Scherezade García is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist whose work often explores allegories of history, migration, collective and ancestral memory, and cultural colonization and politics. A co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA, she holds an AAS from Altos de Chavón School of Design, a BFA from Parsons School of Design | The New School, and an MFA from The City College of New York, CUNY.
García has been featured in solo and duo exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas, Clifford Art Gallery at Colgate University, Miller Theater at Columbia University, Lehman College Art Gallery, Crossroads Gallery at the University of Notre Dame, Museo de Arte de Santo Domingo and others. She has participated in the Havana Biennial, the International Biennial of Paintings at Haute de Cagnes, the IV Caribbean Biennial, Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Latin American Biennial, BRIC Biennial, Venice Autonomous Biennial, and international fairs. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Museum of the Americas, El Museo del Barrio, The Housatonic Museum of Art, El Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, and others. García is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2015) and the Colene Brown Art Prize (2020). An edited monograph on her work Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic, was published in 2020 by the Art Museum of the Americas. She is a member of the Artist Advisory Council of Arts Connection and No Longer Empty. She sits on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association (2020-2024). García is represented by Praxis Art Gallery in New York. Her artist’s papers can be found at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and Austin, TX.
Regarding her art, she notes: “I am an interdisciplinary visual artist born in Santo Domingo, The Dominican Republic, and based in Brooklyn, New York. Through my practice of drawing, painting, installation, sculpture, animated videos, and public interventions. I aim to create contemporary allegories of history, colonization, and politics. My work frequently evokes memories of faraway home and the hopes and dreams that accompany planting roots in a new land. By tackling the collective memory as well as the ancestral memory in my public intervention and studio base practice, I present a quasi-mythical portrait of migration and cultural colonization.
I am fascinated by the social human experience since the first European settlements in the Americas. Its multifarious results are an endless source of inspiration and an essential part of my discourse. This fascination has led me to such themes as the causes and consequences of migration, the mestizo, hybridity, ethnic fluidity, and the consequences of colonization. United by the same thread of ideas, my body of work builds a baroque, globalized, cohesive historical narrative, allowing endless possibilities for my storytelling. While creating this narrative, which challenges the process of historical narration, my works maintain individuality and can also function as a group. I create these allegorical narratives by appropriating and transforming symbols and objects such as life jackets, inner tubes, tents, postcards, newspaper clippings, religious icons and contested historical figures. This allows me to rebuild visual history from the point of view of marginal people and events.
Currently, as a Latinx contemporary artist, my artistic practice is centered on the politics of inclusion. History plays a central role in my decoding and deconstruction of visual narratives of power. I engage history and historical ethnography to pay close attention to traditions, practices, and dominant societal points of view to bring forth other voices visually. I am naming my new series Reframing American, and I seek to reveal forgotten histories that are essential to the understanding of America and the American experience that surrounds us today, an experience that is informed by the past through storytelling, artifacts, artworks, and writings. I aim to create a new body of interdisciplinary work. In particular, I am interested to visually render how America has been visually depicted and understood by engaging ethnic, racial, and historical narratives and cultural encounters that continuously shape and reshape how we view, perceive, and color America. My new body of work on contemporary portraits and landscapes will include large scale paintings and drawings, sound, animation, installation, and performance/theater. My multidisciplinary artistic approach is in tune with the complex, multilayered, fluid, and mobile history of our America.”
