down to our studios in Dumbo. And as we all remember, it was pretty scary time. And I guess I was thinking a lot about obviously quarantine touch, but then also being disconnected a little bit and how art was sort of that way to help. stay connected and that redemptive part of everything that we were going through at that time. Around this time I was also going to New Mexico. We were visiting family that we were concerned about so I would also use those moments to do observational paintings in the southwest and thinking about how to throw off normative visions of the landscape to reintroduce ideas that really don't get talked about. most museums and or or if they are they are categorized in very specific ways and boxed in to certain traditions of like the Hudson River School or like nouveau landscape painting and what I really want my work to do is to not only like break down those historical borders that as artists we're constantly looking at multiple different things all the time and making connections but also the way that our ecosystems will survive global warming is by honoring that interconnectivity between systems that I think are embedded in a lot of these cave paintings I'm interested in, and how they map them to some. So this is another process video of me working. So yeah, sometimes I work very small and I only work on squares so then I'm able to like project them or and also figure out how wide I need to boost up my brushes when I'm going larger. So then the proportions of my marks have that same complex but subtle contrast that I'm doing in the small works. So yeah, this is at Bandelier and I'm just the way that they would structure their societies is are in like circular mesas or adobe structures and I just like it from like a conceptual reason of imagining instead of how we live right now on a grid being in a circular apartment building with an ancient apartment building with all your loved ones and community so I thought that was really interesting This is a painting that I made last year about how Mora, New Mexico banned fracking. It's like this local town that part of my, I think it's like my dad's mom's side of the family is from, but they were able to ban it with banning together local city council members and just to make sure that the local drinking water was safe also. All right, so I'm getting to my last few, or like I have about 10, 15 slides left. this quantum sunset this is like from an observational painting i did in new mexico but that i was moving around um as i was working um i also have like a active sculpture practice too so sometimes almost like how giacometti or like picasso would like look at his sculptures and get inspired to do paintings and one of the reasons why i'm excited to be here tonight is that you your institution really honors that conversation between painting and sculpture so I just wanted to give you guys like insight into my process and that conversation and so this is an image from my first solo show with Garth Green in gallery and what's been great working with Garth is his sense of history he's from an art history training so he's looking at more contextualizing the history around Indigenous art, but also trying to throw that off the stereotypical or cordoning off histories and trying to make it more intersectional with the way he thinks about curating these exhibitions. So it's been fun working with him. Cool. So I haven't shown this to the public yet, but I just got commissioned to do last year. at Crystal Bridges Museum, Outdoor Sculpture Garden in Bronze. So these are images in wax of the figure. So this figure, it comes from the Escuintla Mayan culture. So I think it's around a thousand years. It's like a small little figurine that's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I used to work there as an art handler. And when I'd take my lunch breaks, I would see it there. and so then I was like okay it's stuck behind glass I want to like repatriate this object but as a large scale version of itself so I cast my own body parts like my hands my face but then also thought of how this figure is actually really perfect to hold plants so then I've also been talking with my partner about native plants and reintroducing native plants back into industrial or other environments that are depleted from its natural ecosystem. So I did this all in wax. Some parts of it are wood that directly burn out when you... put it into plaster mold, heat it up in a kiln, and then put in molten bronze. So this is some footage of doing the pouring at UAP Foundry, which is amazing to watch and learn the process. This is also where they make the Academy Awards and a lot of really cool other sculptural props. processes there too so it's really fun to learn it's like painting in a way except very different um except in three dimensions it's really fun um so this is the result of what i made it yeah it's like an outdoor bronze sculpture and we were thinking of making like a watering system for it but then we decided it was just easier if we had gardener the gardening staff there that i was actively talking with to hand water them and then it also oxidized the metal and turn it into a whole different colors, which was really, really fun. But we had so we had, I'll go into like the different native plants that we had in it. But it was just really fun to actually see, have it all work out really well. So it was like the foundry's largest direct burnout sculpture that they'd ever done. And I also did it in collaboration with my partner, Heidi. Because, you know, there's certain technical issues and things that, you know, you can't imagine on your own. And I think artists should acknowledge those collaborative parts of your process and not trying to like, hide it so much. And I think also just the way at which how can you kind of design a structure to hold and provide drainage and provide sunlight and I think that the the funnest part of this was also seeing i was really scared that there was going to be like wasps nests and stuff like that and somebody was going to get hurt but actually um this image on the left right there you can see there's like a monarch butterfly cocoon that just started because of all of the natural milkweed that was growing there there's also pumpkins that we were growing there and uh strawberries um to name a few of them and then on the right there's like an image of it hatching and leaving its cocoon there. So I think it's like a sign that I should keep doing more sculpture that engages outdoor gardening and specifically native gardens. So then I did a seed bank part of the same exhibition but inside that was free to the public with seeds that are non-genetically modified that aren't Monsanto seeds either. So we had like Echinacea, Black Eyed Susans, Milkweed, Blazing Prairie Star. And I think, you know, we live in a country that doesn't have universal health care. And I think if in some small way I could start to educate myself about how to better take care of myself and maybe that could reverberate towards a social practice in the future that I want to go towards of imagining how care could look like in art situations. And we did public snake pot workshops and urban gardening workshops here too. And that was fun. So yeah, I'm in the last few images. This is a painting that I did from observation in Garden of the Gods, New Mexico. That was on exhibit at that same space. And thinking about the way that... the boundaries between different geological spaces are kind of irrelevant when you're actually just thinking about our role in the cosmos so i did the initial painting at garden of the gods and if you guys ever get to go you guys should check it out it's really beautiful there but then i brought the paintings back i rolled them up and then did an observational painting of the moon uh the beaver moon cycle from like late 2022 or no it was late 2021 um in the fall so cool um so the last few images i'm going to show are a collaboration that i did with my partner heidi howard we got commissioned to do the train station at um moynihan the moynihan train station um so this is like our like first collaborative large-scale um painting that we did together so we decided we wanted to imagine what New York City would look like if there weren't any tree, any buildings, any man-made structures and like thinking about like if you could see the Adirondacks from you know the middle of midtown, what it would kind of look like to break down the boundary between space and time. So here's some images of that. Thinking about native plants from the area, also birds and critters. There's this one painting by Botticelli, the Primavera, that's really, really gorgeous where you can see all the bugs