Draft:Michael Anthony García

Michael Anthony García (born October 11, 1974) is a Mexican-American/ Chicano, interdisciplinary contemporary artist and independent curator living and working in Austin, Texas. His practices which can be described as a form of rasquachismo, include sculpture/ installation, photography/ video, poetry/ performance art and all the areas they overlap.

Biography

Michael Anthony García (born October 11, 1974) is an Austin, Texas-based Mexican-American, interdisciplinary contemporary artist and independent curator who works in the poetics of performance, writing, video, sculpture, photography and installation. His work explores his personal story via these overlapping mediums, and in the process the stories of those like him as they navigate the human condition. Themes of queered Latinidad shape much of García’s work across all of his practices in what he describes as, “...a political expression of Latinx Futurism based on utopian projection.” His work has been exhibited in the US and Mexico and is in the collection of Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX. García has been commissioned to create work for Austin City Hall’s The People’s Gallery exhibition, the O. Henry Museum (2016), the City of Austin’s Art in Public Places (2016), Latinos in Architecture (with the Austin Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, AIA Austin) (2016), Museo de la Ciudad de México (2016), ThreeWalls in Chicago (2017), The Contemporary Austin (2019), SoHo House Austin (2021), The Blaffer Art Museum (2021), The Blanton Museum of Art (2022), and was the recipient of a 2015 ArtPlace America grant , the latter of which was with his Latinx curatorial collective, Los Outsiders, of which he is a founding member.

In 1999 he was also a member of the Good/ Bad Art Collective based in Denton, TX. He has curated exhibitions and projects with Mexic-Arte Museum, Texas State University Galleries and Fusebox Festival. He received his BA in Fine Art from Austin College in Sherman, Texas (1996) and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2022). He worked for decades in public education as a Literacy Interventionist at TITLE I schools servicing Mexican, Central American and Caribbean immigrants, which he considers as part of his social activism that informs his work. He was born and raised in El Paso, Texas and though he has both US and Mexican citizenship, he lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Education

García is a graduate of Austin College in Sherman, TX where he received his BA in Fine Art in 1996. In 2020 he enrolled in the Low Residency program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, graduating with his MFA in Fine Arts in the summer of 2022. It was in this graduate program where he was introduced to poet and artist Pamela Sneed, who is most influential in his practices, helping García redirect his passion for writing into part of his visual and performance art practices.

Career

The majority of García's work thematically centers on his identity politics and how his queered Latinx experience has shaped his perception of and by the world. He self-describes as a “matchmaker” whose interdisciplinary practices collage objects, ideas, and in the case of his curatorial work, community due to his focus on the importance of human connectivity. García’s work incorporates writing, performance art, photography, video, sculpture and installation. As a fluent English and Spanish speaker, often necessitating code-switching, García likens his linguistic experience to his exploration of various artistic mediums/ practices. In an effort to avoid the narrative cycle of focusing on negativity, his work is often rooted in Latinx Futurism in what he describes as a, “...utopian expression of positivity.”

One conceptual and aesthetic element that often ties together all of García’s interdisciplinary work is his use of clothing, either as a sculptural or collaged medium or costuming for performances. It provides an abstracted reference to the human form, or fossil of the body, and life in a corporeal world.

García has participated in artist residencies in 2015 at CentralTrak in Dallas, Texas and Proyecto Changarrito in both the month-long Mexic-Arte-based component in Austin, Texas as well as Casa Changarrito in Mexico City, Mexico in 2017. That same year, García’s work was included in the book, Changarrito, and the exhibition 11 años de Changarrito en Acción (2019) at the Museo de la Ciudad de México in Mexico City in celebration of the residency’s anniversary.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

• agua gusgo, The Proyecto, Austin Texas.
• entangled portmanteau, Ivester Contemporary, Austin Texas.
• mujeriego, Lizbet Ney Museum, Austin Texas.
• Olas de Perturbación, Ivester Contemporary, Austin Texas.
• Continental Divide, St. Edwards University Gallery, Austin, TX
• Chimera Chimera, grayDUCK Gallery, Austin Texas.
• Illuminaughty Machine, Red Space Gallery, Austin,TX

Performance Art

In an effort to experiment and find an audience for his early performance art work, García explored its overlap with the world of traditional theater beginning in the late 1990’s when he was based in Dallas, TX. His silent performance works Potato Hierarchy and Downward Climb debuted at Teatro Dallas. García’s full embrace of performance based work took place in the early 2000’s with his relocation to Austin, TX. It was here that this aspect of his practice thrived with various performances at The Blanton Museum of Art and most notably at The Contemporary Austin where he developed his performance Costras Pendientes to activate the installation of Abraham Cruzvillegas in an exhibition entitled Hi How are you, Gonzo?. Over the course of his career, García would also perform at The Blaffer Art Museum and participate in the Experimental Action Performance Festival (previously known as the Lonestar Explosion Performance Biennial) both of which are based in Houston. His performance-based work can often be characterized through an approach akin to yoga or meditation, via which he feels he can, “...embody (perhaps in futility) an emotional positivity.” García likens it to faking it till you make it, “...in an effort to better understand my place in the world.”

