untitled art fair, miami beach
booth c4
featuring: Margarita cabrera

november 29 - december 3, 2022

Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to present a solo installation by Mexican-born Texas-based artist Margarita Cabrera at Untitled Art, Miami Beach. Booth C4 will feature embroidered soft sculptures from Cabrera’s ongoing series Space in Between and Pepita Para El Loro Para Que Hable o Calle, and abstract, cochineal-dyed works on paper from the Flujo de Extracciones series. Cabrera brings a fresh perspective to weighty ideas surrounding globalism, populism, and the migrant experience.

Space in Between reflects on the borderlands between the United States and Mexico through the fabric of one of its most ubiquitous features – U.S. Border Patrol officers’ uniforms. Cabrera has worked with this fraught material since 2010, transforming it into soft sculptures of desert plants indigenous to the region. She organizes collaborative workshops with recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America, empowering them to impart their own stories on the objects with colorful thread and traditional embroidery techniques from Los Tenangos, Hidalgo, Mexico. While the resulting sculptures, planted in traditional Mexican terra cotta pots, are adorned with the deeply personal hopes, dreams, hardships, and triumphs of Cabrera’s immigrant collaborators, they also stand as ambivalent objects – thorny sentinels of the desert that represent the role of law enforcement officers as both protagonists and antagonists in the punishing desert landscape.

In playful imitation, the artist’s series Pepita Para El Loro Para Que Hable o Calle refashions U.S. Border Patrol uniforms into hand-patterned and sewn, life-size sculptures of red-crowned amazon parrots, a now endangered species native to northeastern Mexico and the southern tip of Texas. Stitched on the armatures of battery-operated robotic toys, the sculptures are each embedded with a voice-activated mimicry device that parrots the surrounding sounds and ricochets them from bird to bird across the flock. The work encourages viewer participation in a cacophonous dialogue that mirrors the politicized public discourse around border crossings, incarceration, family separations, and immigrant detention centers.

Flujo de Extracciones is a body of works on paper employing fabric collage with applications of gouache and cochineal dye, an oxidized natural pigment extracted from the eponymous insect that attaches and survives on the surface of the prickly pear cactus pads in the form of a white fungus. The vibrant purples, pinks, oranges, and reds are rich with significance; cochineal is rooted in Latin American history as one of the most valuable exports since Aztec times. The series title, “extracciones,” connotes the extraction of natural resources carried out by the American oil and mining industries, as well as the colonial commodification and exploitation of indigenous land, knowledge, and culture. Cabrera’s amorphic forms are reminiscent of truncated human torsos, or geographical spaces that map out conquered terrain, while the material adaptation of cochineal and U.S. Border Patrol uniforms center the physical, cultural, and spiritual extractions of immigrant communities within the work.

Following Cabrera’s inclusion in the exhibition say the dream was real and the wall imaginary, curated by Joseph R. Wolin, at Jane Lombard Gallery this past spring, the gallery is pleased to present a solo booth (C4) of the artist’s three distinct series at this year’s edition of Untitled Art, Miami Beach.

About Margarita Cabrera
Margarita Cabrera was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and moved to El Paso, TX at the age of 10. She 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. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX; and the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY;. Her work has been included exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, NY; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; the Sweeney Art Center for Contemporary Art at the University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA; the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Location; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; and El Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico.

In 2012 she was a 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, presenting a community public art sculpture commissioned by Lego at Discovery Green in Houston, Puentes Culturales. In May 2019, Cabrera unveiled her monumental, participatory public sculpture Árbol de la Vida: Memorias y Voces de la Tierra in San Antonio, Texas, and was named Texas Artist of the Year.