STOP. LOOK. LISTEN. Art and Social Justice
The University of Arizona School of Art Visiting Artists and Scholars Series, 2019-2020
Desertification Cookbook
Matthew Garcia (Desert ArtLAB)
October 3, 2019, 5:30 PM | Center for Creative Photography, Rm 108
Residency Project:
The public art project Desertification Cookbook is a collection of bilingual community driven recipes, statements, and actions for exploring, surviving, and belonging in the desert borderlands. The cookbook gives voice and identifies complex political and social dilemmas that reveal themselves in our constructed environments through a series of public art directed workshops, plantings, and interventions will take place during the Fall of 2019 and Spring 2020. The cookbook “recipes” will be publicly displayed at locations throughout the city of Tucson Spring 2020.
Bio:
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 with April Bojorquez 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.
