2024 Curatorial Research Fellow: Jason Garcia

Apr 18, 2024

Jason Garcia’s (Okuu Pín/Turtle Mountain) project seeks to raise awareness of Tewa art, culture, and relationship to land through critical engagement with Georgia O’Keeffe’s work and museum, which have long defined the popular imaginary of northern New Mexico and contributed to the erasure of Tewa perspectives.

Questioning the Tewa absence from this conception of the landscape and the broader settler colonial context of northern New Mexico, Garcia will bring together a group of Indigenous artists, scholars, and community members to co-curate an exhibition that honors historical and contemporary Tewa contributions to the land and culture of the region. The project comes at a critical time for the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which is currently planning for a new campus that will center Indigenous perspectives; participants in the project will spend time with the Museum’s collections and in O’Keeffe’s homes and studios, engaging in collective research and exchange.

Jason Garcia’s/Okuu Pín work documents the ever-changing cultural landscape of his home of K’haPo Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo, NM.

Garcia’s Tewa cultural ceremonies, traditions, and stories, as well as 21st century popular culture, comic books, and technology, influences his clay and print work. Using traditional materials and traditional Pueblo pottery techniques coupled with various printmaking techniques, this juxtaposition of customary and contemporary materials and techniques connect him to his Ancestral past, landscape, and cultural knowledge.

His work has been exhibited in many Museums and various exhibitions in the Southwest and the Midwest US, these include the National Museum of the American Indian, Arizona State University, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Colby Museum of Art, and the Peabody Essex Museum.

Garcia earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM and his Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.

Garcia resides and works in his studio located in Santa Clara Pueblo, NM.