Art & Dialogue: Cesar Garcia

Cesar Garcia is the Founder, current Director and Chief Curator of The Mistake Room—LA’s international contemporary art space. A scholar, writer, curator and educator, Garcia formerly served as Associate Director and Senior Curator of LAXART (2007-2012) and as US Commissioner for the 13^th International Cairo Biennale (2012-2013). In 2008 Garcia served on the curatorial team of the 2008 California Biennial and in 2012 he was one of the curators of , the first Los Angeles Biennial organized by The Hammer Museum and LAXART. In 2015 he was appointed one of the curators of Vienna-based foundation TBA21’s new triennium. Garcia has curated a wide range of notable exhibitions and projects including LAXART and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010), Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2011), Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, Getty Foundation, Los Angeles (2012); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); and Instituto Cabañas, Guadalajara, and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Oaxaca (2014-2015) amongst others. At The Mistake Room Garcia has organized major new commissions with Oscar Murillo (Colombia/UK) and Korakrit Arunanondchai (Thailand/US) and monographic exhibitions and projects devoted to the work of Ed Clark (US), Gordon Matta-Clark (US), and Vivian Suter (Switzerland/Guatemala). Garcia lectures frequently internationally and has published extensively. His recent books include (with Lucia Sanroman) (2012), (2013), and (2015). Garcia is the Editor in Chief of MISPRINT, The Mistake Room’s publishing arm and experimental atelier, and the Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Mistake Room’s peer-reviewed multimodal digital journal. In addition to his curatorial and editorial work, Garcia’s research interests include spatial theory, history and theory of museological and curatorial practices, alternative and artist-run spaces, intellectual histories of the Global South, disciplinary formations, and digital methodologies for non-empirical research. Garcia has conduced fieldwork at the US-Mexico Border, in Egypt, and throughout Central and Latin America. Currently Garcia is working on a multi-year research project that will manifest across a wide-range of distinct curatorial and editorial platforms. Titled the project envisions the exhibition as a temporal form and as a spatialized episteme from which original scholarship about the millennial generation’s relationship to identity, nationalism, and cultural heritage is produced publicly through the lens of He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.