The scene is at once intangible and real. Before a blazing pink New Mexico sky and a retreating mountainous landscape, the outline of a figural form appears. Vessels reminiscent of Pueblo pottery are strewn on the foreground among the scrappy forms of brown vegetation. Ghostly spray paint marks emerge from the three vessels, which hold yellow seed-like forms. Their transparency and the frantic white lines they emit are reminiscent of holograms or the sudden appearance of otherworldly beings in a sci-fi thriller.

      Born and raised in San Ysidro, California, a town directly north of Tijuana, Esteban Cabeza De Baca draws from his Indigenous and Latino heritage in producing works that interrogate Western notions of landscape painting. A graduate of the Cooper Union and Columbia University, Cabeza de Baca’s practice incorporates plein aire painting as well as techniques borrowed from street art. In 2015, during his graduate studies at Columbia University, the painter met Jaune Quick-to-See Smith during a CUE Art Foundation event honoring her work.¹ Smith became a major influence on his artistic and philosophical views. Cabeza de Baca’s work draws, in part, from her Nomad Art Manifesto, which proposes an artistic practice based on Salish and Flathead parfleches, one harmless to the environment and simple to transport, useful for “countries which may be disbanding or reforming” and made “for the new diasporic age.”² Cabeza de Baca credits his embrace of non-toxic acrylic paints—such as those used in this work—over traditional, often noxious, oil mediums to this treatise. The material shift not only served philosophical ends, but also allowed him to produce series of paintings which, in layering landscapes on top of one another through carefully formulated series of resists, collapse numerous paintings into one work. An early foray into this technique can be seen in the way that white airbrushed lines are bound by the edges of the vessels in the foreground.

      Vessels speaks to Cabeza de Baca’s broad interests in science fiction and object-oriented ontology, a twenty-first century movement that considers objects as independent of and beyond their interactions with human beings. The artist’s stated interest in portals appears here in the figural form in the center of the work, which mediates our experience of the landscape behind it, inviting us to consider it a doorway through which one can pass. When Cabeza de Baca exhibited this work, the figure existed also as a sculpted terracotta form that he he created while on the Rijksakademie residency in Amsterdam. The buzzing white lines erupting from vessels with yellow seeds or beans speak to these objects’ unique—and potential—lifeforce, at once autonomous and tied to human interaction. Meanwhile, the vessel in the corner, which contains within it a pueblo dwelling, alludes to the work of Hopi engineer and sculptor Alfred H. Qöyawayma. It could also be read as a nod to Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction, which informs Cabeza de Baca’s work from this period.³ Le Guin’s treatise proposes a view of science fiction that repositions technology as an instrument and carrier of culture rather than a weapon of domination. In the landscape and vigorous life force that emerges from the seeds in Vessels, Cabeza de Baca echoes not only the visual metaphors but also the hopefulness of Le Guin’s essay, while simultaneously tying technology and innovation to the land itself.

¹ Conversation with the artist,

² A copy of the manifesto is reproduced in Phoebe Farris, Women Artists of Color: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 82.

³ Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 165-70.


Image courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery.