Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez is an interdisciplinary artist born in Michoacán, México, and hailing from Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta's Civil Rights Movement legacy offered a springboard for activism that helped Cambrón navigate living in an anti-immigrant state while undocumented. This spirit of resistance informs her practice as she explores her lived experience and its thread in the movement toward collective liberation.

Cambrón's practice is an expression of undocumentedness that draws from her family's lineages of labor. Her work intertwines the labor of love in fiber methods that has persisted after crossing the border and the self-taught labor of furniture production that sustains her family today and has enabled them to thrive on their own terms.

Through intergenerational and matriarchal modes of making, Cambrón reclaims discarded materials from her family's furniture projects. By transforming remnants of textile, vinyl, and leather into portraits and abstracted works and installations, she generates various pathways to maneuver in and out of visibility. This agency to visually code-switch is a critical tactic in her work as she confronts the state violence imposed on undocumented people. Reclaiming discarded materials through crocheting, sewing, and netting gives her a loving way to hold her community's precarity while subverting the ways this country animalizes and criminalizes them.

Cambrón earned a B.A. in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College (2014) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2025) as a 2023 fellow of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. She has had solo exhibitions at the University of South Carolina's Upstate Art Gallery (2022) and Oglethorpe University Museum of Art (2023), which acquired her painting Estela Tejiendo I. She has exhibited at the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and exhibited and curated at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

Image: Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez, Zillow, 2024, Discarded textile, vinyl, and cork with copper leaf from artist's family's commercial furniture-making practice, polyester fiber fill, quilting thread, crochet thread, 42" x 30"

Headshot: Lydia Daniller