and critters on the bottom and that was really inspiring for me. That's one of my favorite paintings. It's at the Uffizi in Florence. Here's some more images. cool and this is my partner as you can see with their painted flowers and then us standing together on the right this is like for meta's art open art projects and if you guys go through the new Moynihan train station at Madison Square Garden you guys can check it out too and then the last slide I'll show is right now I'm doing research for a couple exhibitions in the southwest about borderland ecosystems and learning how to grow more native plants in certain areas and letting those flourish and collaborating with making sculptures that get inspired by nature, but then also become choreographed in some ways by natural ecosystems as well, too. So stay tuned. Thank you guys so much for listening and take questions. Thank you so much Esteban. Do we have any questions? I have one to get us started. I wonder if you could speak about your process a little bit more. I mean like this painting for example is gigantic and there's also this really interesting interplay between foreground and background and I wonder if you could speak to your process of sort of how you move through the making of one of these paintings. Yeah so I there's like painters like Joan Mitchell that would really talk about being like honesty with the way that you apply brush work and I think that's something that I try and keep in mind with trying to register a landscape that it doesn't have to be completely realistic in the tradition of somebody like Alex Katz. but that you could have different registers and different subjectivities of registering a landscape. So I think the ways at which I try and build up like the four different layers or the four different dimensions in my in my work is to think about time bouncing between in a non-linear fashion. So what I do is I first develop like one layer of painting in acrylic I let that dry Then I mask out certain parts that I don't really know with like the silicone. How it's sort of going to look. Sometimes it looks like a mess and sometimes I have to trash the whole thing or just start it all over again and paint it over. Or sometimes it's successful like in this. So like I do one layer, let it dry in acrylic, then I mask out in silicone. and then I go over it with like white acrylic paint and there's something and I could go off on that but I'm just going to do the nuts and bolts of my process and then I build up another landscape and and mask off that section in silicone until like it's I don't really know like going back to that Joan Mitchell thing like what I'm gonna get it's not like I'm planning it on photoshop it's like it's all in the process of of itself so When I pull off all the mask, it can provide interesting surprises and then sometimes it could also be a complete failure. But it's interesting to use something that's also a material that I use in my sculpture practice now to make molds and casts of things. And I'm constantly trying to connect things in my process to try and cannibalize it to make more work and to think about how that conversation between sculpture and painting can talk to one another and not be segregated so yeah that's sort of like the nuts and bolts of like how i kind of do it and then i just repeat the process over and over again until i get like about four layers or more and get into like higher dimensional ways of thinking about space so yeah thank you um i just um i'm curious about your residency in amsterdam Were you working primarily on the southwestern theme, or were you exposing yourself to newer landscapes? And if so, how you would describe the difference between a landscape that you are intimate with versus one that you're basically seeing for the first time? Yeah, that's a great question. I think when I was there, I'll flip to some of the images that I was doing at that time really quick. Okay, so I don't really like Rembrandt, but I really like Vermeer's paintings. And going to the Rijksmuseum and studying the ways at which he'd almost like, it's almost like micro stippling technique. how he'd make but make his paintings and there's actually I wish there's a show that's up right now of of his paintings in Amsterdam right now but the way that he would use like the camera obscura to create images was something that I was constantly thinking about when I've been generating the work for this one where I was working inside of a cave like taking photos from inside of a cave but then thinking about how photographic, but then also optics operate and the ways at which we can think about constructing imagery, that was something that inspired my work. I think sometimes some of the images I'm thinking about are kind of what if we didn't awaken to global warming and maybe more environments would suffer desertification too. So even though this might look foreign to certain places it could actually be the future of certain spaces but then i also want to introduce like a another layer to it where there are possibilities of hope within the multiple dimensions that i'm making in my work that's not just the end of the world but that there but that it could also be something there there's possibilities and different strings and dimensions in in my work too so um yeah i i there's also the cobra art um of that time in amsterdam that was like azure jorn that i find really interesting how he would get thrift store paintings of landscapes and then like tag on them um but um yeah i think it was just all around a really good experience for um getting inspired in a new way so yeah and to build off of that question I wonder if you could speak a little bit more to the experience of working with the imagery of the American Southwest in a place that's maybe not that familiar. And how was that work received there and what other conversations were happening that maybe wouldn't happen if that work or that exhibition took place in the Southwest? What's gained and lost, I suppose, by location? Yeah. I think sometimes certain references, I mean, we export culture so much in the United States. The history of Westerns are very familiar to people all over the world. And I think it's almost like a ready made the stereotypical notion of the West that people already kind of know it when they when they're starting to see it. So I'd have people from different. parts of the world from China and from the Netherlands visit my studios during those open studios and comment about their reactions to the work. But I also think some of these things are foreign to people that haven't been to the United States either. And I think about trying to make something that is interesting, even if you don't know all the references, like I don't want to have it be. I'm not interested in being so obscure that on a painting level like you can't get interested in it like if you don't if you know nothing about me I want you to at least have a good time looking at some of the surfaces and I think sometimes now going to some of my exhibitions where people don't know I'm the artist and just listening to everyday people experience the work and hearing that that feedback of their excitement around the work and that's sometimes really interesting to me compared to other ways of seeing but um anyways yeah i think i just i just appreciate all feedback whether it's good or bad or you know in between um but yeah it's just interesting to have different conversations with people and see what they perceive can you describe like the surface of your paintings because when i'm i mean i know where i'm looking at a computer right now but All the paintings look very smooth, and I know you work in a lot of layers, so I was wondering if you could just give a comment about that. Yeah, so I guess I'll go to this one. So each layer that I mask down, it is, there's like the saying that by Picasso where it's like the first marks you put down always kind of set up the next marks or something like that. I'm paraphrasing that quote, so forgive me. So keeping in line with that idea is that sometimes where I mask things down, then I can kind of predict where to move next and where to kind of mask some things out. But I don't really know. And a lot of improvisation happens on the surface. But to go back to your original question, the first marks are actually like a cavity. And then all the subsequent other marks that I masks that I take out. form other kind of deconstructive anti-gestures. So it's just like almost like a canyon in a way of different gestures and marks. So it's not like it's not a smooth surface but more like different canyons and cavities in the surface. But it's completely archival. I just had like a