Tanya Garcia

Interviewed by Adriana Velez

October 2020

AV: Can you give me just a quick introduction of who you are and an overview of your work?

TG: My name is Tanya Garcia. I‘m an interdisciplinary artist. I also teach, I’m an educator. Right now, I’m teaching at MICA and Goucher classes like photo, video, moving image, and sometimes I teach oral history to graduate students. My art practice has kind of changed over the years. I think you saw some of my work and you can ask me questions about any of that stuff. I moved up to Baltimore in 2012 for grad school. I did my MFA in Community Arts at MICA. Prior that, I was just photographing and living in Charleston, South Carolina. I was studying psychology, actually, for my undergraduate degree. I was interested in pursuing art and thinking about being more participatory with the community, making art that way. I was thinking that with my background in psychology, I could pursue art therapy, and this could be an option for working with art in a similar capacity. Then, I came up here and I was working with another program for two years. I ended up making work about Latina identity and I had just started getting into oral history, moving image, and storytelling. I was making work about what it means to be a Latina woman and that was the conversation I was having in particular with folks who worked for the institution I was a student at. These were women who were maintenance workers, at MICA they would call it housekeeping. I was documenting their stories, and they were from different places: from Mexico, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. A lot of that work ended up being about trying to create space for understanding your own identity, in particular with gender, race, or ethnicity. After grad school, that’s what a lot of my work looked like. It was more about working with the Latinx community here in Baltimore. The majority of the Latinx community here in Baltimore is Central American, so a lot of work ended up being about immigration. I did some storytelling and kept utilizing oral history and moving image and expanding on that. The last project I did was in 2017 about immigration. It was collaboration I did with a friend in El Paso, Texas, so it was right on the border. We began filming the landscape and collecting oral histories to go along with those stories

AV: Thank you, that was a great segway into my next question, which was how you started your creative journey and your career. So, clearly your work revolves a lot around Hispanic and Latino identity. How does your personal background inspire that work and how does it motivate you?

TG: I lived in Puerto Rico for a few years when I was growing up but for the most part I lived in the States. I went to high school and college in South Carolina so I was disconnected, quite a bit from the place. We moved in 2001 and I hadn’t been back until 2012-13.

AV: Do you think that disconnect of not being physically in the island, could have shaped your identity as a Hispanic woman?

TG: Yeah, I think so. I think there’s definitely a feeling of disconnect, kinda like the diaspora because I grew up here, but there was this longing of wanting to be there, but not being able to be there. I started going back more frequently after 2013. In 2017, the hurricane happened and I was there right before. I was there for maybe a month and then I came back. I had also gone to Cuba around the same time. When I came back, it was kind of really apparent that I needed to make more artwork about this kind of thing to process it. So my work has evolved to be, I think, more personal now in regards to my relationship with the land. I have this kind of triangle, or circle maybe, of this relationship between body, land, and memory. That’s been the trajectory that’s been moving me these past couple of years. It looked a lot different before and I’ve been using video performance and things like that. It’s changing, still even as we speak.

AV: Of course, art is always evolving and progressing. How does you art integrate with your activism and your community?

TG: That’s a good question. I think, when I was working on the topic of immigration, I was also participating in organizing work, helping organize and filming marches, I was just trying to be participate in organizing. I’ve also done a publication with a friend of mine. She and I organized a publication together and the community would submit responses based off of their experiences of social difference. These were all written responses and they could be fiction, they could be poetry, it could be any sort of creative writing or journalistic piece, and we would organize artwork that would go along with it. The work I was doing after grad school was organizing and traveling exhibits that included a lot of different artists speaking to immigration. Also, organizing panel talks and bringing people in, all that stuff. I was also trying to participate with organizations in the city too, who were working with immigration and supporting folks in different capacities. It was a lot of work and I was also trying to document stuff for the local paper, which no longer exists. The city paper was absolved several years ago. That was all the stuff leading up to 2017 and since then I have organized some fundraisers as well for the trans community here in Baltimore. I helped to organize this fundraiser for that, which was a one night event with all these makers and we would have these vendors, poetry readings, and panel talks and lots of stuff people could interact with. That was a really fun and creative way to participate in the community and in some ways it felt like being an activist, but more so helping organize things and being part of the community.

AV: Definitely. One of the things that I’ve found to be really fascinating about your work is that you’ve really expanded all across the board. You know, you’ve done performance, photography, and journalism like you mentioned. Is there any medium that you feel you haven’t explored but really want to dive into?

TG: Yeah, all of it! I also just like making things and building things with my hands. I’ve been playing around with some fiber stuff and ceramics. Some of that is not always super visibly connected but its also just something I want to do. I've been exploring more improvisational movement, which I think is probably more so just trying to develop this more performative aspect of my work. I’m trying to work on different things, and I think eventually they’ll kind of merge together.

AV: I have a specific question about your photography because I was going through and viewing all of your collections and I noticed some of them are printed in black and white, others are in color, and others are a mix. Is there a reasoning behind printing the pictures this way?

TG: I think it depends, I’m trying to think about which ones you’re talking about.

AV: The collection “Aquí Estoy.” I think that was strictly black and white.

TG: Yes, it was. So those are early ones. They’re some of my first photographs I took when I was in undergrad and I’d been traveling a bit in Florida and was working. I did an alternative spring break and we were traveling down in Florida to learn about an organized group of migrant workers. Those images were really early images that I took.

AV: So it’s like a reflection of the evolution of your work?

