As a Latinx contemporary artist, my work is concerned with creating narratives essential to understanding Las Americas and the American experience. My work intends to unveil the many ongoing cultural encounters that continuously shape and reshape how we view and perceive color in America. The majority of what I create is centered on the politics of inclusion. History plays a central role in my artistic practice of decoding and deconstructing visual narratives of power.
Scherezade García, on the occasion of her solo exhibition Collective Portraits: The Map in My Skin, at IBIS Contemporary Art Gallery in 2022. Photo courtesy of Praxis Gallery in New York, NY
We are delighted to announce the acquisition of A Splendid Soil II, the first work by Scherezade García to enter our collection.
Scherezade García is a painter, printmaker and installation artist whose work explores history, migration, collective and ancestral memory, cultural colonization and politics, and other themes. She draws on her experiences in the Dominican Republic and the United States to imbue her works with stories of transit, fluidity and cultural and physical hybridity.
In her recent body of work, García often depicts dark-skinned female figures surrounded by water and a dazzling array of ornament. These are simultaneous references to the Caribbean’s historical link to the African continent and to the influence of the Roman Catholic church in the region. The result is a series of figurative paintings that combine explorations of the middle passage and the African diaspora with aspects of mestizo culture and decorative Baroque ecclesiastical art.
García is fascinated by the social human experience in a historical context, especially dating back to the earliest European settlements in the Americas. For her, the complexity of past cultural interactions is an endless source of inspiration and the artist’s calligraphic brushstrokes are an allusion to the idea of physical and cultural movement and the fluidity of storytelling and narrative.
Like much of her recent work, A Splendid Soil II is an allegorical narrative that appropriates and transforms symbols and such objects as life jackets, inner tubes, tents, postcards, newspaper clippings, religious icons and contested historical figures. In doing so, García builds a visual history from the point of view of those who have been marginalized and offers a reconsideration of colonial histories.
García earned an AAS from Altos de Chavón School of Design, Santo Domingo; a BFA from Parsons School of Design, The New School; and an MFA from The City College of New York, CUNY.
IMAGE CREDIT: Scherezade García, A Splendid Soil II, 2023. Acrylic, pigment, charcoal, ink on linen, 73 x 54 inches (185.4 x 137.1 cm). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Museum purchase with funds provided by Colleen and Javier Baz.