painting acquired by MCA San Diego. and they're like is this gonna fall off and i'm like yeah no no it's it's completely fine so yeah it's it's archival it's not gonna fall apart which is really nice and it's taken me a while to kind of refine the process to get it to that point so i hope that answers your question hi um so it's clear that you have a pretty robust kind of intellectual framework that kind of like grounds your work at least based off of the beginning of the presentation and there was a term that you used that i kind of wanted to know a little bit more about you know what you meant um because you you said the term representational justice and um you know intuitively i might have some sense of what you're getting at but i'm curious about what you meant by that and you know who if anyone you were kind of referring to with that yeah um i guess i take the inspiration from Angela Davis'thought thinking about Frederick Douglass, how at one point he was like the most photographed man behind Abraham Lincoln or something like that. I'm probably getting that a little wrong, but that you know if we see ourselves represented in the larger discourse then that could reflect possibly more of an empathetic relationship with diversity and becoming more inclusive of people. So the way that I kind of think about that is the way at which we think about the history of the landscape and the people that first called it home and are still there as migrant communities that are following ancient pilgrimage routes throughout the borderlands that have intermarried into European societies or stayed into their indigenous communities and the storytellings that happened through the caves of the United States but then also the histories of the agrarian movement that shaped the land and care for the land even now that you know they're picking most of our fruit and vegetables that we're eating right now and surviving off of you know so for me that representational justice it i have like figurative work that i was showing you guys earlier but then um that is seeking to represent um migrant communities uh from the borderlands but then also thinking about um the representational justice that you know we we objectify nature and and when we represent it in landscape paintings but then also how do you kind of uh register those voices in the landscape through ancient knowledge forms of knowing that I'm trying to register in the history of also land art too so yeah cool any other questions thank you guys so much oh yeah yeah sorry You kind of went into this with your transition between or using sculpture to go back into the paintings. And I was just curious if there were any dramatic discoveries going back from a very ambitious sculpture like the one for the garden, and then going back into the paintings, if it changed anything for you. I think, I guess the first association that pops to my mind is just space. When you're making paintings, you don't need to worry about like gravity of your composition as much as you do in sculpture. So then you could throw in different thought experiments or different propositions of compositions in painting. I think now that conversation between painting and sculpture that I'm trying to think through is more like, how can I almost dematerialize the process to be more analogous to the way that nature grows things rather than just from a completely anthropomorphic way of just using being a host and hosting things to maybe modeling more sculpture that looks more like plants and modeling ways of growing that are in some ways more sustainable. I'm thinking about like the work of like Neary Oxman, but then also other ancient ways of building that different tribes throughout the southwest would grow corn and beans and squash all next to each other in certain ways that would benefit all of them. all three of them so figuring out ways of creating structures and also old materials that were used in the southwest too and then using my painting process as a way to kind of design it as cheaply as possible so then I could propose it to museums that might want to fund these experiments so we'll see how it goes but yeah I just am really inspired by that conversation between painting and drawing looking at people like Picasso or even artists like Huma Baba and yeah so yeah hi it's interesting to see someone who works in so many different mediums and approaches and you mentioned the social practice only once or twice and I'm just wondering how big of a part of your practice is it and kind of it seems like a place where the politics that you talk about that you're interested in could could be it could be a framework for that in particular um perhaps over the painting somehow which um well I don't I don't really know I'm just sort of speculating um because it's an area that I'm curious about and um I don't always see it working necessarily so I'm just wondering how an artist would include that in their practice along with the sculpture and the painting so how's it going yeah I think I'm even though I'm a product of art school from you know age 10 to 25 I didn't do as much education in the history of social practice but I had parents that were organizing and holding meetings and now also touching touching back on certain artists like rick rick tier vanisha that think about how how food is a dematerialized object that can engage people's connections with one another and that part of it with this show that i did of just having growing food that people can just take whenever out off of it was one aspect of it but then also doing workshops with people where we would then also invite them to contribute to the local environment through taking seeds from the seed bank and and growing things on their own after we fired the the work for them so that's sort of like a material aspect of it but where i'm learning even now is like how can i keep this going in other ways how could i think about organizing people actually into the future through social practice especially around labor rights and talking about those material and immaterial things that are so important to us right now in this country that we really need to have conversations around around that and and i think It takes time and I've had to teach myself. how to do these type of conversations with people but sometimes it's just um trying and knowing that you're going to fail sometimes but knowing that you want to do certain things and just trying things out and knowing that if you've messed up today you know there's a new day tomorrow that you can get better at it and try things out and to just keep trying um yeah and just not not giving up so but yeah i know it's not yeah um the second part of uh to that question i guess as you're speaking i was thinking um as an artist sometimes i feel guilty just making painting or drawing and you know it's an interesting way to i don't know if painting can change anything um maybe other mediums can and so that's part of why asking these questions and where that kind of outlet can take place in that that practice yeah and i think there's this book by maggie nelson on freedom uh where she kind of talks about how painting can and she's even quoting like susan sontag where you know sometimes painting slows us down to think and then she goes on to say sometimes that actually stops people from just punching each other and getting into like a fight is that you're just like slowing people down to just think and and and getting people especially right now when people might be so divisive and this show it was actually interesting because it was in arkansas and just seeing people that i would you know from like my urban perspective think that they wouldn't engage in my work you know and i think that that's part of part of what's awesome about art is that it can it might not you know solve global warming right now but it could at least get people to think and not tell people what to think but just slow them down a little bit from their usual mechanistic ways of the nine to five and you know fulfilling quotas and whatnot so i don't know i and there's not and that's not even talking about like the cathartic qualities to the art making process for our own well-being and and self-care that i think are really valuable too so um i guess i'm an optimist um but i also am a realist too that yeah i mean it's hard it's hard work that we're doing and you know i appreciate being here with all of you guys because it's it's not easy what we do sometimes so thank you so much estevan it's a great place to conclude we appreciate your time and learning more about your work And again, please join us downstairs in the clay room for light refreshments if you have time. Thanks again for coming.

