ektor garcia
The multidisciplinary artist ektor garcia lives and works nomadically, making his sculptures in parks and on beaches and boats, among other sites. “I imagine my studio to be amorphous and free,” says garcia, 39. For the artist — who writes his name in all lowercase, in the tradition of the Black feminist scholar and activist bell hooks — fluidity and movement are as integral to his practice as they were to his upbringing. Born to migrant Mexican farm workers in Red Bluff, Calif., he grew up between the West Coast and northern Mexico before studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earning his M.F.A. from Columbia University in New York.
garcia makes many of his sculptures out of crochet, incorporating patterns or actual pieces that his grandmother crafted in Zacatecas, Mexico. He’s drawn to the medium on account of this familial and cultural connection, and because needlework requires few and easily transportable tools. But to create his original textiles, garcia usually favors copper wire over yarn, bending it with a crochet hook into large doilies or panels that recall chain mail. He also works with materials he finds in nature, or at construction sites or supply stores, such as leather, rubber, horsehair and clay. Last week, a major solo exhibition of garcia’s work opened at the San José Museum of Art in California. Simultaneously, for a show at the gallery Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco, the artist has suspended several of his crochet sculptures from the ceiling. One of these works, “conchotas (2.0)” (2023-25), consists of a string of abalone shells. Some of the shells are crocheted shut — with wire looped through the naturally occurring row of holes that lines the edge of each — while from another, wires extend out like tiny tentacles, “reminiscent,” says garcia, “of the creature that once lived there.”
Jimena Sarno
Born in Buenos Aires and based in Los Angeles, the artist, educator and organizer Jimena Sarno explores themes of power, labor, displacement and interdependence. Sarno, 54, has collaborated with the composer Diana Woolner to rearrange “America the Beautiful” using declassified military logistics data as a guide; created a soundscape based on police scanner recordings from the night Michael Brown’s killer wasn’t indicted; and erected a lifeguard tower panopticon for an installation that traced the history of U.S. surveillance. This month, in her first major institutional show, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass., the artist (who declined to be interviewed for this piece) examines how ancestral knowledge, craft traditions and shared resources are preserved by communities through her own works and those by over 20 other artists. Though the exhibition was meant to be a solo show, Sarno’s practice is relational by nature, so she invited many of her collaborators to create speculative “tools” — wooden objects, pottery, assemblage sculptures, textiles and wearable garments — out of natural or reused materials we already share as a way of gesturing toward a more equitable, utopian future.
Throughout the show, there’s an emphasis on repair. In a Super 8 film, the artist is seen working with Argentine conservators to fix two wooden deer that her uncle carved in the 1950s. On-site workshops give visitors a chance to learn how to mend textiles and wooden objects, which they are then invited to leave on view — helping to build out Sarno’s monument to collective labor. And in another instance of community-based education, part of the main installation, which takes the form of a 100-foot-long experimental film projection, features scenes of weavers in Peru, Morocco and Argentina teaching Sarno their craft.
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