Jason Garcia
NM ARTS News:
SANTA FE — New Mexico Arts is pleased to announce two fellowships for the 2025 Artist in Residence program at Los Luceros Historic Site. This year’s artists include Jason Garcia (Okuu Pín/Santa Clara Pueblo Tewa), a contemporary clay artist and printmaker, and Chris E. Vargas, a video maker and transdisciplinary artist. The artists will each spend six weeks at Los Luceros, where they will have time and space to develop their creative practice and offer public programs.
“We are thrilled that our jury of New Mexico-based arts professionals selected Jason Garcia and Chris E. Vargas. Their respective artistic practices will explore and excavate histories of Los Luceros Historic Site while enriching cultural understandings of this beautiful place,” says Kiersten Fellrath, Public Art Program Coordinator at New Mexico Arts.
Jason Garcia will hold the first residency March 7 – April 18, 2025. Using traditional Pueblo pottery techniques coupled with printmaking, Garcia juxtaposes customary and contemporary methods with his Ancestral Tewa cultural knowledge. He plans to spend his time at Los Luceros conducting field visits to Tewa ancestral villages located near the site. He will create concepts and sketches as the basis for clay tiles illustrated with comic book-style narratives as a continuation of a body of work called, “Tewa Tales of Suspense.”
“I look forward to my time at Los Luceros, where I will be investigating and be inspired by Tewa Nangeh-the Tewa landscape and the rich cultural histories surrounding me,” Garcia said.
Chris E. Vargas
Chris E. Vargas will hold the second residency April 25 – June 6, 2025. Vargas’ artwork uses humor and performance to explore the complex ways queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical and institutional memory. His work at Los Luceros will center on Mary Cabot Wheelwright and her collaboration with two-spirit Diné weaver Hastíín Klah. Their work together highlights an intersection of cultural and gendered autonomy, as well as resistance to erasure, which will inform a speculative film and video project bridging past and present.
“I am eager to delve into the layered history and intricate web of culturally informed power dynamics between Mary Cabot Wheelwright and Hastíín Klah, as well as to examine how the remnants of their collaboration resonate in the present,” Vargas said.
Jason Garcia earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico and his Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. His work has been exhibited at museums throughout the country, including the National Museum of the American Indian, Arizona State University, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, among others. He resides and works in Santa Clara Pueblo, NM.
Chris E. Vargas earned his Master of Fine Arts from the Art Practice department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Executive Director of MOTHA, the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art. He received a Creative Capital award in the Emerging Field category in 2016, a John C. Guggenheim fellowship in 2020, and a Latinx Art Fellowship in 2024-25. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
About New Mexico Arts
New Mexico Arts, the state’s federally recognized arts agency and a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, administers the One Percent for Public Art program, awards grants to nonprofit organizations for arts and cultural programs in their communities, and provides technical assistance and educational opportunities for organizations, artists, and arts educators throughout the state. Learn more at www.nmarts.org.