Before we begin, I would like to note The New York Studio School evening lecture series is free to the public with support in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding is generously provided by the Robert Lehman Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and individual donors. Please consider making a donation to help keep our evening lecture series free by clicking on the support button on our home page. Thanks to those of you joining us virtually and here on 8th Street. We'll reserve time at the end for Q&A with the audience.

For those in the room, please raise your hand and we'll bring a microphone to you so our online audience can hear your question. For our Zoom audience, please submit your questions by clicking on the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Following the lecture, please join me and our guests downstairs in the clay room for light refreshments.

Now I'm delighted to introduce our speaker this evening. Esteban Cabeza de Baca's childhood hometown of San Ysidro, California, virtually straddled the U.S.-Mexico border, as did his family. In his work, he employs a broad range of painterly techniques, entwining layers of graffiti, landscape, and pre-Columbian pictographs, in ways confounding cartesian single point perspective. Kabeza Dabaka's recent solo exhibitions include Let Earth Breathe, Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, Nepentla in Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, and Life is One Drop in Limitless Oceans in Kunstvoort 5000, the Netherlands. He received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2010 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2014. He currently lives and works in Queens, New York and is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery.

Now please join me in offering a very warm welcome to Esteban. Hi guys, thank you so much for coming. I'll keep this as short and sweet as possible.

So here we go. My name is Esteban. I'm an observational painter.

My work starts by going outdoors, working directly in the southwest United States where I'm from. And then bringing those images back into my studio in New York City. And it's interesting, I use a projector. So, you know, in one sense, as you'll see in my slideshow, thinking about caves as a metaphor for a projector or timekeeping, ancient timekeeping devices, but then also a metaphor for how we see things and how we produce realities, how we sometimes objectify nature or how we can actually apprehend nature more authentically. So my ancestor Alvar Núñez Cavistavaca was part of, this is in 1527, part of the failed Panfilo de Narváez expedition, where he got shipwrecked and enslaved by Native American tribes like the Kapoké, Han, and Karankawa, and lived with them for about five to six years.

And in that time, he taught Indigenous people. the ways in which they could acclimate to smallpox and also how to avoid colonial apprehensions. So over the course of time, he ended up gaining his freedom and traveling and trading and also faith healing. And then when he went to Mexico, as you can see on the map, he advocated to Spanish forces there in Nuevo, in the New World. uh for a grand alliance between indigenous and european nations but uh they didn't want that at all and um the european forces so he ended up becoming uh imprisoned later on in his life for trying to advocate for indigenous sovereignty so those are just some of like the uh predecessors to so my work um on the image on the left that's an image of cesar chavez my dad was a bodyguard for him uh when he after the Delano grape strike, but during the lettuce strike of organizing undocumented and documented laborers throughout the southwest for fair wages and bargaining in good faith with growers.

On the right, my dad was also a bodyguard for Angela Davis at UCLA. So there's a lot of ideas in my work about liberation theology, that how do you practice charity, how do you start from the building blocks of community and work your way up towards representational justice and art, certain things about that I'm thinking about in my work. So this is where I was actually just here. I'm working on a documentary right now about my process. but um this is Tijuana side and then I was where my mom was born and we'd go here every weekend and then I was just born on the other side in San Cidrum which is a big ranching community and it's very lush you can just throw a seed down and it's things will grow it's not like in other parts of the border where it's more arid this is right next to the water so I think growing up this environment really shapes the way that I think about space, but then also stacking imagery and just ideas of creativity with very little means sometimes and making do with what you have.

So this is some of the inspirations and of my work also is Jackson Pollock on the left and this Indian art of the United States exhibition from 1941 at MoMA. where they had Navajo sand painters almost in a zoological display for museum goers that could experience this. So I'm pretty sure that Pollock saw this and was inspired by some of his work. He even talks about it in some of his documentaries about his work. Can you guys all see this stuff?

Is this good? Okay, cool. Another inspiration has been Salish Katooni tribe member, John Quick to See Smith, whose indigenous nations are from what we call Montana.

And yeah, I think thinking about the ideas of land acknowledgements and even how right now we're on Lenape land, unceded territory, also to the Delaware nations and how, during like the French and Indian War, a lot of the Lenape people were forcibly removed off their land and eventually pushed along the Trail of Tears to places like Oklahoma, and how this is just a recurring policy of the United States. And this painting for me encompasses a lot of those ideas of holding on to your community, but holding on to your sense of self even when things are taken away from you. And when I'm teaching art, there's this nomad art manifesto that John Quick to See Smith teaches that how do you make art with biodegradable materials, how can it be recycled. but the last two is how can you make art that's convenient for countries which may be disbanding or reforming or for the new age of diaspora so just thinking about where we are as a country with global warming and really addressing that and i think artists we we have the capability of imagining futures and imagining and keeping hope alive even if that sounds corny um i still think about that possibilities with art making um so i lived in europe i'm going to start around 2017. I lived in Europe for two years. I was on residency in Amsterdam, which you'll see in a second.

But I got to see a lot of art from my homeland from Mexico, but then art from South America all the way across the waters in Europe. And I think for me, I kept on wanting to build off of that or think about ideas of repatriating objects. through the art of making things and bringing it back into the public and discourse around why and how these objects got to where they're at now. When I would go on trips from living in Europe and coming back home, I would go to these cave sites for the first few years like 2015, 2016 as like an adult and start to think about how these cave paintings, this is like a Paiute cave painting from the four corners area of the United States and how these are sort of portals or gateways to the world we used to live in to quote Vine Deloria Jr's text so this is some iconography that I've been thinking about that's going to be recurring throughout the lecture this was from 2017 there was the dakota access pipeline protests that were going on in the united states where oil and gas industries were going into indigenous territories like standing rock and trying to extract oil and so what we did in this protest that i did initially it's like a photographic realistic drawing of protesting at wells fargo that was in cahoots with the extractionist companies and trying to apply protest pressure onto them. But the painting just didn't really feel that interesting, so I just kind of buffed it and then masked out parts and did drop shadows and stuff like that.

