270 Filipino-American Artist Kim Garcia on Dementia, Diaspora, and Art as Emotional Archive

In this resonant episode of What’s My Thesis?, artist and educator Kim Garcia joins host Javier Proenza for a layered conversation about memory, community, and the personal and political frameworks that shape diasporic identity. Garcia, whose practice spans sculpture, drawing, and community-based collaboration, reflects on her evolving relationship to artmaking—from early experiments in artist-run residencies to recent work that channels intergenerational trauma, familial mythology, and the slow grief of dementia.

Raised in San Diego and based in Los Angeles, Garcia traces her trajectory through California’s UC system, from UCSD to a transformative MFA at UC Irvine. Her sculptural installations—once flamboyant and cartoonish in scale—have given way to more introspective, materially restrained works, driven by the shifting health of her aging parents. A recent series based on her mother’s ever-changing retellings of ancestral folklore evolves into a meditation on storytelling as a haze: unstable, affective, and resistant to conquest. In new work, she confronts her father's long-term cognitive decline following a near-death experience, positioning art as a form of both documentation and private processing.

The conversation moves fluidly through Garcia’s participation in Gallery After Hours (a collaborative curatorial experiment with Amy MacKay), reflections on her return to the Philippines after 24 years, and the psychic legacies of Spanish and American imperialism embedded in Filipino identity. Garcia speaks candidly about her family’s pursuit of Spanish ancestry as a means of aspirational assimilation and the radical shift in consciousness that comes from recontextualizing that lineage within histories of violence and extraction.

With poetic clarity and humility, Garcia frames her work as a refusal of mastery—an intuitive archive that honors contradiction, transformation, and the limits of language. This is an episode about the power of not knowing, and about what it means to hold grief, resistance, and joy in the same gesture.

Topics Covered:

• Intergenerational storytelling and trauma
• Dementia, caregiving, and creative mourning
• Artist-run initiatives and sustainable curation
• Colonial identity in the Filipino diaspora
• Sculpture as performance and interdependency
• The political stakes of abstraction and refusal

Featured Projects and Mentions:

• Gallery After Hours, co-run with Amy MacKay
• Current group exhibition, The Endless Forever at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
• Upcoming two-person show at DMST Atelier with artist Frannie Hemmelgarn (October 4)
• Ten-year anniversary celebration with Amy MacKay (July 19)

 

Follow Kim Garcia: 📸 Instagram: @kimwantscoffee

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