Esteban Cabeza de Baca: Ancestral Dreams, the MoMA PS1 Plaza Mural

Esteban Cabeza de Baca (b. 1985, San Diego) has unveiled Ancestral Dreams, the second MoMA PS1 Plaza Mural, an annual commission juried by local cultural leaders including curators, organizers and artists. The work went on view on June 25, 2026 and remains through spring 2027. It occupies the museum's outdoor plaza in Long Island City, and admission to the museum is free.

The mural imagines a rupture in the physical wall that opens onto another dimension. For the artist, advocating for migrant communities cannot be separated from protecting the land, and that conviction organizes the whole composition.

Cabeza de Baca draws on the ongoing United Farm Workers movement and on Liberation Theology, which emerged in Latin America in the late 1960s and took up Marxist thought to address poverty and other forms of oppression. The composition is anchored by syncretic images of resistance and survival: a black eagle, hands entwined with prayer beads, and a sunburst signifying divine protection, among others.

These motifs are interwoven with atmospheric abstraction and totemic references to the Three Sisters, the corn, beans and squash that stand for sustaining deities across Indigenous cultures of the Americas. Different eras collapse into a single picture. The mural also nods to Mexican Muralism, the Works Progress Administration and the local history of 5Pointz, recasting the public plaza as a place for social advocacy and shared imagining.

Cabeza de Baca is a painter who works between Queens and the Southwestern United States. His work has appeared at MoCA Tucson (2023), The Drawing Center (2019), the Royal Palace Amsterdam (2018) and the Yale University School of Sacred Music (2017), among other venues. His honors include a Civitella Ranieri Visual Art Fellowship (2024) and a NYFA Painting Fellowship (2021). He earned a BFA from Cooper Union in 2010 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2014. The project is organized by Elena Ketelsen González, Associate Curator, with support from the MoMA PS1 Emerging Artist Fund.