So I don't know. I think about how also important thinking about the New York school and this context of the New York studio school, how the history of action painting is one where... it appropriates the language of working on the ground, but how do you kind of use it to inoculate yourself in modernism? How do you kind of do a reverse drip or like a reverse gesture where you end up deconstructing that history and thinking about it through, not necessarily a one directional way, but a multi-directional way that it can...

force us to think differently about the direction of history and and Almost like in in Photoshop how you have different layers and different histories How you can kind of play back and forth between the different layers of history with painting? So this is my open studios that I did at Reichs Academy It's a two-year residency This image is a little grainy but I was starting to I was finally able to start incorporating sculptural ideas, having formal conversations with my paintings, but then also introducing plants. And a lot of my large-scale installations I do with my partner Heidi Howard. And this is sort of like the premonitions of where my work is going right now. These are some install shots from a show I did at Fonz Velter's gallery around that time.

So around this time, 2018, is when Trump restricted the amount of federally protected land to have access to natural resources like coal, tar, oil. And a lot of what my work is also trying to think about is. how to think about the resources of what we're using as oil painters or acrylic painters. Acrylic comes from petroleum, but to also point ourselves right back at the means of where these things are coming and being more self-conscious about things so i think if we were to just uh tax people like the coke brothers or at least hold them accountable for what they're doing to the environment but then also with their lobbying groups what they're doing to to politics that we wouldn't be having to put the burden on our own individuality to recycle and whatnot but that we could have a better shot at alleviating the worst symptoms of global warming.

So this is an example of like a map of where their oil pipelines go through, some of the companies that they are connected to and their think tanks on the left. So around this time too, I was finishing up in Amsterdam. This is my final exhibition that I did in the Rijksakademie. And there were some cave paintings that were being threatened because of the Trump administration's extractionist incentivizing policies that were going on.

So, you know, and I was also thinking about repatriating things back to the public and making it something that we engage with, and it's not behind some glass veneer or whatever. So I started to get look at like cave paintings and turn them into three-dimensional objects and then also think about ways at which I could have it become an interactive installation for people too. So here's just some shots of the installation. If you guys have questions too, I guess well we could wait but I'm also interested in people's ideas as we go along too so i think too i was not really used to amsterdam um i hadn't lived in europe before so some of these works are kind of like a reaction to how cold it felt there too um so this was like uh me starting to go into the caves of uh northern new mexican uh cave dwellings to Sancauy which is in Bandelier, northwestern New Mexico.

And this is not from observation, but I was taking photographs and one of my friends was mentioning how it almost looked like a telescope, like the way that the light would like specifically go through the cave floor in a specific way. And it has pushed me to look more into the history of cave dwellings. as almost like ancient watches for indigenous communities of the southwest before 1492. So around this time also there was the border crisis along the US-Mexico border right in my hometown.

And also there was the Syrian refugee crisis that was going on in Amsterdam, through Turkey and then... into the European Union. So I think a lot about how people become othered or turned into aliens when we're all the same global community, but that people can be demonized or turned into different ways of thinking of a person that aren't based in humane ideas of philosophy that I'm interested in. So then we moved back to the United States. We were living around this time in Carrizozo, New Mexico on a residency.

And yeah, I could just let the work speak for itself. It felt good to be back in the United States also, I think. It just felt much easier to have. people connecting with my ideas and also just being closer to my subject matter as well too was really nice and to the point where I had my first solo show in 19 I mean 2019 excuse me at Boers Lee Gallery and there's like a snake on the bottom that my partner Heidi made but it there's a lot of positive feedback about that show it was like my first New York solo show and it went really really well and to the point where I sampled that same painting that I showed you earlier, John Quick-to-See Smith's painting, Fear, but remixed it to think about... how the forcible separation of miners at the border is concurrent with fear-mongering techniques of U.S. domestic and also foreign policy for enemy non-combatants.

So that's something that I was thinking about with this painting. This is a painting of my mom. this is like a bird's eye view of the indigenous territories along the border before 1492 and how we wouldn't always live as idealistically as sometimes we are portrayed to be but that it was routes of of communion also combat also trade and that have existed for a millennium that I wanted to show that connected rather than broke people's connections to communities along the border before 1492. Cool. So there's this.

It's an installation from 2019, installation I did at the drawing center. This is part of another show that I did at the drawing center in the basement. Then I was asked by a curator to come back to the Netherlands to do a show there at a former military outpost. So thinking about how the colonized can come back towards the forces that actually helped create New York and like Wall Street and the Dutch East Indies Company and how that that small country like the Netherlands have such a reverberatory effect on you know Asian African and American colonies so I'm going to show you quick some images of some of my process when I go out to do outdoors to paint When I move back to the United States, I also just work in acrylic. It helps in some ways when I'm back in the studio to do different chemical experimentations and layering.

But in other ways, when you're painting out in the desert, you have to work faster because it's dry. So sometimes I use acrylic retarders to slow down the drying time. And this is the result of that. process. It's like five feet by five feet.

And thinking about looking from inside of caves and looking outwards, thinking about how our body is also interconnected with the earth's body and looking in and out of different orifices that, you know, it could be an ocular way of seeing, but it could also be like more sophisticated ways of maybe you I like the examples of artists like Hilmoff Klimt that thought of themselves as almost like mediums for spirits to work through them. And I think about that also when I go to paint outdoors in these sites that maybe I could, if I'm in the right perceptive mode, that I could be a vehicle for certain ideas. So then this is around the time that COVID happened and we were living in Queens and I was like biking down to our studios in Dumbo.

And as we all remember, it was pretty scary time. And I guess I was thinking a lot about obviously quarantine touch, but then also being disconnected a little bit and how art was sort of that way to help. stay connected and that redemptive part of everything that we were going through at that time.

