Miguel Arzabe

b. St. Louis, MO, 1975

Miguel Arzabe is a Bolivian-American artist who deconstructs colorful drawings and paintings into strips of material which he incorporates in intricate woven surfaces. With a background in science, Arzabe considers his practice an investigative reverse-engineering of his source imagery, which includes European modernist painting as well as the craft techniques and cultural motifs of his Andean heritage. His work collides references to the Western canon with one of the world’s oldest textile traditions, revealing “uncanny intersections between form and content, the nostalgic and the hard-edged, failure and recuperation.”

Arzabe studied Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and Environmental Fluid Dynamics at Arizona State University, before pursuing his MFA at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. He is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. His work is represented in the collections of the deYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA; the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, NM; and the Oakland Museum of California, among others. His work will be featured in the contemporary art survey TEXTILES x ART published by Thames and Hudson AU and set to be released in late 2025. He lives and works in Oakland, CA.