“Then, of course, we get inspiration to innovate as people share their knowledge in creating something new together.” “I always introduce histories from the beginning so we can learn about who we are and where we come from,” Cabrera says. It’s important to Cabrera that her workshop collaborators, many of whom are people of Mexican descent, learn about the rich and often ancient folk traditions of their ancestral land. For Space, Cabrera ran workshops in which she taught her collaborators to sew soft-sculpture desert flora using an embroidery style associated with the Otomí people of central Mexico. Though she has worked extensively in sculpture, watercolor, and prints made by her own hand, she’s known primarily for the art she has organized others to do.Īnother of Cabrera’s community-based projects, Space in Between, was shown earlier this year at the Dallas Contemporary as part of “Es Imposible Tapar el Sol Con un Dedo” (“It Is Impossible to Cover the Sun With a Finger”), a larger exhibit of Cabrera’s work. Over the past decade-plus, she has pioneered a unique practice of community-based art focused on educating people, often immigrants and women, in traditional Mexican handicraft methods and helping them to assemble works for public display.Ĭabrera’s work has been shown in most of the major public collections in Texas as well as several important museums across the country, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian. Photograph by Josh HuskinĬabrera, who is in her mid-forties, represents a different sort of artist than the archetypal virtuoso who captures personal visions in paint or marble. We have seven hundred new artists and potential art teachers in the community.” A worker attaching a sculpture to the Árbol de la Vida. “You can see in all of these pieces the incredible effort, love, and passion that has gone into them by artists who have never had this kind of experience or opportunity,” she says, rummaging through a storage container for more gems to share. Though Árbol de la Vida won’t open until May, Cabrera believes that the true fruits of her labor are already being realized. Árbol de la Vida: Voces de Tierra conjures and encompasses the vast array of cultures that make up today’s modern South Texas metropolis. The result is exactly as Cabrera intended. Nearby are sculptures that pay homage to local Jewish, Chinese American, and Native American communities as well as to local industries and agricultural trades: railroad ties, a saddle, and, everywhere, animals, fruits, and vegetables in abundance. Cabrera is hesitant to pick favorites, but those she hurries to display include a knee-high feathered hat commemorating an eighteenth-century “cattle queen” who reportedly died in possession of a million acres of land in the Rio Grande Valley a television set that commemorates KWEX Channel 41, the pathbreaking Spanish-language station that would eventually become the charter affiliate of Univision and a replica of a drive-in movie theater showing John Wayne’s tribute to local history, The Alamo, which premiered in San Antonio in 1960. Cabrera shows off the heavy clay sculptures-each made by a local nonprofessional artist-with pride and no small physical effort, turning and lifting them by thick steel rods attached through their centers in preparation for overhead suspension. Just uphill from the installation site, packed away in twenty-foot shipping containers in a dusty parking lot, the greater part of Cabrera’s vision lies in wait: the more than seven hundred elaborate sculptures that will eventually hang on the Árbol’s frame like Christmas ornaments. Artist Margarita Cabrera, standing beneath the gazebo-like structure, directs a team of painters putting finishing touches on the reddish-brown boughs of her Árbol de la Vida. Branching out in a curving canopy from a slender central trunk, this monumental public artwork is, for now, leafless, a work in progress. On a warm December day in the far southern reaches of the San Antonio River Walk, on a spur path to the sleepy Mission San Francisco de la Espada, a massive steel structure-eighty feet in diameter and forty feet tall-spreads its arms above the South Texas scrub.
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