Alicia Garza (she/ella) is a multimedia artist, instructor, and graphic designer. She was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley border region of Texas and has recently completed a B.A. in Studio Art with a minor in Media Studies at Pomona College in Southern California. Creating and altering is her driving force, and the resourcefulness expressed in her work stems from growing up in the RGV and learning from those around her. She is inspired and influenced by the visual aesthetic of daily life, folk tradition, and the craft of “el Valle.” Focusing on the use of reclaimed material, Alicia's work lies at the intersection of sustainable fashion, art, craft, and activism, as sharing this process with others is core to her practice; in leading demonstrations, selling upcycled clothes at festivals, and circulating online, she engages her audience beyond the gallery with creative, fashionable alternatives to modern consumer trends.
More from the artist:
A significant starting point in my work is the reclaimed, post-consumer materials that I am determined to give new meaning and value to. In centering secondhand garments as canvas, as worthy of effort and care, I feel a connection to the history of tailoring and mending and begin to consider the precolonial/post-industrial approaches to textiles and clothes.
What came out of my discomfort with shirts that were too long for my torso and the realization that mass-produced apparel does not account for the infinite variations of bodily proportion/fit is a practice that extends beyond my own closet and is part of a growing circular economy movement. While a net positive change in the fashion industry requires large-scale, sweeping changes to our current capitalist mode of production through a focus on fair trade and the environment, the promotion of reuse and repair allows for personal control over consumption habits while bringing awareness about these larger environmental topics.
What surprises people most is the moment they see the garment as both a piece of clothing and a piece of art. They see, in the extremes of my work, their own closet but in a new light - sometimes they will think of a specific item they own, maybe something that doesn’t fit right, that has a stain or hole, or just isn’t eye-catching enough to pull from their own closet and understand the potential in those pieces.
Since the beginning of my experience working with reclaimed materials, my pieces have ranged from simple upcycling techniques (bleach, embroidery, mending) to complex transformations of garments into self-expressive art. Although this work strays from traditional art in the use of clothing as canvas, the formal aspects of art that I incorporate to add visual interest, which also highlights the construction of the garment, include patterns, color, line, and value, while the principles of harmony (or opposite of that, chaos), emphasis, and variety determine the placements of the embellishments on a dynamic, 3-D surface.
Hecho en el 956
Having grown up in and now based out of the Rio Grande Valley, my experience as a fronteriza, or a woman in the borderlands, has influenced the subjects and imagery of my work more than I knew as a younger artist. Florals pop up in relation to femininity, and in conjunction with craft, inspired a connection to traditional Mexican textile embroidery. Decorative trims and repeating patterns are inspired by Talavera (pottery), Mariachi trajes de charro (suits), and Folkorico dress ensembles that impressed on my young mind, which I can now study and recognize in my work as an emerging artist. Beyond the patterns, painting styles, and symbols that recur in Mexican-American culture, I’m inspired by the textures, environment, and naturally occurring markers of daily life in the RGV - which ranges from the desaturated paint colors of buildings bleached by the sun, or the heavy presence of policing and politicized imagery that make up the lived experience of those near both sides of the Texas-Mexican border. In higher education, I was exposed to a robust and expansive history of Mexcan-American/Chicanx and Latin American cultures, arts, and activism, connecting to histories and a bank of knowledge that wasn’t as accessible to me in the RGV. This is something I am not alone on; community interest and appreciation of the arts, music, and film are forefronting cultural appreciation and discussions that for so long, have been stifled or ignored. It was through my education in the Los Angeles area, a place with more similarities to the RGV than differences, that I learned about essential histories, figures, events, and significant work whose authors and contributors came from the very same place that I did. It is through my art and through research that I am able to work through a complicated personal history and relationships, such as that of the Spanish language. Either as an escape or an embrace, what is expressed in my work is a formulation of personal history and an imagined future, revealed in the aesthetic or verbalized on the clothes I wear.