On Saturday, June 10, 2023 at 2:00pm, Garth Greenan Gallery hosted a public discussion between the artist Esteban Cabeza de Baca and his mother, longtime union organizer Rosario Cabeza de Baca, moderated by art writer Barbara Calderón. The talk addressed overt themes in Cabeza de Baca's work, which include an urgency to connect the history of labor movements and the fight for workers' rights and protections to current environmental concerns.

Esteban Cabeza de Baca (b. 1985)’s childhood hometown of San Ysidro virtually straddled the U.S.–Mexico border, as did his family. His father and Mexican-born mother were active participants in the Brown Berets, as well as the Chicano, American Indian, and Black Panther movements. Of Mexican and Native American heritage himself, Cabeza de Baca was heavily influenced by the border town’s liminal position, and by his parents, whose intersectional political awareness and respect for human dignity led them to shelter undocumented migrants in their basement during his youth. Cabeza de Baca received a BFA from Cooper Union, School of the Arts in 2010 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2014. He currently lives and works in Queens, NY.

Rosario Cabeza de Baca is an immigrant born in Tijuana, Mexico and raised across the border in San Ysidro, California. She began organizing in her community to get a community clinic and with César Chávez at the age of fourteen (14). As the daughter of a farmworker mom, she helped neighbors and others toiling in San Diego's fields to join the United Farm Workers of America and fight for dignity, safe and fair working conditions. Rosario studied Biology at UCSD where she worked in a neuroscience laboratory for ten years. Her community work continued in Denver, where her husband Historian Vincent Cabeza de Baca taught at Metro State University beginning 1993. Rosario worked with the Southwest Voter Registration Project and was the state coordinator for the Colorado Women's Vote Project in 1996. As a result of her activism for Latinas and Latinos to access health care, specifically those living with HIV/AIDS, Mayor Webb appointed her to the Board of the Denver Health and Hospital Authority, then to the Community Health Services Board. She coordinated the Behavioral Health Programs at the Latin American Research Agency (LARASA) for several years before working full time as a labor organizer during the last three recent decades. She is a union organizer for Denver Health Workers United-CWA, organizing workers at the same hospital where she previously served as a board member. Rosario and her late husband were active in the Chicano Movement, especially to gain equality and quality public education for all.

Barbara Calderón is a writer, artist and founding member of the arts collective Colectiva Cósmica. She is currently faculty and an art librarian at the School of Visual Arts. She was previously assistant director of The Latinx Project at NYU and has collaborated with the Brooklyn Museum on Frida: Appearances Can be Deceiving and Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960 - 1985 exhibitions. Her art criticism has been published by Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, artnet, Art21, and Cultured Magazine. She was a recipient of the 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.