Scherezade García Explained

Scherezade García
Birth Name:	Scherezade García
Birth Place:	Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Awards:	Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2015), Colene Brown Art Prize (2020)
Elected:	Board of Directors, College Art Association
Field:	Painting, Installation Art, Sculpture, Drawing, Video
Training:	Altos de Chavón School of Design (AAS), Parsons School of Design (BFA), CUNY City College of New York (MFA)

Scherezade García (sometimes Scherezade García-Vázquez) (born 1966) is a Dominican-born, American painter, printmaker, and installation artist.^[1] She is a co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA Collective.^[2] García is an Advisor to the Board of Directors of No Longer Empty and sits on the board of directors of the College Art Association (CAA) for the period of 2020–2024.^[3] She is assistant professor of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas.

Early life and education

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic,^[4] García has been active in the visual arts from the time she was a child.^[5] After graduating with an AAS from the Altos de Chavón School of Design, a Parsons affiliate, in La Romana, Dominican Republic in 1986, she won a full merit scholarship to attend Parsons School of Design in New York City. She received a BFA cum laude from Parsons in 1988 and completed an MFA in Sculpture at City College of New York in 2011. Since 1986, she has lived and worked in New York. She is the sister of artist iliana emilia García.

Career

She served on the faculty of Parsons School of Design from 2010 to 2021. She joined the University of Texas at Austin as Assistant Professor of Art in 2021. In 2015, she received a career grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Much of García's work deals with themes relating to themes of history, colonially and Afro-Atlantic legacies;^[6] her art is informed by aspects of her black and European heritage.^[7] Four of her mixed-media works are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.^{[8] [9] [10] [11]} Other works may be found in the collections of El Museo del Barrio, the Housatonic Museum of Art, and the Museo de Arte Moderno Santo Domingo.

Selected works

• Paradise Redefined: at the Lehman College Art Gallery, December 2006, a sculptural installation of tent like structures covered with images of Dominican tenant buildings and bodegas, with light, street sounds and fragments of Spanish language emanating from within. Intermittently breaking wave sounds add to the mix coming from a mural size beach scene. "The installation is concerned with issues of identity and homeland, and the expectations of a better life, which often characterize stories of migration to the United States." said Benjamin Gennochio, critic for The New York Times.
• Hurricane Sandy Altar: 2013, is a painting featured in an essay by Abigail Lapin Dardashti titled El Dorado: the Neobaroque in Dominican American Art, focusing the use of gold by Dominican artists who subvert myths and dreams constructed by imperialist and neocolonialist economic and political systems ^[12]
• Transit/Liquid Highway: September 2015, exhibited in the lobby of Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery Miller Theatre, is a site-specific mural explores the relationship between the Dominican Republic and immigrants new homeland. Large images of waves and found objects both intermix losses and gains of migration^[13]
• Acariciando el chivo/Caressing the Goat: The painting García's painting hearkens to the 19th century after the island's separation and re-colonization by Spain. Depicted as an androgynous, Black child holding a goat, Ulises Heureaux - known as Lili and born illegitimately to a Haitian father and a mother from St. Thomas - is shown in Garcia's beautifully abstracted painting as a ghostly image existing between two swirling universes. As the man who led the country of Santo Domingo during the years 1882 until Lili's assassination in 1899 he was considered heroic, and very much a contradiction of the 20th century myth of racial whiteness that the dictator Trujillo later projected. The painting was featured in the exhibition Bordering the Imaginary: Art from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their Diasporas, curated by Abigail Lapin Dardashti in 2018 at BRIC Gallery,^[14] which explored the dynamic of the Haitian/Dominican diaspora.^[15]
• Memories of a Utopian Island: A site-specific installation and video animation Conversation Thread in collaboration with Vladimir Cybil Charlier. Two projected silhouettes of the artists tackle contemporary issues related to their island of origin that includes both Haiti and Dominican Republic. Speaking in a mixture of French, English and Spanish and Haitian Creole the silhouettes talk back and forth about an environment of equality and collaboration rather than one of friction. On another wall Borlette (Lottery) combines the sculptural inner tubes made of rice paper beaded to resemble Voodou flags, signature elements respectively of García and Charlier's individual practices.^[16]

