Pollinators

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Esteban Cabeza de Baca: Pollinators, on view from January 8 through February 27. The Queens-based artist will present a group of paintings on canvas and a selection of cast-bronze sculptures. The exhibition is the artist’s third show with the gallery.

Born in San Ysidro, San Diego, to Chicano and Mexican parents who were active in the United Farm Workers, Cabeza de Baca draws on the legacy of landscape painting to imagine new, future entanglements between humans and their environment. He begins by making observational en plein air paintings of sites in the American West and Southwest, and then subverts this art-historical tradition through a host of interventions—masking, overpainting, and subsequently excavating passages of paint; superimposing motifs inspired by graffiti and Mesoamerican petroglyphs; and infusing his artworks with in situ materials, such as soil from Colorado or cochineal and indigo dye from Mexico. Through these methods, Cabeza de Baca fosters alternative ways of making and seeing, upending European frameworks of mastery and possession and urging us to engage with the world in ways that are sensuous, porous, and reciprocal.

A leitmotif of these new paintings is the pollinator—a bright-green, pod-shaped figure modeled after a Maize God depicted on a 500–900 CE Mayan whistle. An avatar of the unruly natural forces that move freely across manmade borders, the pollinator evokes productive energies of hybridity, regeneration, and resilience. A figure of the future as much as the past—and influenced by sci-fi and speculative fiction—the pollinator signals a path forward for humankind, pointing us away from extractive imperatives and recasting relationships between the individual, the collective and the ecological.

With his cast-bronze forms, Cabeza de Baca extends the world of his paintings into the three-dimensional space of the gallery. Developed from burnouts of plants native to the Northeast United States and given a natural patina, the sculptures in Pollinators are an extension of Cabeza de Baca’s Host, a monumental large-scale bronze from 2022. In that work, two seated figures double as a planter for native vegetation, transcending object-making to reimagine artmaking as a process of building—or repairing—ecosystems. In the current show, the burn outs of milkweed, echinacea, sunflower, and aster fuse together with the grating used in the casting. The resulting forms—gnarled, mythic, biomechanical—suggest the liquid metal has, in effect, pollinated the plants, yielding a futuristic hybrid of the organic and the elemental. As with so much of Cabeza de Baca’s work, this vision is strangely optimistic, a portal to a world shaped by Indigenous knowledge where classifications merge and fresh possibilities surface.

Cabeza de Baca has received numerous grants and awards including, a Robert Gamblin Painting Grant (2013); a Stern Fellowship, Columbia University (2013); a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award (2014); a Stokroos Foundation Grant (2017); a Henk en Victoria de Heus Fellowship (2018); a NYFA Painting Fellowship (2021); and a Civitella Ranieri Visual Art Fellowship (2024). 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); Esteban Cabeza de Baca – Life is one drop in limitless oceans … , Kunstfort Vijfhuizen, (2019, Amsterdam); Nepantla, Garth Greenan Gallery, (2021, New York); Let Earth Breathe, The Momentary Museum (2022, Bentonville); Alma, Garth Greenan Gallery (2023, New York); West of Federal, Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design (2023, Denver); and Cesar’s Angels, Parker Gallery (2024, Los Angeles). He has participated in over 20 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), MoCA Tucson (2023, Tucson), and Newchild Gallery (2024, Antwerp) among others.

In 2027, Cabeza de Baca will present a solo exhibition at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico.