By Melisa Yuriar
For artist ektor garcia, no piece is ever truly finished—only paused. His sculptures, built from hours of crocheting, weaving and casting, resist the idea of permanence. In Loose Ends, garcia’s first solo museum exhibition in his home state of California, San José Museum of Art presents his sprawling installation, and more works, that embody his ethos of continual transformation.
“Loose ends for me—the expression, to ‘tie up loose ends’—is about the cyclical nature of coming back to things and leaving things loose and open,” he says. The show brings together some early and newly constructed works, reshaped and reimagined into an evolving, singular constellation.
The nomadic artist, born in Red Bluff, spent some of his youth in Mexico and beyond: “My family moved around a lot, and I move around a lot now as well, it’s a problem I have; I can’t stay put in one place for too long.”
Now, after spending much of his adult life living between Mexico, Europe and the U.S., garcia has returned to the Bay Area and has, for the time being, settled in San Francisco—a place that helped shape his early years as an artist. “This exhibition is a mini retrospective of sorts,” he says. “There’s some early work of mine in this show and pieces that belong to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.”
Working across materials that include copper wire, clay, leather and glass, garcia’s craftsmanship draws from traditional Mexican craft techniques and his experience and intuition to create sculptures that balance between softness and structure, contrasts and contradictions: delicate crocheted copper wire meets hardened bronze, and woven leather twists around ceramic. Each material carries a sense of memory, labor, and cultural history—his homage to handcraft traditions often overlooked, or gendered.
“I think of myself as a sculptor because it’s all encompassing,” he says. “If I were to call myself a crochet artist it would be very limiting, because I work with ceramics, metal and casting. I transformed a lot of soft crochet doilies I’ve made by dipping them into bronze, copper or aluminum in my friend Marcos Lima’s foundry in Mexico.”
The repetition at the heart of garcia’s practice—stitch after stitch, gesture after gesture—becomes a kind of ritual. “Spending time alone in the studio doing a repetitive task such as crochet, carving, or rolling clay—you lose track of time. That, to me, is the ritual of art making,” he says. “The more that my oil, my spirit, is imbued on these materials, the more alive they are.”
Loose Ends reflects that meditative process of reworking and renewal and speaks to his refusal to tie things off. “When I crochet, I often leave a tail—I don’t like to finish things. Much of my work has long tail ends because they’re to be continued,” he says.
That sense of openness extends to garcia’s materials themselves, which are often organic and mutable—copper wire that oxidizes over time, leather that softens with touch, clay that cracks and settles. His works are caught mid-breath, their forms suggest regeneration and decay.
Deeply introspective, garcia’s art is also tethered to community and rooted in connection. His formative years in the Bay Area, he says, left an indelible mark on his practice. “Everyone around me—my friends, my community—they were all really creative, queer punks,” he recalls. He points to fiber artist Heather Ciriza and multidisciplinary artist Raúl De Nieves as pivotal influences during that time in his life. “They would make their own clothes—they’re so creative—and just inspired me so much.”
After nearly a decade based in Mexico City, garcia returned to California, reunited with tails he left behind. “It was hard for me to imagine coming back to the United States because I had been gone for so long,” he says. “But I’ve been living here for the last two months, and I just opened a show in San Francisco, which felt like a family reunion.”
Reconnection—whether to people, places, or past work—threads through Loose Ends. To garcia, returning to earlier sculptures and reshaping them, transforming familiar materials through new contexts, it’s a vital part of his practice. “It was important for me, for this show, to bring old and new work together,” he says. “To tie up loose ends.”
Even as his work finds homes in major museums, garcia resists finality. “I don’t know when a piece is truly finished,” he admits. “Oftentimes I set myself limitations. I’ll work on a piece until I run out of material, or I run out of time. My works are never completed—they’re simply paused.”
When asked what it’s like to see his paused works resurface years later, garcia smiles. “There are so many bureaucratic rules when a larger piece is bought by an institution,” he says. “The pieces feel like strangers when we meet again, even after I spent so much of my life with them.”
That tension—between movement and stillness, freedom and structure—animates the works garcia creates. A self-described former “anarchist punk,” he bristles at constraint. “I grew up a punk, but I’m growing up now, and grappling with it,” he says. “I still don’t like rules, but with age I’ve learned from youthful mistakes. It’s about accumulating knowledge and experience—and learning to say no to things.”
And his work, like his life, is shaped by motion. garcia crochets on trains and on planes, carrying fragments of new pieces in his suitcase as he travels. “As I labor over a piece, I go into autopilot, and begin to plot the next one while I work,” he says. “Work leads to more ideas for more work. I don’t like to plan things ahead too much.”
Now back in California, nature has become a quiet guide for the nomadic craftsman. “As soon as I got back, I went to see the redwoods and stood under those massive trees,” garcia says. “They took years and years to grow into what they are. Nature is my biggest teacher and inspiration.”
Like the redwoods, garcia’s works stretch upward and outward, shaped by time, and by transformation. In Loose Ends, nothing is fixed, or finished—every singular stitch, knot, and cast surface is alive, and waiting for its next form.