TG: I think so, those are all film in black and white. Some of these were in Charleston with a friend of mine, you know, just kind of exploring. These are a bit of a reflection, and also exploring different metaphors within these images. These are all film but I was also photographing digitally. I still photograph with film, I think I prefer sometimes just as photographs. The “Miscellaneous” collection is a combination of these. What I like about color and what I like about black and white is that sometimes it’s nice to have less information, if that makes sense. Color can add a lot of information that can sometimes be distracting. When it’s black and white, it’s simplified and you’re really just looking at the context of something specific within the image that, maybe it’s more of this light thing, is made more apparent when it’s black and white.

AV: Yeah, I definitely see that. So, jumping back to your activism work. How do you see art as an overall force, being political or integral to social movements and transformation?

TG: There are lots of way and I think it depends a lot on the individual and how you want to use your work. You also have to understand what you’re practice is and the medium you speak with, or maybe its multiple mediums you like to speak with. There are so many different artists who work in different ways with communities, so there’s no one way to do it. As an individual, I think what makes art interesting is that it’s also a way --if we think about art as holding a mirror to the world or your processing of the world around you, and being really aware and intentional with that-- your work will then also be a political piece if you’re still interacting and participating in the world in that way. Some people also make work that’s like storytelling and create stories with communities, like with kids for instance. Sometimes it’s with puppetry performance and these can have political storylines, like about cooperation, about working socially together, and reimagining worlds, that kind of thing. It’s not just "here is this imagination of a world that could be," and the reality is that everything isn’t. But if you also try to build simultaneously with the making of the art then it could be.

AV: Definitely. It sounds very cliché to say but children really are the future and if we instill from a very young age the feeling of compassion and solidarity, we can really change the way society is going to progress in the next few years. The next question I have is, what is the message you try to send through your work? Is there an overarching messagings?

TG: Yeah. So, what I’m trying to do with my work is really trying to complexify things, in a way. What I think conservative politics does is really do black and white thinking and binaries about people and things and situation, but I feel like if we complexify things we have a lot more room for grey areas. So I try to do that, I complexify the geographical and the sociopolitical narratives through my interdisciplinary work. And I’m not necessarily sticking to one type of medium. That’s why I use all of those types of mediums but the story, the kind of undercurrent, the purpose of the work is to create a complication of these different things. I think a lot of work does relate and create an exploration of that relationship to land, body, and memory; and that question of relationship to place and thinking of place as a body and as a thing that also has the ability to tell a story too. I think the ways in which our bodies have been impacted by colonialism, and imperialism, and capitalism, also affect in the same way the landscape that we exist in.

AV: Definitely, definitely. I can relate that to my personal experience, because I was born and raised in Puerto Rico and when I moved to the United States I was seventeen. It really felt like I was missing a physical presence in my life. That’s when I realized that it’s more than just your homeland. It’s an overall presence that envelops you and its very interactive, but you don’t notice that until you’re pulled away from it. It’s a very complicated experience, place as a concept and how we experience it.

TG: Yeah and the relationship to place, it transforms. Like for instance, for me, my memory of place, like the island, it's very different. It’s not the reality that it is now. It’s not my experience now. It’s super complicated.

AV: Yes, and it’s a very personal experience as well. Everyone has a different experience with place, which is why I find art is such a great way to express it, because it’s so personal. So, what project has really impacted or changed you? What is a project that off the top of your head you can say “this really changed who I am and my perception of life” ?

TG: Its hard for me to pick just one. I think for different reasons, they all kind of did. I think the publication was a really great way of creating that way for people to contribute and participate in sharing stories and making art around social difference. What I mean by social difference is the ways in which we’re considered different by social standards, that could be race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. It was just really beautiful to read people's responses to that and have people interested in wanting to contribute to something like that. It wasn’t just about me or my teammate Valeria, it was more about the community. So I think in terms of community, that was a really great project to participate with other people in. There is this one piece I did in 2013 -14, maybe; I made this video piece and it was from my first time going back to the island in over ten years. I made a short piece of that and I had just been sitting on it. I had it for several years and barely showed it but it's resurfaced in the direction of my work and where it is going now. I think it might be on the website as well, it's called daydreaming, “Despierto.” The concept of my work now is "oh this is what I was doing then." You know what I mean? It’s like, “this makes sense." At the time I was like “this is visually interesting and I like this,” but now I’m realizing I’m understanding it and maybe the way I was doing this before.

AV: Now that you feel like you’ve been in this industry and you’ve been working for many years, how do you feel that your art is going to evolve in the next five years?

TG: Oh, that’s a good question. So, I actually have been teaching for a few years and I’m actually going to be going to school for acupuncture and Chinese medicine.

AV: Oh, wow!

TG: I think it’s going to change some more. It doesn’t mean I’m abandoning my work or anything like that. The way I see it is that the philosophy I’m going to be learning is really going to influence my art and practice in the next 4 or 5 years. There’s going to be partial practice as a medical practitioner and that does involve a creative process and does involve collaboration, particularly with patients. It’s just a very different process from the western medical approach and it does involve creative and artistic process. I’m really interested in this as an alternative form of collaboration with people and I’m looking forward to opportunities that are more cooperative and as an art practice. I think this is probably going to be influenced by that as well.

AV: That’s really fascinating, we can expect to see that fusion between science and art in the upcoming years? That’s really interesting; I really love Eastern medicine so I’m excited to be expecting to see a lot of that. Is there anything that I missed about your work that you would like people to know?

TG: I guess what I already discussed with you in terms of that, my work is really about complexifying these sociopolitical narratives. It's never black and white. There’s always layers to the work that I’m sharing and it’s an intersectional complexity.

AV: Perfect. Thank you so much, Tanya, for your time and answering all these questions for me. It really means a lot, thank you so much.

TG: No problem!

To learn about Tanya García and her work, go to: http://www.tanyadenisegarcia.com/