Activist Victoria Garcia of Sunrise Movement showcases her eclectic painting style — Muse Factory
Painter Victoria Garcia talks Green New Deal, the fashion industry, and the healing power of art.
Victoria Garcia’s main sources of inspiration come from many places. Nature, mythology, and history, specifically Japanese, Greek, and Mexican, all play a role in shaping her artistic approach. Throughout her creative journey, she’s also been heavily influenced by the Art Nouveau and Impressionist movements.
“Their stylization of natural forms, use of bright, bold colors and the way these artists were able to make present everyday objects, like a lamp or a landscape, in a way that transformed them from something mundane to something memorable really appeals to me.” Garcia said.
A graduate of New York University (NYU), Garcia started her artistic career pursuing fashion. After landing internships at prestigious fashion houses like BCBG Maxaria and then interning for major magazine outlets like Marie Claire, Garcia realized that while her love of fashion stemmed from her passion for creative self-expression, the fashion world was not the fit for her that she had hoped.
In 2013, after hearing about the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, Garcia pivoted to nonprofit and cultural work, working at the Naval Academy Archives prior to her current position at Sunrise Movement. She dedicated her time to learning about activist leaders like Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, and the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Garcia applies Ginsburg’s example in her own life, using what talents and advantages she has to enact her vision of a brighter future. Today, she works in fundraising for Sunrise Movement, but also finds time to dedicate to her artistic practice.
Inspired by a wide range of mythologies and philosophies, Garcia also takes a Marie Kondo-esque approach to organizing and taking care of her space. A self-proclaimed “plant mom,” Garcia finds it important to surround herself with greenery and take care of plants. While she cultivated her green thumb many years before the pandemic hit, she finds it that much more important to dedicate time to them now.
Her love of plants and the environment are found everywhere throughout her artistic work. Greens, blues, turquoises, and delicate foliage find their way into her paintings, giving them an ethereal naturalistic beauty.
So tell us a little bit of your background. You started with fashion but pivoted to nonprofits and environmental activism. How did that come about?
I started really getting interested in the fashion industry probably around middle school, so like 13–14. I always have tended to be very introverted and shy, so I tended to compensate with the way that I dressed. I was very “out there” with my ensembles. I guess that was my way to, like, communicate my more extroverted side without actually having to speak about it. What I think is so amazing about fashion as an industry and its impact on our culture is that as people, we say so much about who we are and what we believe in and what we want, and what we think of ourselves by the way we dress. It just communicates so much with just a single glance, and it’s one of the most recognizable signifiers of, like, a time and place. So I think that was what really fascinated me and inspired me to go to New York, which is the fashion capital of the US if not one of the major fashion capitals of the world.
That’s what originally brought me to NYU, and so I did internships with Stylus and magazines like Marie Claire, just very bottom of the ladder, not very glamorous jobs at all. I was still very excited and thrilled to be there, but as I learned more about the environmental impacts of the fashion industry, it started to put a bit of a stain on this otherwise very glamorous and aspirational world.
I think this was around the time when the collapse of Rana Plaza happened in Bangeladesh in 2013. That really was my first introduction to learning about the labor practices that the fashion industry relies on, especially fast fashion. Companies include Walmart, your Expresses, any clothing store at the mall that you could think of.
Also, high luxury brands would rely on really cheap labor and exploiting mainly women of color and young girls to create these items that people will spend less money on than they would on a sandwich. That started to make me question if this was really an industry that I want to put my body and my efforts, and my energy behind.
It definitely was a moment of crisis, because I had been enthralled and so focused on becoming a part of this industry, and to have that path start to come into question was a bit of an identity crisis for me. Once I left school, I started learning more about labor leaders like Dolores Huerta out in California leading the labor strikes with Cesar Chavez. There are so many amazing activists like Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who have really done so much to bring attention to the climate crisis in a really short amount of time even though activists have been working on this for decades.
All that is to say that now I am fully focused on trying to do whatever I can to help avert the climate crisis in the US as much as we can by pushing politicians to be bold and enact bold transformative change to reshape our economy and society to prepare and protect the most vulnerable communities in this country from the worst effects of the climate crisis. It always happens that the people who do the least to cause the problem suffer the most, and that’s just completely unjust.
Can you talk about how you found about Sunrise Movement and how you got involved?
Sunrise Movement has been around since about 2017, and it was founded by a group of college activists who got their start in divestiture efforts to get their universities to divest from fossil fuel stocks. The moment that I first heard of Sunrise was when they occupied Nancy Pelosi’s congressional office after the 2018 mid-terms. They were really pushing forward this idea that was just in its infancy of the Green New Deal, which was this major governing vision to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs. I was just amazed at this group of young people come to the office of the most powerful Democrat in Congress.
It was just so awe-inspiring because for so long I felt powerless as a young person. Like, what can I do to fix the things that I see as unjust in this world? To see young people actually going out and doing that, moving past their fear, making a stand, and saying “you need to prioritize this because in twelve years we’ll go past the point of irreversible damage.” At that point in 2018, the UN said we have twelve years from going off the cliff.
It was just not a priority of the Trump administration obviously. Trump was and is, as Jane Fonda says, a “fossil fuel president.” So after the mid-terms, I started following them on social media and kept hearing all this coverage in outlets like Vox. Then I heard our Executive Director Varshini Prakash being interviewed by Ezra Klein.
