Photo by Kate Hassett
Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez is an interdisciplinary Artist, Activist, and Public Speaker born in Michoacán, Mexico. She immigrated to Georgia at seven, grew up undocumented in Atlanta, and has been a DACA recipient since 2013.
Cambrón’s work explores the nuances of undocumentedness and its thread in the movement toward collective liberation. Through public art, she has served as a monument-maker asserting the humanity of immigrants in Atlanta, claiming barren walls to paint landmarks that belong to undocumented people. Her work institutes a space for immigrants within the South's dominant racial binary. From her first mural on Buford Hwy to her mural at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, she confronts the idea of who is worthy of public celebration in the home of the largest Confederate monument in the nation. She has worked to complicate the immigrant narrative beyond murals through portraits and site-specific installations. Cambrón 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 Agnes Scott College's Dalton Gallery, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the High Museum of Art.
Cambrón received a B.A. in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College (2014) fully funded by the Goizueta Foundation. In 2015, she became an educator and one of the first Teach for America DACAmented Corps Members placed in Georgia. Two years later, she returned to Cross Keys High School, her alma mater, to teach art. In 2019, Cambrón left the classroom to pursue art full-time. She is completing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a recipient of the 2023 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and is expanding her practice into fibers, sculpture, and discarded materials from her family's commercial furniture-making practice in Atlanta.