Haight Street Art Center is proud to present Melanie Cervantes: Viva La Mujer in our main galleries opening March 14, 2026. Keep an eye out for more events and print workshops to come!
The exhibition is a series of prints and multimedia projects centering Indigenous women and Third world and indigenous movements. Through screenprints, posters and sculptures, Cervantes amplifies the enduring power of her people and the deep well of wisdom held by community healers, organizers, and visionaries. The work engages issues central to her community in an effort to inspire solidarity and bring about justice. These works don’t just reflect struggle—they celebrate survival. They honor those who, even in the face of oppression, choose to build, protect, and dream. Each piece is a rallying cry and a love letter, crafted to energize our spirits and remind us of the brilliance within our collective resistance. Each print becomes an altar, each poster a call to honor the strength woven through generations. Highlights of the exhibit will include new works on paper screen printed by Cervantes in studio here at Haight Street Art Center and Cervantes’ soft sculpture installation of the Mexica (Aztec) moon goddess “La Más Xingonx: Coyolxauhqui Re-membered.”
“My work is shaped by the struggles, injustices, and resilience I witnessed in my communities,” says Cervantes. “These experiences inform not just the content of my art, but the way I approach collaboration and cultural work. From my earliest stencil and poster workshops to large-scale installations and soft sculptures, I’ve sought to center the stories and voices of those too often erased, creating spaces for people to connect, reflect, and act. Working alongside communities, whether locally or internationally, has reinforced my belief that art can be a tool for solidarity, social transformation, and collective care.”
Melanie Cervantes (Xicanx) has never lived far from the California Coast. Born in Harbor City, California and raised in a small city in the South Bay of Los Angeles Melanie now makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area where she creates visual art that is inspired by the people around her and her communities’ desire for radical social transformation. Melanie’s intention is to create a visual lexicon of resistance to multiple oppressions that will to inspire curiosity, raise consciousness and inspire solidarities among communities of struggle.
In 2007 she co-founded Dignidad Rebelde, a graphic arts collaboration that produces screen prints, political posters and multimedia projects that are grounded in Third World and indigenous movements that build people’s power to transform the conditions of fragmentation, displacement and loss of culture that result from histories of colonialism, patriarchy, genocide, and exploitation. Dignidad Rebelde’s purpose is to illustrate stories of struggle, resistance and triumph into artwork that can be put back into the hands of the communities who inspire it.
Cervantes has exhibited extensively nationally including at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco); National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago); and Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) and internationally at the Musée d’Aquitaine (Bordeaux, France), Galerija Alkatraz (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and Museo Franz Mayer (Mexico City, Mexico). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, the Latin American Collection of the Green Library at Stanford, the Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College and the Library of Congress and the as well as various other public and private collections throughout the U.S.
Please be sure to also visit Melanie Cervantes: Bringing Back Ourselves, now on display in the Garden Gallery at Haight Street Art Center.