Further reading

• Dardashti, Abigail Lapin. "El Dorado: The Neobaroque in Dominican American Art." Diálogo, Vol. 20, No. 1 (spring 2017): 73–87.
• Dardashti, Abigail Lapin. "Tracing the Ocean: Transnational Movement in Scherezade García's Murals, 1997-2018." In Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic, edited by Olga U. Herrera. Washington, DC: Art Museum of the Americas, 2020, pp. 25–31.
• Dardashti, Abigail Lapin, et al. Bordering the Imaginary: Art from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Their Diasporas. Exh. cat. Brooklyn, NY: BRIC, 2018.
• Flores, Tatiana and Michelle A. Stephens. Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago. Exh. cat. Long Beach, CA: Museum of Latin American Art, 2017.
• Fuentes, Elvis. "Solo Show: Scherezade García." Art Nexus, No. 64 (April–June 2007).
• Herrera, Olga U. "A Bridge Between Beauty and Tragedy: An Interview with Scherezade García." In Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic, edited by Olga U. Herrera. Washington, DC: Art Museum of the Americas, 2020, pp. 32–36.
• Herrera, Olga U. ed. Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic. Washington, DC: Art Museum of the Americas, 2020.
• Kartofel, Graciela and Jan Estep. "A Title?" In Disorienting Signs. Exh. cat. New York: Leonora Vega Gallery, 1999.
• Lerner, Jesse and Rubén Ortiz-Torres. How to Read El Pato Pascual: Disney's Latin America and Latin America's Disney. Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Black Dog Publishing, 2018.
• Maroja, Camila. "Meandering Pathways: Tropical Barroquism in the Work of Scherezade García." In Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic, edited by Olga U. Herrera. Washington, DC: Art Museum of the Americas, 2020, pp. 16–24.
• Paulino, Edward and Scherezade García. "Bearing Witness to Genocide: The 1937 Haitian Massacre and Border of Lights." Afro-Hispanic Review, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall 2013): 111–118.
• Ramos, E. Carmen. Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art. Exh. cat. Washington DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2013, pp. 170–173.
• Reinoza, Tatiana. "The Island Within the Island: Remapping Dominican York," Archives of American Art Journal 57, no. 2 (Fall 2018): 4-27.
• Sullivan, Edward J. "From Here to Eternity and Other Recent Works by Scherezade Garcia." In Paraíso. Exh. cat. Havana Biennial, Casa de la Cultura Galería Carmelo González, November 2000.

External links

• Official website
• Smithsonian American Art Museum
• Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
• Scherezade Garcia: In Transit/Liquid Highway
• Scherezade Garcia-Vasquez, University of Texas at Austin, Department of Art and Art History

Notes and References

1. News: With Expectations of a Better Life. Genocchio. Benjamin. 2006-12-17. The New York Times. 2018-03-18. en-US. 0362-4331.
2. Book: Guerrero, Alex, E Carmen Ramos, Graciela Kartofel, and Altagracia Diloné Levat.. Manifestaciones.. CUNY Dominican Studies Institute Gallery. 2010. New York.
3. Web site: College Art Association. Board of Directors. June 3, 2020. College Art Association.
4. Web site: Scherezade García. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 3 March 2018.
5. Web site: Artist in Residence Spotlight: Scherezade Garcia. 29 October 2012.
6. Web site: Scherezade Garcia - Bios - Miller Theatre at Columbia University. www.millertheatre.com. 3 March 2018.
7. Web site: Dominican Art History: 10 Trailblazing Female Artists You Should Know. 4 March 2018.
8. News: Santo Trujillo is Dead, from the series Island of Many Gods. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 3 March 2018.
9. Web site: Day Dreaming/Soñando despierta, from the portfolio Manifestaciones. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 3 March 2018.
10. Web site: The Dominican York, from the series Island of Many Gods. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 3 March 2018.
11. Web site: La Guadalupe. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 3 March 2018.
12. Dardashti. Abigail Lapin. 2017-05-11. El Dorado: The Neobaroque in Dominican American Art. Diálogo. en. 20. 1. 73–87. 10.1353/dlg.2017.0007. 148680683. 2471-1039.
13. News: Scherezade Garcia: In Transit/Liquid Highway. 2017-02-17. Wallach Art Gallery Columbia University. 2018-04-05. en.
14. Web site: aclark. 2017-12-20. Bordering the Imaginary: Art from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and their Diasporas. 2019-06-25. BRIC. en.
15. Web site: Abigail Lapin Dardashti. 2019-06-25. The Center for the Humanities. en-US.
16. Web site: Bordering the Imagery:Art from the Dominican Republic, Haiti and their Diasporas. Lapin Dardashti. Abigail. June 2019.