Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | Click here to join mailing list
Matt Garcia’s artistic practice investigates ecology, its relationship to knowledge systems and how media can connect communities to a reclaiming or re-imagining of lost epistemology. Matthew Garcia is an assistant professor of Art and Design at Dominican University of California located in the San Francisco Bay Area and the founder of the interdisciplinary collective Desert ArtLAB. In 2010, Garcia established Desert ArtLAb to explore how a connection to desert ecology and art can foster a sense of belonging, empowerment, and self-determination.
Garcia’s work has been presented nationally and internationally at: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Paris, France), Museum of Contemporary Native Art – MoCNA (Santa Fe,NM), Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara ,The International Symposium on Electronic Art (2012,2015), Balance-Unbalance Festival (Noose, Australia) and HASTAC (Lima, Peru). Garcia is a 2016 Creative Capital awardee in Emerging Fields.
Garcia’s current project, The Desertification Cookbook, visually re-brands the concept of deserts not as a post-apocalyptic growth of wasteland, but as a culinary and ecological opportunity. The cookbook is a collection of bilingual community driven recipes, statements, strategies and actions for exploring, surviving, and belonging in the desert borderlands.
The book mentioned in the interview is Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience by Enrique Salmón.
[…] Matthew D. Garcia is occupied most recently at residency for a year in Tuscon, Arizona. His work there centers around The Desertification Cook Book, an artist book with recipes (not all for eating) designed to speak to how to live beautifully in the desert. Garcia began this project several years ago and intends to use his residency period to push it to completion. To hear more about this work and other projects, including the Desert Art Lab, listen to the complete interview. […]
[…] Matthew D. Garcia is occupied most recently at residency for a year in Tuscon, Arizona. His work there centers around The Desertification Cook Book, an artist book with recipes (not all for eating) designed to speak to how to live beautifully in the desert. Garcia began this project several years ago and intends to use his residency period to push it to completion. To hear more about this work and other projects, including the Desert Art Lab, listen to the complete interview. […]