August 22nd - October 5th, 2025
McKelvey Charitable Fund Gallery
Reception Saturday, September 13th 5-7PM
Moira Garcia - Painter, Printmaker, and Fiber Artist
Moira Garcia (Chicana) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and native of New Mexico. She holds a BFA in Studio Arts with a focus in Printmaking from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and a MA in Latin American Studies with concentrations in Art History and Indigenous Studies from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Her work is a visual language of symbol, color, and metaphor that references and interprets ancient visual culture and cosmologies. Garcia creates from a variety of materials and methods to produce multilayered narratives that connect ancestral imageries and the contemporary world.
Artist Statement:
Nepantla is a Nahuatl word that means “in-between” and has come to be understood as a concept which expresses in-betweenness, liminal space and transition, especially as it relates to the cultural and spiritual identities of Mexican Americans and people of the borderlands. Expanding upon this definition, Nepantla can represent the life experience, bookended by birth and death, and the current moment in which we find ourselves— at the crossroads of great changes and the axis between past and future.
As an artist, I create inside of Nepantla. I dialogue with color, symbol and meaning from ancient timelines. My works are a continuum of ancestral remembering— of what ceases to be dismembered, buried, and forgotten. My interest in Mesoamerican art developed during my early childhood experiences in Mexico and continues to be the primary inspiration in my work today. Based on my study of Nahuatl language and Mesoamerican artistic praxes, I create works that are in conversation with pre-Hispanic legacies. By means of recreating aesthetic qualities, materials, design, and iconographies, I am interested in revisibilizing artistic traditions that were destroyed during colonization and remain largely unrecognized in contemporary culture.
Rooted in Mesoamerican and Andean visual culture, the works on exhibit showcase contemporary methods in printmaking, painting, and fiber art, and express themes of creation, history, sacrifice, and revival. Within the archive of Nepantla, records of amatl (paper), petate (woven mat), and khipu (knotted cord) echo the vibrancy, power and continuity of ancient visual language.
Artist Instagram: Moira Garcia