Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez is an interdisciplinary artist born in México and based in Chicago, IL. She migrated to Atlanta, GA, as a child, where being undocumented in the South spurred her to become a socially engaged educator and artist. Her work spans public art, installation, drawing, painting, and her family’s craft.
Cambrón’s art practice draws from her lived experience and her family’s lineages of labor. Her work intertwines the labor of love in fiber methods that persisted after migrating and the self-taught labor of furniture production that sustains her family today.
Through matriarchal fiber-crafting techniques, such as sewing, netting, and crocheting, Cambrón reclaims discarded materials from her family’s furniture projects. By transforming remnants of textiles, vinyl, and leather into portraits, abstract works, and installations, she creates multiple pathways to navigate in and out of visibility. This agency to visually code-switch is a critical tactic in her work as she confronts the violence inflicted on her community.
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), and has exhibited at the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and Agnes Scott College, among others. In 2025, Cambrón was awarded a full fellowship through SAIC to participate as an artist-in-residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA. She is also a 2025-2027 Artist-in-Residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition.
Image by Thomas Logan
