Eric J. García
Eric J. García is an artist, cartoonist, veteran, and mentor from New Mexico. Although he creates in multiple mediums, including sculpture, murals, and printmaking, Collateral recently had a chance to sit down with him and talk about his political art, inspirations, process, and risk-taking.
García earned his BFA with a minor in Chicano studies from the University of New Mexico and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a core member of the printmaking collective, Instituto Gráfico de Chicago, a member of the Justseeds Cooperative, part of the emerging Veteran Art Movement, and a dedicated teaching artist. García’s work can be found in the collections of the National Museum of Mexican Art, the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The images featured in this issue of Collateral can be found in his book, Drawing on Anger, published by the Ohio State University Press.
on art and childhood:
I grew up in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is predominantly an underserved part of the city, mostly working class and Chicano families. My parents are very creative people. I think that’s why I learned to not only make art, but to dabble in a variety of processes. My dad, he’s a jack of all trades. He’s a carpenter. He eventually got a job drawing blueprints for a living, but he’s also a blue-collar worker who poured concrete, drywall, digging ditches, working on a ranch. I was always around him, making different things in his wood shop. My mom’s the same. She’s a seamstress, she’s a baker. She used to make elaborate wedding cakes with all the different floral designs and stuff.
They were both creating around [my siblings and me]. I don’t think it was necessarily with the idea of making art but the idea of necessity. They were a working class family with four kids and needed to cut corners to live. They said, Well, I can do it myself instead of paying someone else. And they were encouraging of me becoming an artist. There was no hesitation or questioning. They encouraged me through all my career. I grew up in that kind of environment, and that’s why I started creating and making.
I’ve been drawing since I was small. It was just something I always had to do; I had to have a pencil in my hand, I had to be drawing something. I don’t think I took it seriously until I got out of the military and I made that my major in college. That’s when I finally put all my eggs in the basket and said, This is what I want to do. This is what I’m going to do.
on political activism & inspiration:
My parents weren’t activists or even very political. They were in more of a survival mode, trying to support their four kids, get good jobs, stay out of trouble, and try to live “the American dream” as Chicano/Mexicano parents. They were trying to survive in the States, trying to assimilate, trying to get by.
My love of history and politics comes from my brother, who’s ten years older. He’s a history professor specializing in Chicano and Southwest border studies, and he’s always reading. He’s always talking about what’s going on now, and what was happening in the past. The running joke in my family is that he’s a doctor, but he can’t cure anyone. but I think teaching history can be a cure. Knowing history could be a societal cure that can help communities understand ourselves and others.
[Our parents] are like, You should be doing something other than this activist business, because it just makes people mad. You can get in trouble, you can get thrown in jail. And you know what? He has been in jail, because of his activism. And my mom told me, Be careful. Look what your brother did. You can get in trouble too.
I think me being an artist is a different type of trouble that my parents might not be aware of. Art has a softer, more go-around way of causing trouble that might not put me in jail. I could maybe lose my job. I could get thrown off of Twitter, or social media might ban me or something. But I know these are ways of getting trouble that might not compute to them.
on getting started:
I don’t listen to music when I’m in the studio. I listen to news; I want to know what’s happening in the world. I constantly have NPR in the background—I’m often inspired with news that’s maybe a blip on the bigger scale of what’s going on. I’ll wonder, how come that was just a small little segment that just got buried under Trump’s tweets? How can I make it more prevalent in the newsfeed? And I’ll say, let me make a visual of it. Let me help accompany this news with a visual so it won’t be forgotten so fast.
Once I get an article or an issue I’m intrigued by, I start thinking of a way to illustrate it. Sometimes, it can be as easy as the news anchor giving me the metaphor right out of their mouth. They’ll say, The earthquake that destroyed Turkey was like Godzilla coming down. That’s the visualization. They just give it to me right there and I draw Godzilla devouring Turkey.
But there are two ways of going about creating a political cartoon for me. It’s either making a metaphor (something is like something else—like the economy of the United States is a balloon about to pop), or the other strategy is to create a more literal depiction of what’s happening. Like when I can depict Uncle Sam making out with gun dealers while innocent citizens are gun-downed in the background.
And [my cartoons] used to be hand drawn at first. I would draw it in pencil then ink it, scan it, and then I would manipulate things on Photoshop, erase things or tweak things, and then I would send them off digitally. Now, since my son was born, I bought an iPad. I’m doing everything digitally. I’m cutting out a few steps in my process to make it faster.
on revolutionaries and America:
So many activists, entertainers, and athletes have put their careers on the line to talk about critical issues, to question the establishment. I say, let’s remember them. Let’s keep remembering them. Let’s honor them. Sometimes these heroes of the United States have been whitewashed, commodified by the establishment. We honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but we’ve got a cotton candy version now; he was a radical in his time. People didn’t like him. And now we have a day to honor him. Are we really honoring what he said though, and what he meant, what he was trying to do? It’s weird how the United States is able to co-opt these revolutionaries and make them their own nice, friendly, non-aggressive heroes in their own shape of Americana.
And it’s getting harder and harder to teach the basics of history in schools. If we talk about what’s happening in Florida right now, banning African American studies, which is the main part of US history… They’re just trying to dice it up so that the only history being told is a patriotic and rose-colored version of what really happened in this country.
