Courtesy of Scherezade.net
Cover Photo by Dr.Ricardo Romo
Scherezade García is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist whose work often explores allegories of history, migration, collective and ancestral memory, and cultural colonization and politics. A co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA, she holds an AAS from Altos de Chavón School of Design, a BFA from Parsons School of Design | The New School, and an MFA from The City College of New York, CUNY. García has been featured in solo and duo exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas, Clifford Art Gallery at Colgate University, Miller Theater at Columbia University, Lehman College Art Gallery, Crossroads Gallery at the University of Notre Dame, Museo de Arte de Santo Domingo and others. She has participated in the Havana Biennial, the International Biennial of Paintings at Haute de Cagnes, the IV Caribbean Biennial, Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Latin American Biennial, BRIC Biennial, Venice Autonomous Biennial, and international fairs. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Museum of the Americas, El Museo del Barrio, The Housatonic Museum of Art, El Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, and others.
García is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2015) and the Colene Brown Art Prize (2020). An edited monograph on her work Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic, was published in 2020 by the Art Museum of the Americas. She is a member of the Artist Advisory Council of Arts Connection and No Longer Empty. She sits on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association (2020-2024).
García is represented by Praxis Art Gallery [link: https://www.praxis-art.com/en/artist/scherezade-garcia/] in New York, and IBIS Art Gallery in New Orleans.
Her artist’s papers can be found at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Garcia is an assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin.She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and Austin, TX.
Artist Statement
My work inhabits a baroque universe of different worlds of aesthetics planes. Through my art works, I become a storyteller. My visual narratives generate energy, alluding to the emotional physicality of art making; and there is the urgency of a concept to keep alive. The physical and emotional experience of drawing is essential to my art making process. Through my drawings, I create beauty with lines. The process of drawing gives rise to visual codes which lead me to spontaneous compositions and intriguing meanings at once. I work in drawing, painting, installations, artists’ books, and video animation. Through these different media, I create contemporary allegories of history, colonization, and politics.
My fascination with the social human experience since the “discovery” of America and its multifarious results is an endless source of inspiration and an essential part of my discourse. This fascination has led me to such themes as the causes and consequences of migration, the mestizo and barroquism as consequences of colonization, the inversion of traditional beliefs of salvation, and the questioning of religious and social uses of the notion of paradise. I create my allegorical narratives by appropriating and transforming symbols and objects that have included life jackets, inner tubes, suitcases, mattresses, tents, umbrellas, religious icons, and newspapers clippings.
Read more about the artist on page 10
