iliana Emilia García

Iliana Emilia García
Born 1970 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
iliana emilia García in her Brooklyn studio

About the Artist
iliana emilia García is a multimedia artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, printmaking, and installations. She often works in large format drawings on canvas and paper and escalating installations depicting her most iconic symbol: the chair. Her work explores concepts of emotional history, collective and ancestral memory, and intimacy. A co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA, she holds an AAS from Altos de Chavón School of Design, a BFA from Parsons School of Design | The New School, and an MA in Biography and Memoir from The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Her work has been written about in numerous art publications and catalogues. García has been featured in solo and duo exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas, Taller Boricua, Hostos Community College, New York, and exhibited at BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Exit Art, NY; No Longer Empty at Sugar Hill, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; El Museo del Barrio, NY; Aljira Center of Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; Leonora Vega Gallery, NY; Howard Scott Gallery, NY; NOMAA, NY; Joan Guaita, Spain; the 3rd Triennial Poli-Grafica, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Barnard College, NY; Museo de Arte Moderno de El Salvador and many other venues. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Blanton Museum of Art, Texas, Museo Bellapart, El Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, and others.

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Inspiration and Influences

García’s work focuses on the “poetic and emotional examination of the history of objects.” Through this, she focuses on the value assigned to objects, such as those that we own, those that come from our homes, and those that follow us through life. Certain objects, such as the chair, are seen as a recurring object which holds memories and signifies resilience. In her work, García visually documents objects that “trigger or build up memory.” Her work aims to link “objects, places, and emotions to convert [the objects themselves] into storytellers in their own right.” For García. The chair represents tradition and visual history; the heart represents a public symbol of intimacy within communal activities. Each of these symbols dierently represent remembrance and can be interpreted as an icon through which history can be told. The objects also represent emotional comfort and demonstrate García’s constant search for satisfaction in tradition.
The Chair

“I’ve been working on chairs for 20 years —” García says, before glancing at the floor and whispering, “— actually, more than 20 years. But that dates me....The chair … holds a lot of things. A lot of memories, too — for me, it’s like home, family, and community. When I see a chair, I wonder if someone just left, or if someone’s coming. There’s a lot of expectation and ambiguity in the object,” she continued. “In the way that we deconstruct our history, I’m deconstructing the chair. That also becomes part of my history.”

- Iliana Emilia García, Hyperallergic

The chair is the physical object upon which a person can lean and find support, strengthened by its continuity in life. The chair helped García “delve deeper into ancestral processes of survival, legacy, as well as dynamics between generations and places.” García’s work aims to create “piles of stories” which speak of “human movement, migration, and constant evolution.” She tells stories of resilience, grief, and trauma through objects which she and her audiences can connect to.
Unknown Distances, from the series Unknown Distances/Undiscovered Islands, 2006-2007, printed 2012, inkjet print on canvas, image: 30 x 38 in. (76.2 x 96.5 cm) canvas: 32 x 40 in. (81.3 x 101.6 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by William W. W. Parker, 2013.32.3, © 2006, Iliana Emilia García

"Dominican-born artist Iliana Emilia García has chosen the chair as a key subject in her work. One of the most enduring icons in modern and contemporary art, the chair has become a richly coded sign capable of transmitting multiple meanings. These may range from the lonely melancholia of Van Gogh’s Gauguin’s Chair, to the conceptual matter-of-factness of Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, or the poignant recognition of the voiceless migrant of Doris Salcedo’s installation 1550 Chairs Stacked Between Two City Buildings. In her photographic series titled Unknown Distances/Undiscovered Islands, garcía recognizes the ability of this icon to also address emotional and geographic displacements."

- Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, SAAM Stories
Traces of a Past, 2017
- Unfinished History, 2015
The Heart

From Heart Condition, Series Building a Paradise, 1998

The symbol of the heart also encompasses vulnerability, strength, and weakness in love, while the chair can act as physical objects that can be interacted with.

"History, especially the one of the heart, tends to turn fantastic when held by dreaming souls and broken ones; and sometimes, even when it seems possible to express pain with tears and pleasures through smiles, they do not guaranteed the true interpretation of the feelings (if that would be possible) or the strength/weakness of emotions (those ones of first loves).... the heart, the care taker (if the tree falls) of finding our innocence, of making up for any loss of memory and bringing back a sense of gain, love, emotional accomplishment and presence. It may also bring sadness and regrets, but it is said that pain does not have memory or may sometimes be delayed by some basic human urge of finding beauty first."

- Iliana Emilia García
Yo quiero/I Love, 2001.

Neon, 36 x 39 x 2.5 in. (91.4 x 99.1 x 6.4 cm). Edition of 3.
Me quieren/I am Loved, 2005. Neon, 34 x 40 x 2.5 in. (96.5 x 101.6 x 6.4 cm). Edition of 3.

Collection El Museo del Barrio.

Photograph by William Vázquez.
Publications
- Iliana Emilia García: The Reason/ The Object/ The Word
  Softcover - January 30, 2020
  "Visually tracing and detailing an international artistic trajectory and practice spanning over thirty years, the book iliana emilia García: The Reason/The Object/The Word reveals the artist's multidisciplinary engagement with our contemporary global world through a personal vocabulary where image, gesture, word, and object are transformed to explore memory and emotional spaces. In her drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, prints, video art, and photography, García reveals a deep visual search for the sentiments and poetics of existence through significant themes of absence, loss, dislocation, settlement.
  Richly illustrated in color, the volume features artworks executed from the late 1980s to her most recent installations and large-scale paintings, providing a fascinating visual record of a brilliant artistic corpus.
  
  The book combines scholarly readings and interpretations of her art with essays by Olga U. Herrera, Paula Gómez Jorge, Ana Cristina Perry, Iliana Ubiñas Renville de García; an interview of the artist by Alejandro Anreus; and the artist's writings."
  
  (Iliana Emilia García's website)
  
  Publisher: Art Museum of the Americas
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