About The Artist: Ektar Garcia

Born in 1985 in Red Bluff, California he grew up there feeling alienated. garcia first studied art intensively in 2010 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, where he focused mainly on textiles. He next pursued an MFA at Columbia University in New York, where he worked with metals, wood, and ceramics. Becoming intimate with each of these materials in concert encouraged him to explore and experiment across techniques and materials. Ultimately, this concentrated study inspired garcia to disregard arbitrary material boundaries and cultivate an expansive relationship with both tooling and techniques. garcia’s multi-faceted practice incorporates handcrafted and technically rendered objects that are often combined into multi-part installations. garcia frequently repurposes elements from his own oeuvre to create new iterations of works.

He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2016. He has had solo exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2024); James Fuentes, New York (2023); Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco (2022); Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2022); the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle (2022); Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2021); and SculptureCenter, New York (2019); amongst others.

Garcia’s time intensive practice is rooted in the soulful beauty of craft traditions while allowing for the broadening of traditional crafts’ defining material elements. . Already pushing these boundaries with his well-known use of materials such as copper wire, leather, horsehair and shells, garcia now revisits previously completed works and introduces additional elements. In some work garciareconstructs the original, adding a dyed black raffia border. Maintaining the spirit of his initial effort, garcia allows for reinvention and fresh possibilities, his practice a tangible marker of contrast and transformation.

https://snagmetalsmith.org/2024/04/ektor-garcia-crossing-arbitrary-boundaries/

The child of migrant farmers, as a Mexican and an American, he feels at home in both countries. garcia1 is an avid practitioner of the art of crochet, in part to honor his mother and grandmother, and favors unexpected material combinations, challenging traditional techniques to become untraditional. He imbues the simplicity and familial familiarity of crochet with copper wire to bring disparate objects together. He sees the process of crochet as circular—spiraling out from its starting point, then connecting back to itself to create its own iterative structure. As an artist, he is drawn to cross-cultural references and the tenacity of migratory creatures.

https://rebeccacamacho.com/exhibitions/58-ektor-garcia-nu.dos/

ektor garcia’s nu.dos - a play on the Spanish word nudos, meaning knots, phonetically separated into two words, nu and dos, meaning two new, or new two - expands the lexicon of his visual language by introducing previously unexplored materials such as paper raffia, hemp and house paint, and re-imagining past works. The result is an intricately layered investigation of time and place, and the manifestation that art is dynamic, continually evolving, adjusting and reflecting meaning and emotion, akin to humanity. Many of his art pieces in SJMA exhibit incorporate knots via different materials; especially ceramic.

This page's exhibition picture (ssen above) debuts his largest single crocheted copper work, crochet copper mandala. At just over 9 feet tall and nearing 6 feet wide, garcia engaged his whole body to create the signature round doily structure. The marquee piece dwarfs the viewer, a reversal of roles, the opposite of the traditional experience of a household tabletop item, magnified, physical and all-encompassing. Using different forms of motif( domestic, organic vs. non organic or architectural), garcia’s time intensive practice is rooted in the soulful beauty of craft traditions while allowing for the broadening of traditional crafts’ defining material elements. Already pushing these boundaries with his well-known use of materials such as copper wire, leather, horsehair and shells, garcia now revisits previously completed works and introduces additional elements. In pieles (formerly wire mesh), a suspended sculpture of crocheted copper wire, garcia partially disassembles and reconstructs the original, adding a dyed black raffia border and structured copper tube. Maintaining the spirit of his initial effort, garcia allows for reinvention and fresh possibilities, his practice a tangible marker of contrast and transformation.

His work is also being shown in San Francisco at Em Kettner | Rebecca Camacho Presents | 18 September - 1 November 2025

526 Washington Street, San Francisco, CA 94111.

Suggested Docent Touring Themea to Explore with Participants

Use of organic vs non organic materials to explore transformations

--Heritage

--Creating art using different processes and materials

--Repetition both physically and symbolically

URLs

https://coopercolegallery.com/artist/ektor-garcia/ multiple links to many articles/photos

https://coopercolegallery.com/2019/ektor-garcia-acquired-by-the-whitney-museum/

https://coopercolegallery.com/2021/ektor-garcia-featured-in-art-in-america/ comprehensive bio

https://snagmetalsmith.org/2024/04/ektor-garcia-crossing-arbitrary-boundaries/ info on why he uses copper, butterfly, limpet shells