Stories of Wonder: When the Sea is my Land, a solo exhibition by Scherezade García-Vazquez is presented at Praxis Gallery in New York. The exhibition will be on view from September 16 through November 13, 2021.
With her exhibition history, from the Art Museum of the Americas to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, García’s work as an artist holds power to explore allegories of history, migration, collective and ancestral memory, and cultural colonization and politics. García’s work unveils the formation of stories important to the American experience, centered on the politics of inclusion.
Essential to her work is race and the politics of color. Each color represents its own narrative, like individual people, but once they mix together, they represent each culture’s reactions to the many others in America. The result of the mixed paints into a cinnamon color is a constant in her work since 1996.
In exploring the meaning behind the “cinnamon color”, García remarks,
“Mixing all the colors in a palette is an inclusive action, the outcome of such activity is cinnamon color. The new race, represented by my ever-present cinnamon figure states the creation of a new aesthetic. This unique aesthetic with new rules originated by the lush landscape, the transplantation, appropriation, and transformation of traditions. Also, the catholic iconography with my mixed- race warrior/angels is my way of colonizing the colonizers…by appropriating, transforming, and creating new icons.”
As a Latinx artist, García employs allegorical narratives on the cultural encounters that shape views towards America, engaging the viewer in finding their own narratives behind each stroke of the brush.