I was really amazed that this really substantive and clear vision for a brighter future and a plan to get the US government to take the climate crisis seriously was being communicated by someone my age. Then I found that they were hiring in DC, and I thought “I’ll just throw my hat in the ring.” I got really lucky and found my little crew of progressives and felt like I finally had a job that felt connected to a larger purpose.
The mission of the movement is young people fighting to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process. The plan is to make climate an urgent priority in our communities, so that’s like talking to our friends, having one-on-ones, talking to our family and other people, building that grassroots support for the Green New Deal. Also, exposing the corrupting influence of fossil fuel executives on our politics and most importantly, electing political leaders who will stand up for us and protect the interests of their communities who elected them to be there and not be beholden to corporate interests.
So our big mission is to make the decade of the Green New Deal a reality. It has five main objects. The first is to end greenhouse gas emissions relatively quickly, create millions of good jobs, modernize US infrastructure, and secure a healthy environment for all while promoting justice and equity for society and all people.
I feel like you’re very grounded and rooted in creative self-expression, be that via the yoga that you do but also artistic expression. What’s your philosophy of life and creativity?
It’s just a very human urge to make something outside of ourselves. We’re always trying to make our mark on the world, to be able to point to something and say “this proves I was here.” I think that’s really special because it’s hard for me to connect with people one-on-one. I’m a very guarded person, but I love that my art offers a door to start a conversation and start a connection with something that I make. Anything that you put yourself in is a really amazing thing because you can use that to connect with others. That’s all that humans want, to be loved and accepted. Our works are one of the ways we can do that.
You’re an avid reader, you’re interested in so many different cultures and traditions, and I think you can see bits and pieces of that in your paintings. Can you talk about where you pull that inspiration from?
I remember in college I took this art class that was all about Mexican mythology. My father was born and raised in Mexico. I love that I have this link to this really ancient and really special culture that has roots way back on this continent before Europeans came here and colonized it all. I’ve just always been inspired by mythology, whether it’s cultures like Greece with their pantheon of gods or Japanese mythology where they have a lot of really deep storytelling traditions that weaves in spiritual animals. Just think things that you would see in a Hayao Miyazaki film.
There is this one story of foxes called kitsunes and they guard temples, and I just love this idea of this other world that is like ours but just has a little element of magic and mysticism to it. I find a lot of inspiration from stories like that. Anything that comes from nature. I’m a big plant mom. I would live in a treehouse if I could.
I like to mix a lot of my mediums, like jewelry pieces or mosaic tiles in my paintings, or gold foil. I just really love being able to kind of collage all of these mediums together instead of just relying solely on paint or charcoal, just to mix it up and add something you may not expect.
Your use of gold foil harkens back to those medieval manuscripts, where they used gold foil to decorate holy books, so you have a modern feel in the style of your work but the gold adds an old mysticism to it. What made you think one day to take a piece of found jewelry and incorporate that into your paintings?
Honestly, it’s probably because I wanted to include something but didn’t know how to represent it in two dimensions, so I probably just thought “I’m gonna stick this on here.” I also definitely get a lot of inspiration and references from mosaics, like the ones in Ravenna, Italy. There’s this beautiful mosaic with gold cubes and it just looks so beautiful with the light shining off of it and because I couldn’t get that same quality and effect from paint, I just thought “well, there’s no rule that says that I can’t put a gem on a canvas.” I’m gonna make this what I want and I love that creative freedom that comes from making things for yourself. I don’t want to be restricted and bound by “the principles of fine art.”
You mentioned your plants. Give us a little bit of detail about your love of plants, what it means to have plants in your environment, and the connection to your painting Spring Awakening (pictured above).
Especially this year, in the year of the ‘rona, you want to try to bring the outdoors in. Plants have always been a presence in my home. My mom has a green thumb and has always had plants around, and I definitely took up that mantle to the extreme maybe. I dunno, plants make you happy. They help make the days seem a little bit more enjoyable, especially where we’re all stuck indoors and there’s not much novelty in our lives at the moment. It’s a special moment when I can look over to my plant corner and see a new bud or a new leaf.
The Spring Awakening piece is something I completed in early 2019. I love the character of Poison Ivy. I just love any fictional character that has green skin, like Elphaba in Wicked. I was inspired to have a painting that was all shades of green, and when you think of green, you think of plants and of spring. Going back to Greek mythology, they personify the seasons as people, so she became spring. Her sister, the piece I’m working on now, is going to be in all shades of blue. She’s going to be “Winter Sleep.” Winter is when most of the natural world goes to sleep. She’s going to be icy blue with a giant snowflake. I’m trying to get that done before the end of 2020, which is pretty soon.
I feel like a lot the world has been in a state of sleep this year. For those of us who have been lucky enough to stay indoors, we’ve been forced to kind of slumber and be stationary, so this is the year to finish this piece because it’s very timely.
To listen to the full conversation, please check out the video below.
Valeriya “Lera” Nakshun is the Founder and Editor of Muse Factory. She’s also a freelance culture writer and community organizer whose work focuses on Eurasia, the Middle East, and the underrepresented cultures of those regions. A naturalized American citizen, she is interested in all things art, multiculturalism, migration, and the spaces in between.
She currently works as a Marketing Specialist for the Strategic Partnership’s Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Connect with her on Twitter @Lerachkajan
Originally published at https://musefactorymag.com on December 2, 2020.
