Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Weaving, painting, video
Website: miguelarzabe.net
Miguel Arzabe was born in 1975 and lives and works in Oakland, California. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS in Environmental Fluid Dynamics from Arizona State University, and an MFA from UC Berkeley. He is represented by Johansson Projects in Oakland. His work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum (Svane Family Foundation gift), the Oakland Museum of California, the Albuquerque Museum of Art, the Harn Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. He was awarded the 2022 Artadia Award for the San Francisco Bay Area, a 2023 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a 2023 Golden Foundation Residency. His work was featured in the 2024 exhibitions About Place at the de Young Museum and The Poetics of Dimensions at ICA San Francisco, and is included in the 2025 Thames and Hudson survey publication TEXTILES x ART. His residencies include Facebook AIR, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Millay Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. His work has been featured internationally at the Centre Pompidou (Hors Pistes), the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, MAC Lyon, MARS Milan, RM Projects in Auckland, and the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale in South Korea.
Arzabe makes colorful and dynamic abstractions — weavings, paintings, and videos — through a process of methodical deconstruction and reconstruction. He begins with paper ephemera from art shows, modernist paintings, and discarded audio recordings, which he analyzes, cuts into strips, and weaves back together, revealing unexpected intersections between form and content. His weavings draw on the cultural techniques and motifs of his Bolivian Andean heritage — particularly the ch’ixi, a Bolivian weaving tradition that draws from multiple sources to create something entirely new — while also engaging the formal vocabularies of modernist painting and abstract expressionism. The tension in his work is between control and chance, the nostalgic and the hard-edged, failure and recuperation. A parallel video and sound practice extends these concerns into time-based media.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.