If people are scared that their children are going to feel bad because they’re learning US history, then all of US history should be banned. You shouldn’t feel good about the genocide of Native Americans. You shouldn’t feel good about the enslavement of African Americans. You shouldn’t feel good about conquering other nations with the idea of manifest destiny and material greed.
I’m not shocked that history is looked upon as something dangerous, as a way of causing our youth to become critical of where they live and who they are. Because our history is not pretty. I don’t think it should be rose-colored. I think we need to talk about these important issues that happened in the past to make sense of the present, and then we can move forward into the future.
on art, healing, and hope:
I would love to say [I have hope] because I have a kid now, but I don’t know. I’ve been told that I’m one of the most positive pessimists you’ll ever meet. It all just seems so daunting, the task at hand, the task teachers have. How do you wrangle twenty-five kids in a classroom when you’re underfunded, understaffed, and the parents and the higher ups are on your back? It’s a daunting task for any kind of teacher right now. Then your books are being banned; you can’t even teach all of the proper information to your students!
I was listening to a banned author in Florida the other day. They said one of the good repercussions to come from this is that their name is now talked about even more. It’s a badge of honor to be on a banned list. And students, being the angsty teenagers they’re going to be, they’re going to go look for [these books] because, Oh, what’s this banned thing I shouldn’t be looking at? I’m going to go read it!
I think [art is] not only therapeutic, I think it’s a medicine. I’m not a big talker, as my wife could tell you. The way I [speak] is through art. I put all my passion, my anger, into creating, into making art.
I get antsy when I’m not making something, when I’m not creating. I need that release. Since my son’s been born, my new release as a father is creating my new series called Tales from the Crib where I illustrate him and all his antics. It’s a new way of releasing my emotions as a father.
on becoming a teacher:
I didn’t start teaching until way later in my career. After grad school, I very luckily went into education, and I worked for the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago for over a decade. That’s where I was not only introduced but came into being as a teaching artist. I finally came to terms with understanding that my art has always been a teaching device. My work is specifically created to be a tool of learning, and examining, and educating.
When I was in Chicano studies in undergrad, I was filled with all of these really interesting stories that I didn’t know about my own history. I said, Well, how come there’s not a visual to complement this text, to help people get inspired or get some understanding of who this person was or the situation was? And I decided, I’m going to create a visual to accompany it, to amplify this story that’s been lost or sometimes erased. That’s a tool for educating.
I’ve been working on murals with students [since] prior to that, when I didn’t realize I was a teacher. I think that’s how I came to terms with the idea of me being a teacher: being a teaching artist that’s not only using my own artistic abilities, but sharing techniques with others so they can realize their own expressions.
The arts are a different way of teaching, too, of helping students understand the world. There are different ways of talking about “the basics.” One of the ways [of teaching] that I learned at the museum was arts integration, where we would go into the classroom, a science or social studies room, say, and work side by side with a teacher to give them artistic ways of teaching something that might not seem related to the arts. For example, in the science class, we studied Leonardo da Vinci because he was a scientist that worked with understanding the world through art. There are different ways of understanding mathematics (and reading, and literature…) through creative ways. And I think without those creative methods, there’s a whole population of students that can’t maneuver into these subjects.
on negative feedback and the point of political art:
I get plenty of people on social media saying, We don’t like your work, go back where you came from, stuff like that. And I can’t speak for every political cartoonist, but for me it’s a badge of honor. I think we gravitate toward negative feedback. That means our cartoons are working. They’re pushing buttons. If anyone wants to spend the time to type and write me back, then the cartoon worked. It made some gear in their head move. The ultimate goal of our cartoons is changing minds. And the world is so polarized, it’s hard to break through any of those shells.
I want to start dialogues. My cartoons aren’t answers. They don’t give the answer to problems. Sometimes they pose more problems than answers! I want people to think. I want people to really have deeper, more critical dialogues about what’s going on.
Hopefully these cartoons create new perspectives and say, Let’s talk about that. Let’s question what this cartoon is saying, what it really means.
That’s what I want.
where to find more of García’s work:
Current exhibition: Aim High at Ogden Contemporary Arts in Ogden, Utah
The OCA writes: “This May, Ogden Contemporary Arts presents a solo exhibition for New Mexico artist Eric J. García, the non-profit’s 2023 Artist-in-Residence. García, who arrived in Ogden for his residency on March 1st, has utilized OCA Center’s Studio Lofts to further develop specific concepts within his work, particularly around immigration and the term ‘alien’ as presented in various contexts. His completed body of work is revealed for his solo exhibition, Aim High, at OCA Center on May 5th…and will remain on display through July 16th. As part of his residency, García spearheaded a community mural project that will also be unveiled at The Monarch in conjunction with his exhibition opening. The mural was created with input and direct participation from local residents, leading to an environmentally themed piece that is specific to Utah.
Upcoming: Inclusion in Dr. Frederick Aldama’s forthcoming anthology, From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides.
Ongoing: Connect with García’s work through Justseeds, or follow up with his latest announcements here.
Previously: Check out Drawing on Anger (2018), published by the Ohio State University Press, or watch this episode of Colores on PBS