Writing/ Publishing

García’s interests in writing and publishing dovetail with his focus on establishing and creating community. In the early to mid 2000s he contributed content to VOA (Voices of Art) Magazine, Cantanker Magazine and Chingozine. As an offshoot of his intersectional podcast, El Puente, in 2019 he published and distributed POCa Madre Magazine as a means of amplifying the voices of BIPOC and queer artists who were highlighted as features in the print publication.

Art Curation

Solo Curation García’s first foray into curation took place in Guadalajara, Mexico in 2009 as a pop up exhibition, pr[é]st[á]mos, at Humo Live Art, directed by Humberto Moro. Three years later, García was invited for his first institutional solo curatorial project, YLA (Young Latino Artists) 18: Con/Juntos (2013), at Mexic-Arte Museum, by curator of exhibitions and programs Claudia E. Zapata. YLA, now known as ELA (Emerging Latino Artists), is a yearly exhibition at the museum in which guest curators develop a theme and select artists speaking to that idea, important to their practice. García’s exhibition subtitle, “Con/Juntos” juxtaposes two Spanish words translating to “with/together” which sound like the Spanish word “conjunto” referring to a small musical group/ band. In the exhibition, he had artists show their individual work as well as collaborate, in some cases internationally, in the creation of new work. The work ranged from sculpture and installation, to video and even collaborative knitting. Due to the success and public reception of the Con/Juntos, 2015 saw García curate his second solo exhibition, this time at the art galleries of Texas State University. In De La Tierra, García selected artists from a variety of cultural backgrounds to take assigned portions of No Se Lo Tragó la Tierra by seminal Chicano writer Tomás Rivera as an entry point to empathy and creating new works based on the themes in those selected chapters. He aimed to amplify the migrant bracero experience through the eyes of artists who had not lived that experience as a means of having the artists and public “walk a mile in their shoes.

García’s curatorial curiosity turned to abstraction with six painters in Wild Abandon at PrintPress in Austin, TX in November of 2017. Two years later, García collaborated with artist Jose Villalobos to curate Cuerpos Unidos, focusing on Black, Latinx and Queer artists whose work spoke about their bodies. The exhibition debuted at Clamp Light Gallery in San Antonio, Texas and traveled the project to (MoHA) the Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, Texas.

Delayed because of the COVID pandemic, ¡Se Ha Dicho! debuted at the Austin Central Library Gallery, Austin, TX in September 2021 filling the large gallery with the work of 14 Latinx artists and 2 poets whose writings punctuated the visual art as vinyl poems on the walls. The exhibition’s title translates to either a declarative or folksy “It Has Been Said.” The following year, in April, García was invited to curate the first visual arts only content of the traditionally performance based Fusebox Festival. Designed as an anti-fair art fair, it was titled “It’s NOT Fair.” García teamed up with several local galleries to develop new projects that highlighted artists each space had worked with in the past.

Most recently, García developed a curatorial project with the OUTsider Transmedia Festival in Austin that was part of the 2023 festival. Bespoke: The Space Between Words, saw him creating a visual and performance conversation between the mural installation work of artist Forrest Scherer used as a performance backdrop with the socially engaged poetry of Pamela Sneed, Ena Ganguly and the curator himself.

Curation with Los Outsiders

• [artcrush] Hasta La Basura Se Separa, Antigua Aduana Centro Cultural, Nuevo Laredo, México (2008)
  • traveled to Box 13, Houston, TX, (November, 2009)
• HEIR today, gone tomorrow, Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC), Austin, TX (June 2011)
• Gently Fried, Emma S. Barrientos MACC, Austin, TX (April 2015)
• Sew Wasted, Fusebox Festival, Austin, TX (September 2016)
• En Bola, de Stijl Gallery, Austin TX, (June 2017)
• CAPIROTADA: Of A Personal Nature, grayDUCK Gallery, Austin, TX (March 2020)
• Chai’n Brai Laika Daimon, Laredo Center for the Arts, Laredo, TX (December 2023)
  • traveled to Canopy Projects in Austin, Texas in (July 2024)

Collections

García’s work is in the collections of:

• Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX
• SoHo House, Austin, TX
• Proyecto Changarrito, CDMX, México

Awards and Residencies

• Holly Hunt Graduate Merit Fellowship, SAIC, Chicago, IL (2020)
• Austin Critics’ Table Award, Artist of the Year, Austin, TX (2020)
• MACC Artist Award of Excellence, Emma S. Barrientos Mexican-American Cultural Center, Austin, TX (2018)
• Austin Critics’ Table Award, Artist of the Year, Austin, TX (2016)
• Artist of the Year (3-D), Austin Visual Artist Association, Austin, TX (2012)

Residencies

• CentralTrak, through University of Texas at Dallas (2020)
• Casa Changarrito, Mexico City, Mexico (2017)

External Links

• Michael Anthony García Official Website
• Campbell, Andy (August, 2014). “Michael Anthony García” . TheDestroyerMag.com.
• Franco, Josh T (September, 2013). ”Michael García: Interview”. ZingMagazine.com.