Around this time I was also going to New Mexico. We were visiting family that we were concerned about so I would also use those moments to do observational paintings in the southwest and thinking about how to throw off normative visions of the landscape to reintroduce ideas that really don't get talked about. most museums and or or if they are they are categorized in very specific ways and boxed in to certain traditions of like the Hudson River School or like nouveau landscape painting and what I really want my work to do is to not only like break down those historical borders that as artists we're constantly looking at multiple different things all the time and making connections but also the way that our ecosystems will survive global warming is by honoring that interconnectivity between systems that I think are embedded in a lot of these cave paintings I'm interested in, and how they map them to some. So this is another process video of me working.

So yeah, sometimes I work very small and I only work on squares so then I'm able to like project them or and also figure out how wide I need to boost up my brushes when I'm going larger. So then the proportions of my marks have that same complex but subtle contrast that I'm doing in the small works. So yeah, this is at Bandelier and I'm just the way that they would structure their societies is are in like circular mesas or adobe structures and I just like it from like a conceptual reason of imagining instead of how we live right now on a grid being in a circular apartment building with an ancient apartment building with all your loved ones and community so I thought that was really interesting This is a painting that I made last year about how Mora, New Mexico banned fracking. It's like this local town that part of my, I think it's like my dad's mom's side of the family is from, but they were able to ban it with banning together local city council members and just to make sure that the local drinking water was safe also.

All right, so I'm getting to my last few, or like I have about 10, 15 slides left. this quantum sunset this is like from an observational painting i did in new mexico but that i was moving around um as i was working um i also have like a active sculpture practice too so sometimes almost like how giacometti or like picasso would like look at his sculptures and get inspired to do paintings and one of the reasons why i'm excited to be here tonight is that you your institution really honors that conversation between painting and sculpture so I just wanted to give you guys like insight into my process and that conversation and so this is an image from my first solo show with Garth Green in gallery and what's been great working with Garth is his sense of history he's from an art history training so he's looking at more contextualizing the history around Indigenous art, but also trying to throw that off the stereotypical or cordoning off histories and trying to make it more intersectional with the way he thinks about curating these exhibitions. So it's been fun working with him. Cool. So I haven't shown this to the public yet, but I just got commissioned to do last year.

at Crystal Bridges Museum, Outdoor Sculpture Garden in Bronze. So these are images in wax of the figure. So this figure, it comes from the Escuintla Mayan culture. So I think it's around a thousand years. It's like a small little figurine that's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And I used to work there as an art handler. And when I'd take my lunch breaks, I would see it there. and so then I was like okay it's stuck behind glass I want to like repatriate this object but as a large scale version of itself so I cast my own body parts like my hands my face but then also thought of how this figure is actually really perfect to hold plants so then I've also been talking with my partner about native plants and reintroducing native plants back into industrial or other environments that are depleted from its natural ecosystem.

So I did this all in wax. Some parts of it are wood that directly burn out when you... put it into plaster mold, heat it up in a kiln, and then put in molten bronze.

So this is some footage of doing the pouring at UAP Foundry, which is amazing to watch and learn the process. This is also where they make the Academy Awards and a lot of really cool other sculptural props. processes there too so it's really fun to learn it's like painting in a way except very different um except in three dimensions it's really fun um so this is the result of what i made it yeah it's like an outdoor bronze sculpture and we were thinking of making like a watering system for it but then we decided it was just easier if we had gardener the gardening staff there that i was actively talking with to hand water them and then it also oxidized the metal and turn it into a whole different colors, which was really, really fun.

But we had so we had, I'll go into like the different native plants that we had in it. But it was just really fun to actually see, have it all work out really well. So it was like the foundry's largest direct burnout sculpture that they'd ever done.

And I also did it in collaboration with my partner, Heidi. Because, you know, there's certain technical issues and things that, you know, you can't imagine on your own. And I think artists should acknowledge those collaborative parts of your process and not trying to like, hide it so much. And I think also just the way at which how can you kind of design a structure to hold and provide drainage and provide sunlight and I think that the the funnest part of this was also seeing i was really scared that there was going to be like wasps nests and stuff like that and somebody was going to get hurt but actually um this image on the left right there you can see there's like a monarch butterfly cocoon that just started because of all of the natural milkweed that was growing there there's also pumpkins that we were growing there and uh strawberries um to name a few of them and then on the right there's like an image of it hatching and leaving its cocoon there. So I think it's like a sign that I should keep doing more sculpture that engages outdoor gardening and specifically native gardens.

So then I did a seed bank part of the same exhibition but inside that was free to the public with seeds that are non-genetically modified that aren't Monsanto seeds either. So we had like Echinacea, Black Eyed Susans, Milkweed, Blazing Prairie Star. And I think, you know, we live in a country that doesn't have universal health care. And I think if in some small way I could start to educate myself about how to better take care of myself and maybe that could reverberate towards a social practice in the future that I want to go towards of imagining how care could look like in art situations.

And we did public snake pot workshops and urban gardening workshops here too. And that was fun. So yeah, I'm in the last few images.

This is a painting that I did from observation in Garden of the Gods, New Mexico. That was on exhibit at that same space. And thinking about the way that...

the boundaries between different geological spaces are kind of irrelevant when you're actually just thinking about our role in the cosmos so i did the initial painting at garden of the gods and if you guys ever get to go you guys should check it out it's really beautiful there but then i brought the paintings back i rolled them up and then did an observational painting of the moon uh the beaver moon cycle from like late 2022 or no it was late 2021 um in the fall so cool um so the last few images i'm going to show are a collaboration that i did with my partner heidi howard we got commissioned to do the train station at um moynihan the moynihan train station um so this is like our like first collaborative large-scale um painting that we did together so we decided we wanted to imagine what New York City would look like if there weren't any tree, any buildings, any man-made structures and like thinking about like if you could see the Adirondacks from you know the middle of midtown, what it would kind of look like to break down the boundary between space and time. So here's some images of that. Thinking about native plants from the area, also birds and critters.

