Glasstire’s Best of 2024

Full disclosure: I introduced the Texas artist to the New York gallery a few years ago, so I may be a bit biased. But El Vaivén del Mar, the centerpiece of Margarita Cabrera’s terrific show bowled me over with its deceptively lighthearted deployment of incongruous materials to serious ends. A soft-sculpture Spanish galleon, sewn from her signature material of olive-drab US Border Patrol uniforms, floats on a sprawling sea of the colorful ruffles of skirts from flamenco costumes. A playfully simple gesture, and an equivocal one, it nonetheless speaks of the long shadow of history the double-edged sword of “heritage,” and how the legacies of colonial structures and the exploitations of capital ripple from the Age of Exploration to wash up on the shores of the present.