Abigail Reyes was born in 1984 in San Salvador, El Salvador, and currently lives and works in La Libertad, El Salvador. Reyes uses language, text, and poetry as a tool for healing and also as an act of resistance. Reyes is an artist, graphic designer, and poet who has exhibited works internationally including Brazil, Spain, and Germany. She is featured in “Latin American Artists from 1785 to Now” recently published by Phaidon Press.
She has had solo exhibitions at Espacio Cultural La Erre (Guatemala), Liliana Bloch Gallery (United States), Marte Museum (El Salvador), Lokkus Contemporary Art Gallery (Colombia), Manzanita Hall Gallery CSUN (United States), Museum of Art and Design Contemporary S.1.1 (Costa Rica). She was invited by the Swiss Institute of New York to intervene in public space.
She has participated in group exhibitions at: Ford Foundation Gallery (United States), The School of Visual Arts Gallery (United States), Norton Museum (United States), Oklahoma State University´s art gallery (United States), Espacio Mínimo Gallery (Spain), Jumex Museum (Mexico), Palais de Tokyo (France), Sala Amós Salvador (Spain), Sies + Höke Gallery (Germany), Städtisches Galerie Wolfsburg (Germany), Gallery de Arte Taimiao (China), Galería Extra (Guatemala), Espacio Poporopo (Guatemala), TEOR/ética (Costa Rica), National Hall (El Salvador), Cultural Center of Spain (El Salvador), Lokkus Gallery (Colombia). She was selected for the X Central American Biennial. She has participated in art residencies in the United States, Brazil and Central America. She is featured in “Latin American Artists from 1785 to Now” recently published by Phaidon Press.
Abigail Reyes is a Salvadoran contemporary artist, graphic designer, and poet whose multidisciplinary practice moves across text, embroidery, video, photography, installation, and public art. Language is both the subject and material of her work. Through repetition, transcription, poetry, and carefully selected phrases, Reyes examines how words can reinforce systems of authority while also becoming tools for healing, resistance, and self-definition.
Her practice is informed by personal experience as well as research into gender, labor, popular media, and the social structures of Latin American life. Typewritten pages, secretarial exercises, television dialogue, fabric, thread, and familiar domestic materials are transformed into works that reveal the emotional and political weight carried by seemingly ordinary language. Reyes is particularly interested in forms of work historically associated with women and in the expectations of obedience, discipline, and invisibility placed upon feminized labor.
In works such as Plana, Reyes uses lines drawn from secretarial training manuals, repeatedly typed onto sheets of paper and joined through embroidery. Mechanical repetition becomes both evidence of control and a means of endurance. By bringing practices associated with offices, domestic labor, and traditional women’s work into the gallery, she gives public form to experiences that are frequently overlooked.
Reyes also examines gendered violence and the influence of popular culture. Her 2021 exhibition Aquí se come carne at Liliana Bloch Gallery addressed systemic machismo in Latin American society through video, text, testimony, and installation. Drawing from telenovelas and lived experience, the exhibition considered how language, entertainment, and workplace structures normalize male authority and shape expectations of women’s behavior.
Migration, belonging, and geographical movement are central to other parts of her practice. For QUESTIONS, presented by the Swiss Institute in New York from 2021 to 2022, Reyes photographed roads in El Salvador used by migrants traveling through Central America. Short questions and statements appeared in an installation at Astor Place, connecting personal experiences of departure with the political language of borders, customs, aspiration, and displacement.
In 2025, Liliana Bloch Gallery presented Sutura, a body of work connecting the artist’s physical recovery from illness with the cracks and tremors of the built environment in El Salvador. Through cotton, layering, and visible stitching, Reyes treated repair not as an attempt to erase damage but as a way of acknowledging fragility and transforming it into resilience.
Born in San Salvador in 1984, Reyes studied graphic design at Don Bosco University in El Salvador. She was the inaugural participant in the Swiss Institute’s Clarice O. Tavares Residency for artists working in Latin America and has completed residencies in the United States, Brazil, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. She received the Y.ES Contemporary Prize for production and travel and was selected for the X Central American Biennial in 2016.
Reyes has presented solo exhibitions at Museo MARTE in El Salvador, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo in Costa Rica, Espacio Cultural La Erre in Guatemala, Lokkus Contemporary Art Gallery in Colombia, California State University Northridge, and Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Ford Foundation Gallery, Museo Jumex, Palais de Tokyo, Norton Museum of Art, Espacio Mínimo, Sies + Höke, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, and TEOR/éTica, among others.
Reyes is included in Phaidon’s Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now, an international survey of more than 300 modern and contemporary artists born or based in Latin America. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and Museo MARTE in San Salvador. She lives and works in La Libertad, El Salvador, and is represented by Liliana Bloch Gallery, where her work is available to Dallas art collectors interested in contemporary Latin American art, text-based practice, fiber, video, and installation.