By Laura Bannister
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.”
