Garcia’s approach to communal art-making was shaped by his early work apprenticing as a muralist. Growing up in a housing project in East L.A., he apprenticed with Paul Botello of the East Los Streetscapers, whose brother was among the founders of the East L.A. mural movement. Through mural-painting, he says, he learned how to mediate between the needs of different community members in creating a collective work of art. "Folks call it community engagement," he says about the mural tradition, "but it is really conflict resolution at the core of it.”
Though he was expelled from high school right before graduation, Garcia was accepted to Otis College of Art after the dean of the college attended the dedication ceremonies for one of the murals he painted with Mr. Botello. But in his first semester, he was shot while coming home one day, and his studies cut short. Meanwhile, he had been drawing flyers for his friend’s punk band, which had just signed to the largest independent music label, Epitaph Records, which hired him to create their album covers. While recovering from his injury, he learned graphic design, and, later, the business of art administration. The idea of treating the artist as a whole business is one that has fed into Meztli Projects. “If we take every youngster who says they’re a young artist, give them the tools to learn how to facilitate, give them the tools to budget, and give them tools to fail and stand back up, they’re going to be successful,” he says.
Garcia also sees his own art as a process of healing. Now, as a printmaker, he uses medicinal plants like aloe vera to explore ideas about masculinity. “It’s processing a lot of the violence I experienced when I was a teenager,” he says.
Art has the power to both heal and promote policy change, Garcia says. In 2018, Meztli was part of the effort to remove the statue of Columbus in L.A.’s Grand Park, or what was the Tongva village known as Yaangna. “It was very important that [the county] understood and accepted all the reasons why having a statue of Columbus was harmful,” Garcia says, “With the statue removal, we wanted to interrogate the language and policy. Obviously, yes, this is horrible, we’ve got to remove it. But if we don’t build the understanding as to the why, then we’re going to come back and have to do this all over again with another piece of art, or another statue, another monument.” Now, as an artist, Garcia is imagining new kinds of monuments.
In the face of long legacies of violence, the work of change and repair is ongoing. “It hasn’t always been possible to do this work in this way and have the resources to do it,” Garcia says, “But I’m also happy that some of the things we’ve learned from COVID, and the racial reckoning the city has undergone or is still undergoing, is that these are the possibilities in which we can step into.”
Join Meztli Projects at Getty for a hands-on plant dye workshop on October 15 to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
