Margarita Cabrera

Interdisciplinary artist Margarita Cabrera graduated from Hunter’s MFA program in 2001. Her work centers on social-political community issues including cultural identity, migration, violence, inclusivity, labor, and empowerment. Cabrera often creates sculptures made out of mediums ranging from steel, copper, wood, ceramics, and fabric. Her work also includes a number of collaborative projects at the intersection of contemporary art practices, indigenous Mexican folk art and craft traditions, and US-Mexico relations. Cabrera’s aim in studying and preserving endangered cultural and craft traditions is to activate these investigations into the creation of fair working conditions and the protection of immigrant rights. 

Cabrera currently resides and works in El Paso, Texas, where her work was recently installed in a two-year exhibit at the El Paso Museum of Art. In 2023 she was the recipient of a US Latinx Artist Fellowship, and in the past Cabrera has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and was a Knight Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Cabrera’s work is part of the permanent collections of more than twenty museums, and has been included in surveys organized by institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Ford Foundation Gallery, New York; and the New Orleans “Prospect 4.” Recent solo exhibitions include Margarita Cabrera: “It Is Impossible to Cover the Sun with a Finger,” Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; ”What Art Can Do: Margarita Cabrera—The Collaborative Act of Making,” Art League Houston; and “Margarita Cabrera: Space in Between,” Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York.