There's this one painting by Botticelli, the Primavera, that's really, really gorgeous where you can see all the bugs and critters on the bottom and that was really inspiring for me. That's one of my favorite paintings. It's at the Uffizi in Florence. Here's some more images. cool and this is my partner as you can see with their painted flowers and then us standing together on the right this is like for meta's art open art projects and if you guys go through the new Moynihan train station at Madison Square Garden you guys can check it out too and then the last slide I'll show is right now I'm doing research for a couple exhibitions in the southwest about borderland ecosystems and learning how to grow more native plants in certain areas and letting those flourish and collaborating with making sculptures that get inspired by nature, but then also become choreographed in some ways by natural ecosystems as well, too.

So stay tuned. Thank you guys so much for listening and take questions. Thank you so much Esteban.

Do we have any questions? I have one to get us started. I wonder if you could speak about your process a little bit more.

I mean like this painting for example is gigantic and there's also this really interesting interplay between foreground and background and I wonder if you could speak to your process of sort of how you move through the making of one of these paintings. Yeah so I there's like painters like Joan Mitchell that would really talk about being like honesty with the way that you apply brush work and I think that's something that I try and keep in mind with trying to register a landscape that it doesn't have to be completely realistic in the tradition of somebody like Alex Katz. but that you could have different registers and different subjectivities of registering a landscape.

So I think the ways at which I try and build up like the four different layers or the four different dimensions in my in my work is to think about time bouncing between in a non-linear fashion. So what I do is I first develop like one layer of painting in acrylic I let that dry Then I mask out certain parts that I don't really know with like the silicone. How it's sort of going to look.

Sometimes it looks like a mess and sometimes I have to trash the whole thing or just start it all over again and paint it over. Or sometimes it's successful like in this. So like I do one layer, let it dry in acrylic, then I mask out in silicone.

and then I go over it with like white acrylic paint and there's something and I could go off on that but I'm just going to do the nuts and bolts of my process and then I build up another landscape and and mask off that section in silicone until like it's I don't really know like going back to that Joan Mitchell thing like what I'm gonna get it's not like I'm planning it on photoshop it's like it's all in the process of of itself so When I pull off all the mask, it can provide interesting surprises and then sometimes it could also be a complete failure. But it's interesting to use something that's also a material that I use in my sculpture practice now to make molds and casts of things. And I'm constantly trying to connect things in my process to try and cannibalize it to make more work and to think about how that conversation between sculpture and painting can talk to one another and not be segregated so yeah that's sort of like the nuts and bolts of like how i kind of do it and then i just repeat the process over and over again until i get like about four layers or more and get into like higher dimensional ways of thinking about space so yeah thank you um i just um i'm curious about your residency in amsterdam Were you working primarily on the southwestern theme, or were you exposing yourself to newer landscapes? And if so, how you would describe the difference between a landscape that you are intimate with versus one that you're basically seeing for the first time? Yeah, that's a great question.

I think when I was there, I'll flip to some of the images that I was doing at that time really quick. Okay, so I don't really like Rembrandt, but I really like Vermeer's paintings. And going to the Rijksmuseum and studying the ways at which he'd almost like, it's almost like micro stippling technique. how he'd make but make his paintings and there's actually I wish there's a show that's up right now of of his paintings in Amsterdam right now but the way that he would use like the camera obscura to create images was something that I was constantly thinking about when I've been generating the work for this one where I was working inside of a cave like taking photos from inside of a cave but then thinking about how photographic, but then also optics operate and the ways at which we can think about constructing imagery, that was something that inspired my work.

I think sometimes some of the images I'm thinking about are kind of what if we didn't awaken to global warming and maybe more environments would suffer desertification too. So even though this might look foreign to certain places it could actually be the future of certain spaces but then i also want to introduce like a another layer to it where there are possibilities of hope within the multiple dimensions that i'm making in my work that's not just the end of the world but that there but that it could also be something there there's possibilities and different strings and dimensions in in my work too so um yeah i i there's also the cobra art um of that time in amsterdam that was like azure jorn that i find really interesting how he would get thrift store paintings of landscapes and then like tag on them um but um yeah i think it was just all around a really good experience for um getting inspired in a new way so yeah and to build off of that question I wonder if you could speak a little bit more to the experience of working with the imagery of the American Southwest in a place that's maybe not that familiar. And how was that work received there and what other conversations were happening that maybe wouldn't happen if that work or that exhibition took place in the Southwest?

What's gained and lost, I suppose, by location? Yeah. I think sometimes certain references, I mean, we export culture so much in the United States.

The history of Westerns are very familiar to people all over the world. And I think it's almost like a ready made the stereotypical notion of the West that people already kind of know it when they when they're starting to see it. So I'd have people from different. parts of the world from China and from the Netherlands visit my studios during those open studios and comment about their reactions to the work. But I also think some of these things are foreign to people that haven't been to the United States either.

And I think about trying to make something that is interesting, even if you don't know all the references, like I don't want to have it be. I'm not interested in being so obscure that on a painting level like you can't get interested in it like if you don't if you know nothing about me I want you to at least have a good time looking at some of the surfaces and I think sometimes now going to some of my exhibitions where people don't know I'm the artist and just listening to everyday people experience the work and hearing that that feedback of their excitement around the work and that's sometimes really interesting to me compared to other ways of seeing but um anyways yeah i think i just i just appreciate all feedback whether it's good or bad or you know in between um but yeah it's just interesting to have different conversations with people and see what they perceive can you describe like the surface of your paintings because when i'm i mean i know where i'm looking at a computer right now but All the paintings look very smooth, and I know you work in a lot of layers, so I was wondering if you could just give a comment about that. Yeah, so I guess I'll go to this one.

So each layer that I mask down, it is, there's like the saying that by Picasso where it's like the first marks you put down always kind of set up the next marks or something like that. I'm paraphrasing that quote, so forgive me. So keeping in line with that idea is that sometimes where I mask things down, then I can kind of predict where to move next and where to kind of mask some things out. But I don't really know. And a lot of improvisation happens on the surface.

But to go back to your original question, the first marks are actually like a cavity. And then all the subsequent other marks that I masks that I take out. form other kind of deconstructive anti-gestures. So it's just like almost like a canyon in a way of different gestures and marks.

So it's not like it's not a smooth surface but more like different canyons and cavities in the surface. But it's completely archival. I just had like a painting acquired by MCA San Diego. and they're like is this gonna fall off and i'm like yeah no no it's it's completely fine so yeah it's it's archival it's not gonna fall apart which is really nice and it's taken me a while to kind of refine the process to get it to that point so i hope that answers your question hi um so it's clear that you have a pretty robust kind of intellectual framework that kind of like grounds your work at least based off of the beginning of the presentation and there was a term that you used that i kind of wanted to know a little bit more about you know what you meant um because you you said the term representational justice and um you know intuitively i might have some sense of what you're getting at but i'm curious about what you meant by that and you know who if anyone you were kind of referring to with that yeah um i guess i take the inspiration from Angela Davis'thought thinking about Frederick Douglass, how at one point he was like the most photographed man behind Abraham Lincoln or something like that.

I'm probably getting that a little wrong, but that you know if we see ourselves represented in the larger discourse then that could reflect possibly more of an empathetic relationship with diversity and becoming more inclusive of people. So the way that I kind of think about that is the way at which we think about the history of the landscape and the people that first called it home and are still there as migrant communities that are following ancient pilgrimage routes throughout the borderlands that have intermarried into European societies or stayed into their indigenous communities and the storytellings that happened through the caves of the United States but then also the histories of the agrarian movement that shaped the land and care for the land even now that you know they're picking most of our fruit and vegetables that we're eating right now and surviving off of you know so for me that representational justice it i have like figurative work that i was showing you guys earlier but then um that is seeking to represent um migrant communities uh from the borderlands but then also thinking about um the representational justice that you know we we objectify nature and and when we represent it in landscape paintings but then also how do you kind of uh register those voices in the landscape through ancient knowledge forms of knowing that I'm trying to register in the history of also land art too so yeah cool any other questions thank you guys so much oh yeah yeah sorry You kind of went into this with your transition between or using sculpture to go back into the paintings. And I was just curious if there were any dramatic discoveries going back from a very ambitious sculpture like the one for the garden, and then going back into the paintings, if it changed anything for you. I think, I guess the first association that pops to my mind is just space. When you're making paintings, you don't need to worry about like gravity of your composition as much as you do in sculpture.

So then you could throw in different thought experiments or different propositions of compositions in painting. I think now that conversation between painting and sculpture that I'm trying to think through is more like, how can I almost dematerialize the process to be more analogous to the way that nature grows things rather than just from a completely anthropomorphic way of just using being a host and hosting things to maybe modeling more sculpture that looks more like plants and modeling ways of growing that are in some ways more sustainable. I'm thinking about like the work of like Neary Oxman, but then also other ancient ways of building that different tribes throughout the southwest would grow corn and beans and squash all next to each other in certain ways that would benefit all of them.

all three of them so figuring out ways of creating structures and also old materials that were used in the southwest too and then using my painting process as a way to kind of design it as cheaply as possible so then I could propose it to museums that might want to fund these experiments so we'll see how it goes but yeah I just am really inspired by that conversation between painting and drawing looking at people like Picasso or even artists like Huma Baba and yeah so yeah hi it's interesting to see someone who works in so many different mediums and approaches and you mentioned the social practice only once or twice and I'm just wondering how big of a part of your practice is it and kind of it seems like a place where the politics that you talk about that you're interested in could could be it could be a framework for that in particular um perhaps over the painting somehow which um well I don't I don't really know I'm just sort of speculating um because it's an area that I'm curious about and um I don't always see it working necessarily so I'm just wondering how an artist would include that in their practice along with the sculpture and the painting so how's it going yeah I think I'm even though I'm a product of art school from you know age 10 to 25 I didn't do as much education in the history of social practice but I had parents that were organizing and holding meetings and now also touching touching back on certain artists like rick rick tier vanisha that think about how how food is a dematerialized object that can engage people's connections with one another and that part of it with this show that i did of just having growing food that people can just take whenever out off of it was one aspect of it but then also doing workshops with people where we would then also invite them to contribute to the local environment through taking seeds from the seed bank and and growing things on their own after we fired the the work for them so that's sort of like a material aspect of it but where i'm learning even now is like how can i keep this going in other ways how could i think about organizing people actually into the future through social practice especially around labor rights and talking about those material and immaterial things that are so important to us right now in this country that we really need to have conversations around around that and and i think It takes time and I've had to teach myself. how to do these type of conversations with people but sometimes it's just um trying and knowing that you're going to fail sometimes but knowing that you want to do certain things and just trying things out and knowing that if you've messed up today you know there's a new day tomorrow that you can get better at it and try things out and to just keep trying um yeah and just not not giving up so but yeah i know it's not yeah um the second part of uh to that question i guess as you're speaking i was thinking um as an artist sometimes i feel guilty just making painting or drawing and you know it's an interesting way to i don't know if painting can change anything um maybe other mediums can and so that's part of why asking these questions and where that kind of outlet can take place in that that practice yeah and i think there's this book by maggie nelson on freedom uh where she kind of talks about how painting can and she's even quoting like susan sontag where you know sometimes painting slows us down to think and then she goes on to say sometimes that actually stops people from just punching each other and getting into like a fight is that you're just like slowing people down to just think and and and getting people especially right now when people might be so divisive and this show it was actually interesting because it was in arkansas and just seeing people that i would you know from like my urban perspective think that they wouldn't engage in my work you know and i think that that's part of part of what's awesome about art is that it can it might not you know solve global warming right now but it could at least get people to think and not tell people what to think but just slow them down a little bit from their usual mechanistic ways of the nine to five and you know fulfilling quotas and whatnot so i don't know i and there's not and that's not even talking about like the cathartic qualities to the art making process for our own well-being and and self-care that i think are really valuable too so um i guess i'm an optimist um but i also am a realist too that yeah i mean it's hard it's hard work that we're doing and you know i appreciate being here with all of you guys because it's it's not easy what we do sometimes so thank you so much estevan it's a great place to conclude we appreciate your time and learning more about your work And again, please join us downstairs in the clay room for light refreshments if you have time. Thanks again for coming.

Transcript for:Esteban Cabeza de Baca: Artistic Exploration

Transcript for:
Esteban Cabeza de Baca: Artistic Exploration